No ShrinkWrap Web2.0 Reviews

Recently I designed a custom brochure for a construction company. The client wanted mostly images with very little text and a professional layout. Clearly, a template-based tri-fold brochure cranked out in Microsoft Publisher was not going to get the job done.

As a side note: I plan on using this and similar techniques to create custom PowerPoint slide backgrounds and theme elements. A PowerPoint presentation’s design should use little text and combine with lecture material to provide visual cues that help students remember key points. The overall look of a PowerPoint presentation can affect a lecture’s success - the more professional and targeted a presentation’s theme and graphical elements are, the more likely students will be engaged and pay attention to the visual cues.

For the client’s brochure, I decided to start with a custom, watermarked background - by choosing the right construction-looking picture and creating a background from it, I could bring the images on each page together for a cohesive presentation. Once I designed a custom background for the images, the rest of the brochure practically created itself.

Before I begin: while I used Photoshop to create these brochure pages, I’m sure other programs like Gimp can be used to reach the same results. Since I work with faculty and students, I’m always on the lookout for open-source (or at least freeware) that can replicate what I do in pay programs; if I find a way to replicate these results in Gimp, I’ll write an addendum.

First, here are the images I used to create one of the brochure pages:

And the final result:

Since the client is a construction company specializing in building natural rock walls, I wanted a background that depicted boulders but lacked a lot of detail - too much detail would draw focus away from the project photos. I liked the look of the pile of boulders above - it’s very rough and chaotic and has a lot of character and edges, but I couldn’t use the photo itself. I started by cropping the image down to just the pile of boulders and copied the result into a new image in its own layer.

For the watermark, I envisioned somehow dropping the detail in the photo, making it black-and-white, then finding a suitable background color. I found the Graphic Pen filter accomplished much of what I wanted - I made sure my active foreground color was black, then applied the filter with the following result (before and after comparison):

Next, I used the eyedropper tool to select a neutral rock color from the original boulder photo - in this case, I selected #d0b08a. I used the Paint Bucket tool to fill the background with the selected color, then used the Layers palette to drop the opacity of the watermark layer to 30% so the background color shows through (you can also modify layer transparency by using the menus - Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options):

The resulting watermark is a great backdrop to the client’s construction photos - relevant to the brochure material and stark enough to show necessary detail while soft enough to not draw too much attention:

Have any favorite watermark and PowerPoint tips? I’d love to hear them - leave me a comment below.

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A Lifehacker article today led me to the reCAPTCHA project. This fascinating project creates CAPTCHAs from OCR errors produced while digitizing text, then serves those CAPTCHAs to your site resulting in a seemingly symbiotic process - you prevent comment spam on your site with their CAPTCHA, and they receive assistance from thousands of humans correcting OCR errors. According to reCAPTCHA’s project description,

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

I decided to check out this slick-sounding project. It’s pretty easy to integrate their CAPTCHA plugin into Wordpress:

1. Sign up for an account at reCAPTCHA - as far as I can tell, the service is free
2. Register for an API key, one per domain
3. Download the Wordpress plugin (they have plugins for other applications as well)
4. Upload, activate and set options for the plugin
5. Follow the instructions here to insert the CAPTCHA into your comment loop

You can see the results below. The interface is a little confusing - it would be nice if it used a smaller field and smaller widget, perhaps something more like bot-check. Perhaps reCAPTCHA 2.0 will integrate better into existing forms. As it is, it’s still worth the small added confusion to be helping digitize projects like the Internet Archive.

Unless, of course, people stop leaving comments.

After playing with the plugin a little, I noticed the letters are sometimes hard to discern. For instance, I can’t even make a guess as to what the word on the left must be in this one:

Dave says it’s cit.), - good call.

My guess is this widget’s refresh button will get a lot of use.

What do you think - is the interface too confusing? Test it out and tell me in the comments below.

UPDATE-

I decided to disable the plugin - it’s too cumbersome as it exists now, and I don’t want to make visitors work hard to leave comments. I like the idea of the project though, and hope a version 2.0 is in the works. I’ll leave a screenshot up of the plugin interface.