Take your pick of Black, Blue, Green, Grey or Red, with each menu being available to download as a zip file containing the relevant files. Open the html file into an editor or view the source and copy the CSS code and unordered list into your own documents, then replace the textual content from within the list items with your personal menu titles.

The menus have been tested and appear to work without issue in Firefox, IE7, IE6, Opera and Safari.

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Put together your textual layout on the relevant page size, here I’ve roughly set out a few paragraphs of text pulled straight from an article on the topic of frogs.

Go to File > Place and import your desired graphic (resized beforehand in Adobe Photoshop), move it into position on the page. Notice however the image sits over the top of the text rather than the text flowing around it.

With both text and picture selected go to Object > Text Wrap > Make. (Choosing Options will allow you to set the margin around the image)

The image is now sat within the paragraph of text allowing the words to flow around it, keep an eye out for any hyphenations as a result and knock them down onto the next line if necessary.

Now the text is wrapping around the image, the picture can be moved anywhere on the page and the text will continue to flow around it. To adjust the spacing around the image, simply go to Object > Text Wrap > Options.

Let’s say that you wanted to do something a little more fancy, in this example the frog photograph has been clipped out to blend in as part of the document without being constrained to a rectangular box.

To allow the text to wrap around the actual body of the frog, use the Pen Tool to draw in a make-shift shape following the outline of the frog.

With this new shape selected, go to Object > Text Wrap > Make.

The text now flows around the previously created object, and in turn gives the impression that it is wrapping around the frog image.

In my example I added an orange fill swatch for illustrative purposes, to remove this simple select the shape with the Direct Selection Tool and clear the fill colour.

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Download Vector Resources Freebie
1.70mb | 1 x EPS | 1 x GIF

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One of the first steps is to source a continental layout of the globe in 2D format, follow the recent post; Free Vector Maps and Country Outlines and download the vector world map from MacDaddy.

Open up the map in Illustrator and select the main vector shapes, click the ‘New’ icon in the Symbols palette. With this symbol saved into the palette delete out the shapes.

Draw a circle on the artboard with a blue fill.

With the Direct Selection Tool (White Arrow) select just the right hand point.

Hit delete to remove this point and leave a semi-circle.

With the semi-circle still selected go to Effect > 3D > Revolve.

In the 3D Revolve options change the source to the Right Edge and Surface to Diffuse Shading.

Click the Map Art button and select the previously created symbol of the world map, scale the artwork to fit and also check the Shade Artwork checkbox.

This will leave you with a three dimensional sphere mapped with the continents of the world.

Should you want to adjust the angle of the globe, open up the Appearances palette and double click on the 3D Revolve effect to open back up the options window.

As you can imagine this feature is not limited to maps of the world, imagine the advantage of drawing up a drinks can and being able to place a label design for review.

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Unless you are a talented artist, use photography as a base for your poses. This can be sourced from a stock photography website or quickly created by directing a group of friends into the relevant positions and poses. Open up your pictures into Adobe Photoshop.
Some people may want to import their images directly into Illustrator, however I find the Pen Tool much easier to work with in Photoshop.

Roughly trace around the outline of the character, minimizing some of the detail if necessary such as the folds and creases in clothing.

Continue by creating more paths outlining the shape of the face, here I’ve used my own discretion to give the character a stylish side parting.

Go into further detail and outline the main facial features such as the eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth.

Select all of the paths with the Path Selection Tool and Copy (CTRL + C)
Swap over to Adobe Illustrator and Paste your selection (CTRL + V), choose the Compound Path option.

Click and drag a selection around your Path and Ungroup (SHIFT, CTRL + G).

Select only the complete outline path and add a 3pt stroke.

Next, select the paths that make up the inner details and add a 2pt stroke.

Now select the paths that make up the facial details and add a 1pt stroke.

Use this stage to draw in any additional areas of detail, such as the eyeballs.

Using a technique similar to previous character tutorials, roughly draw in a complete path keeping the points within the confines of the stroke, trace around the face to begin with.

Select your colour scheme for the illustration, here I’ve picked a trio of blues and filled the new facial outline with the lightest shade.
Press CTRL, SHIFT + [ to send the fill to the back of the objects.

Repeat the process by drawing another roughly path around the hair outline, this time fill with the darker shade of blue.

Continue with the eyebrows then move onto the rest of the character, filling each section with the relevant tone.

Once finished, you will be left with a stylized character illustration. However, the theme is not complete without a hazard to relate to the safety instructions.

Produce a generic flame shape by starting with an oval, with the Pen Tool selected hold ALT and click on the top and bottom points to remove their Bezier curves. Use the Direct Selection Tool (White Arrow) to individually select and rotate the Bezier curves of the left and right points by 45 degrees (hold Shift).

Copy and Paste the shape multiple times, rotate and reflect (Object > Transform …) each one to give a bunch of flames to represent a fire.

Give the flames a colour swatch of orange, starting with a dark tone at the base and giving the top flame the lightest shade. Make sure all the flames have a 2pt stoke.

