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You've always admired the beautiful graphic sets made by computer users and wished that you could make them too. But that would be impossible with WebTV, right?
Wrong! You CAN create your own sets with your WebTV
and two online tools....ImageMagick Studio and one of the transloaders. My sets are proof of this! Once you learn how to use the different functions available in the ImageMagick Studio, you will be able to design
your own graphic sets. But first you need to
understand a few of the basics of WebTV and graphics.
PIXELS
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A pixel is the unit used to
measure the width and height of a graphic or a web
page. While a computer can "see" things that are very wide, WebTV can't. Any graphic or page can be no
larger than 650 pixels wide (600 pixels is optimal)
for WebTV to translate it properly. If you are viewing a page wider than this, your unit will "squash" it down to about 600 pixels in width, causing distortion. This is why the buttons and text on many pages with bordered backgrounds run over the border image...your WebTV made a wide page fit into 600 pixels of space. What does this mean for you? When designing your sets you must make sure that the width of the border image PLUS the width of the widest graphic (usually the welcome banner or divider bar) PLUS the spaces between them add up to 600 pixels in width or less.
I usually size my border image to be no wider than 100 pixels, my welcome banners and divider bars to less than 300 pixels wide and the other buttons to about 150-200 pixels in width. This way they all fit neatly into the table with no overlapping.
BORDER BACKGROUND TABLE
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Next you need a table code for bordered backgrounds. This sets your page up to use a bordered background so that you page content is contained to the right of the border image. This is the one I use:
This code goes right under the body tag in your page coding. The strange looking code (& followed by nbsp) is what moves the page content over. Use as many as you need to place your page content properly...I use between 12-18, depending on the size of the banner and buttons.
BASE GRAPHICS
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Because you can NOT make completely original graphics with your WebTV, you need to choose the base graphic for your set. Make sure you get it from a website that says it is ok for you to use their graphics freely...otherwise you may be violating someone's copyright, which could land you in MUCHO trouble! 'G'
Now that you are familiar with the basic things you need to know, let's learn how to make graphics!
1. Resizing a graphic
2. Transforming a graphic
3. Compositing one graphic on another
4. Annotating (writing) on a graphic
5. Decorating a graphic
6. Output your graphic
7. Make your graphic sets page
The thing to remember is to HAVE FUN! It took me a while to learn to do this but now that I have, making graphic sets is one of my favorite things to do. And if you have any questions, please feel free to email me at
[email protected]
I will answer your questions if I can, and if I can't I will refer you to someone who can.
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