Redbubble Strikes Again

Early this morning over on Redbubble there’s a new promotional tool that has some folks “up in arms”. They’ve thoughtfully provided a flash sales widget for our work.

That one above is from my own site on Redbubble

What some of the folks are complaining about is that they’ve created these widgets for all the groups as well, which allows work submitted to groups to be displayed in widgets wherever anyone wants to use them.

Myself, I don’t have an issue with this – it is promotional, and it is, after all, a flash widget. Most people using something like this on a blog or myspace/facebook aren’t likely going to try and decompile the swf file to get the images out…even if they did, they are pretty small.

What I do think is that RB should probably put an “opt in” button for group works – when you submit images to a group you have the choice of allowing your work in a widget, or not. That should satisfy almost everyone…though it makes more work for coders.

Here’s the flash widget from our Naked Genius Group:

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Creating Simple Animated Gifs (for beginners)

 

I recently had a request for help creating a simple animated text gif, so I thought a quick tutorial might be in order.

With the advent of flash files and javascripts, “anigifs” aren’t used very often anymore, though they are sometimes still used as avatars.

Personally, I don’t use much animation on my own websites because they tend to give a less than professional appearance – I keep flash to a minimum, using it only for image display where necessary.

If you just have to have an animated avatar or signature file, and don’t have a clue how to do it, this tutorial will let you make your own within a few minutes, with no real knowledge, and without having to worry about timelines.

Create an avatar like this text name:

 

Or create a small display of images for your avatar, like this logo display:

You will need to have a graphic program of some description capable of creating text, and cropping/sizing images, and it will need to be able to save files in the .gif format. Almost any program will do, including Microsoft Paint, which comes as part of the package in most windows versions.

You’ll also need to download a small animation program called “Unfreez”. This is a free program with a very tiny footprint so even dialup users should be able to download with ease: you can find it here: Unfreez

This tutorial is available in two formats – a downloadable pdf file and an online html page – links for both are below:

Download the pdf tutorial from here: Creating Anigifs

Or view the online tutorial in html format here.

If you need any additional help with this, or would like a tutorial for something not already covered in this blog, please feel free to contact me, or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

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