To finish off the illustration Select All (CTRL + A) and Copy, then switch back over the Adobe Photoshop and Paste the image into a new document.
Duplicate the layer by dragging the layer into the New icon in the layers paletter.
Go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone to give the impression of the cheaply printed feeling usually associated with these safety instructions.

In the Color Halftone options, enter 4px for the minimum size, then change the channels to 45.

Change the blending mode to Overlay at 50% opacity, then duplicate the original layer and place above all other layers. Change this layers blending mode to Multiply and drop the opacity to bring back the darker colour scheme while keeping the halftone pattern visible.

Finish off the illustration by drawing in a basic background of beige shapes using the Polygonal Lasso Tool on its own layer at the bottom of the stack.

Think of a comedy caption to compliment your safety illustration, then maybe draw up a few more to make a complete set of safety instructions. The key areas to remember are to begin with generic poses and give the characters blank facial expressions.

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I’m still really impressed over how the site has grown over the past year, it’s helped tremendously in my personal learning curve of online marketing, social media and general website optimisation and upkeep.

Average stats of late:

Average visits per day: 6000
Highest Peak: 10,094 (March 27th)
Top Content: How to Combine Pixel and Vector to Produce Striking Artwork and Free Punk Vector Graphics
RSS Subscribers: 3000

With regards to traffic sources the main source of vistors has been StumbleUpon, with Good-Tutorials also bringing in plenty of traffic to my tutorials. I also had the pleasure of making the Delicious popular pages in March but strangely enough I’ve never had any success with Digg!

Other Blog related achievements:

As well as being a great source of education for myself, the SpoonGraphics blog has also led to a couple of unexpected achievements:

Featured in Web Designer Magazine - Issue 157
Double page cover of Blog.SpoonGraphics in the Dreamweaver section, “diagnosing the tricks behind the dot com designs” with an overview of the key design features of the site.

Ranked Number One in my Home County
After being kindly informed by email of a high ranking in the Alexa stats for my home county I recently checked back to find I had subsequently made it to first place spot.

What’s next - you decide

Now would be the pefect opportunity to discover what the readers of the blog would like to see in the future in the form of articles, tutorials and freebies. I’ve been struggling to come up with new content recently so this will really help out!
Post your thoughts in the comments and I’ll have a go at implementing a post around your topic!

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My Favourite New Features

The first thing that greets you after the upgrade is the nice fresh administrator theme. The mixture of baby blue and grey is a cool modern image. After a short while I soon got to grips with the new low-fat menu layout!

One major improvement that comes with 2.5 is the inclusion of many new features, so many in fact I was actually able to remove a number of plugins, with the additions they provided now included as default.
Two such plugins included Multifile Upload and MyAvatars, now replaced by the built in media uploader and default Gravatar support.
On the topic of plugins, the automatic updater is very cool, making installing the latest releases a breeze. Instead of downloading the latest files from the author’s website, uploading them to your server and reactivating them through the admin panel, you can now simply update each one with the click of a button.
When writing your posts, you can flick onto HTML mode for quick tweaks here and there as well as insert media such as images and video directly from the new Flash uploader - Nice features but the cause of a slight problem for me, read more below.

Elsewhere there has also been a vast improvement in the Blogroll side of things, where users can now include multiple categories and lists of links in their sidebar.

Gravatar Theme Modification

In order to make use of the new Gravatar support, I firstly uninstalled the MyAvatars plugin which had previously held the job of placing a MyBlogLog or Gravatar image next to each commentor name. To allow the Wordpress’ new Gravatar feature I simply had to add the following code into the themes Comments.php file at at line 30:

Popularity Contest Plugin Errors

Another issue that was experienced shortly after the upgrade was the error that appeared when trying to reactivate Alex King’s Popularity Contest Plugin. Luckily the solution was only a Google search away and the problem was soon resolved after visiting Ken McGuire’s blog.

Simply open up popularity-contest.php from your plugins folder, scroll down to line 59 and delete out one of the two sets of ‘../’ from the call for wp-blog-header.php. Re-upload the file and find the plugin now activates.

Wordpress 2.5 Image Uploader Error

The most painful of problems I experienced was with the fancy new media uploader… which tended not to want to upload any media. After selecting an image the uploader would ‘Crunch’ the file but fail with a http error. Many solutions were tried from the Wordpress support thread but this particular fix saved my blog:

Open up the .htaccess from your Wordpress install directory and insert the following:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

As highlighted on Josh Highland’s Blog.

The ability to upload multiple images at once is great for Blog.SpoonGraphics with the high picture counts found in the tutorials.

So, have you made the jump to Wordpress 2.5 yet? Or are you waiting for the initial problems to be ironed out before going for the full change?!

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From the site:
Spice up your colleagues’ day with our Newton Virus, the first virus to introduce gravity to your laptop, causing the desktop icons to fall down as if subject to the gravitational pull from the real world.

Newton Virus comes on a USB key for manual infection. Simply plug the key into a computer and the virus will automatically copy itself on the hard drive.

The virus will then hit at random, but only once. It will not replicate itself, mail itself to your friends or destroy any of your files, but instead provides you with moments of blissful surprise and magic.

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