could any one help me do my banner for my site, well its not really a banner its just got my name in it really and need to have one. Would adobe photoshop be my best piece of software to use to edit my content.

Could anyone give me a few tips on how to do colour fade and make layers different colour as i really want to get cracking on learning .psd and graphics



This post has been edited by microscopic^earthling: Jun 10 2005, 05:45 PM

you can make a banner on http://cooltext.com/, it isn't really professional but they have nice templates, an example: for other sites you can search on goolge.

If you want to do it with a photoshop, yiou can download trialversions (paintshop pro v9.0, or adobe photoshop, (one month to try them each))

This is a great site that should be able to help you with wotever u need help on

http://www.pixel2life.com/

Gl with ur banner

The easiest way to go about making a banner is to hop over to one of the
free online banner making websites... these usually offer banners, buttons, and other gifs...

some interesting banner making sites are:
http://www.animationonline.com
http://www.3dtextmaker.com/
http://www.abcbanners.com
http://www.quickbanner.com/
http://cooltext.com/

The next way ofcourse is to design your own banner from scratch... If you're on a windows platform, I'd suggest using Photoshop or Corel Draw; however if you're on a Linux machine.. then use Gimp... Gimp and Photoshop are nearly identical, although Gimp allows you most functions through a right click.

At present my own computer is down and I'm going to have to buy a new one... (trying to visit a cyber cafe a much as possible to make my posts..lol... ); otherwise I'd have offered to help you out with you banner....

all the best.. Rashid Ahmed

It depends what kind of banner you want to create. If you just want a plain banner, any graphics program will work. Just get an image and your text and put the pieces together. Now if you want an animated banner, I suggest that you download an animator if you have one. Me, I'm still using Gif Animator 1.0 from 5-7 years ago. I know, sad, but it works and it works well enough for me so I'm not complaining. If you would prefer to use templates that other sites provide do a google search on "Free Banner Making" or "Free Banner Templates" and you're bound to find something that you like. Hope this helps and good luck.

Gif Animator may be out of date, but I recommend it to everyone that asks about making gifs, and banners. Not only is it really, really simple to use but it's compatible with .bmp files and since Paint was my first image editing program I instantly fell in love with how easy I could make banners. Sure the sizing can blur the pictures a big but generally for any rough copy of a banner it's stupendous. Then all you really need to do is send that file to a professional or a friend with photoshop and order them to do a better job. lol

Image Ready works really well, as does Adobe After Effects for anything effects related. You can do some amazing stuff with those programs, not to mention using PhotoShop in conjunction wtih either. But I must admit the programs are confusing if you don't take a course or have the manual, and the Help Tutorials are daunting usually in length, so I suggest editing with something like PhotoShop, saving the files individually in .jpeg or .gif format, then placing them into Gif Animator and doing frame by frame banner creation. It's not the best quality sometimes, but considering how high quality the images are after Photoshop, you on gain normalcy in the quality department. And they are a good way to have atleast something until you can figure out and learn the workings of Image Ready.

Most banners need to be themed though, if your site is gray and black, it's a bad idea to make a red and blue banner that flashes. Or if your site it Orange and Black it's really bad to have a banner pink and purple. lol If you color code your banner, and make it match your website you can come up with some really neat things. A really good way is going frame by frame in gif Animator and making images that create the alusions of an effect. So have a frame by frame movement that seems to be destroying the letters of your website, or slowly have a face moving into the picture from one side. It'd tedious and a little time consuming, but it can look cool.

I knew a friend that made a Stick-Man dancing banner using Gif Animator, just because he wanted a challenge. It was frame by frame but it was really awesome. He had technicolored circles randomly flashes at different points of the frames, so it looked similar to a strobe light. And at one point he had the screen go black and the stickman got inverted from black on white, to white on black, it made him look like he was glowing in the dark.

I don't know if that's what you'd want to do, but I think that it's just proof that even the simplest things can turn out to be really really good.

Well good luck!