Michael Skwarcan's Blog

Tips for Interviewing

Michael Skwarcan — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:49:29 +0000

One thing we all have to do in life is to get a job. Getting a job isn’t that hard today, but getting a good job and the one you want can be very difficult. As we graduate from high school or college and go into interviews, we have to convince our employers that we are better than the rest of the candidates for the job.

Find the line between confident and arrogant. You want to give the employer the impression that you can confidently complete any of the listed tasks on your resume, without looking like an arrogant piece of crap.
Example: You are asked to rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 and why? Bad answer: 10 because I am completely capable of doing everything that the job requires of me. Good answer: 8 because while I feel I can complete the tasks required of me, I know that I can still get better.

Know your Strengths. I have been in quite a few of interviews, sometimes I have asked to talk about a strength of mine. The strength part should be the easy question, if you can’t think of anything good about yourself, then you might have some self-esteem issues and that won’t be covered here.

Try to be original here. Don’t just say that you are a hard worker, can work well with others, or show up to work on time. If you have to brag about your ability to work hard or show up on time, then there’s not much to else to say about you. Feel free to give an example after you state a strength as well. Example: One of my strengths is my ability to multitask and adapt so if I am required to work on multiple projects at once, I can easily transition from one to another to meet all required deadlines.

Know your weaknesses. The key to this question is talking about a strength that may have a negative effect occasionally. Bad answer: I tend to have trouble meeting deadlines. Good answer: I tend to try to take leadership when involved in group activities and sometimes I can come across as a little overbearing or I tend to be a bit skeptical of others work and my own so I do a lot of proofreading and double checking work. It puts you in a good light while telling the employer that you know you aren’t perfect.

Talk about your ability to communicate well with others and how you work well with teams. Let’s be honest, the majority of people applying for this position are qualified. What sets you apart from the rest of the crowd is your personality. The goal here is to get the interviewer to like you. Talk about how you communicate easily with other and can easily work together with others to accomplish a goal. Since everyone is qualified, the interviewer is looking for someone who’s not only qualified but someone who they would want to work with.

Here are a couple links to other sites that will provide you with more tips on how to secure that job.
88 Surefire Job Interview Tips
Interview tips from an Experienced Recruiter
Interview Do’s and Dont’s - Video

How To: Create a Web 2.0 Background

Michael Skwarcan — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:10:10 +0000

Gradients, reflections, easy to read font, and simplicity. Keep these four things in mind when creating your website and you are sure to manage a site that gives you users a little eye candy while holding on to simplicity and usability. Most designers have trouble making the compromise between usability and making artwork. The web 2.0 trend focuses on usability while still giving the user something to look at.

First thing on our list is to create some gradients. The ones that come with Photoshop are terrible looking and it’s easy to just download some gradients online. I highly recommend Deziner Folio for web 2.0 gradients.

After downloading the gradients, you’ll have to put them into your gradients folder in your computer. In my case, that would be, Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop/Presets/Gradients. After that, you’ll have to load the gradients in Photoshop. Click on you background layer and either right click the layer and click on blending mode or just double click the layer. Click on gradient overlay and the click the drop down arrow to view available gradients. If your new gradients aren’t there, click on the small arrow in the top right corner and click on Load Gradients from the drop down menu. If it isn’t already in the folder we put it in, then we will have to browse to that folder and hit ok. Now all of your gradients should be loaded.

After loading your gradients or creating your own, create a blank document that is as high and you want you gradient to be. I chose a 500px high by 500px wide. Right click your background layer and go to blending options. If blending options isn’t there, then your background layer is locked so duplicate it and throw away the locked one. Choose gradient overlay and choose a gradient that you think looks good. For large gradients, I wouldn’t recommend the gradients with a sharp color change. Play around with the gradient setting if you aren’t satisfied with the look.

Once you are have you gradient complete, select a sliver of the whole gradient vertically. Now crop your image by choosing crop image in the Image Menu. Save it to a folder where you plan to make you website. Now before we close out of Photoshop, choose the eye dropper tool and get the color of the pixel at the very bottom of your gradient. Double click the color in the box below the eye dropper tool and find the hexadecimal code at the very bottom. Should be a combination of 6 letters and numbers.

Go into the HTML page that you wish to add the background too. Create a link inside the tag that looks like . That is a reference to your CSS page. Now create a CSS page (if using dreamweaver or a similar program choose New –> CSS) or just start with a blank page and save it with a .css extension. Your body tag should look like the one below.

The 6 number/letter combination should be the same value as your bottom pixel of your gradient and your background-image:url should point to wherever you saved the file on your computer. The background repeat should stay the same and change the color: tag depending on whatever color you would like your font.

Now just add your content and header like any normal page.

How To: Creative Ways to Display your Work

Michael Skwarcan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:22:55 +0000

Don’t just create some art in Photoshop, put it on something, give it a little spice. Today I will be using a picture I created myself in Photoshop and then put it into a stock photo I downloaded. I got the one I’m using today at Stock Exchange. If you wish to follow along using the same example, heres the link:Stock Photo

After choosing your particular piece of art work and your background to which you will paste is on, click on the piece of artwork you plan to use. It must all be on one layer, so go up to the Layer menu and choose Flatten Image if you have to, just don’t save when we’re done. If all the artwork is one 1 layer, hit ctrl+a to select everything, then hit ctrl+c to copy it.

Create a new blank layer on the background picture (the photo of the billboard in my case) and have it above the layer of the billboard and make it your active layer. Then from the Filter drop down menu, choose Vanishing Point. You will go into the Vanishing Point Editor and will have a cross hair cursor. Click on the 4 corners of the billboard (or wall, or whatever you choose). Zoom in using the magnifying glass on the left side if necessary. After placing your 4 corners, hit ctrl+v to paste the artwork into the vanishing point editor. It will appear in the top right corner and if you hover over it, you will get an arrow cursor.

Just click and drag the artwork inside of the 4 corners and it will go into perspective. The artwork may not take up the entire area of the billboard or it may be too big. I had to make mine bigger and to do that just click on the transform tool from the left tool bar. It will give you boxes like a normal transform. You may have to drag the artwork around inside the box until you find a corner to click and drag to transform. Hold shift when transforming the size of your artwork to keep the dimensions. When it looks alright, click OK.

If you look at the image now, you’ll notice that the edges are slightly rough and the image is covering up part of the lights on the bottom. The easiest way I find to do this, is to drag the artwork image below the background and starting using the eraser tool (I’m using a hard eraser, size 13). Have the artwork image selected while erasing. You won’t actually be able to see what your erasing this way, but just stay outside the lines like a coloring book. You have to do it this way over just hiding the artwork image, due to the fact you can’t erase hidden layers.

It doesn’t have to be perfect but close works. We got it where we want it, but it still looks dull, and doesn’t really fit with the background. So click on the artwork layer, and click on layer styles right to the left of opacity and start flipping through them one by one. The layer style I decided looks the best for mine was Linear Light. It used the light well from the picture so it looked like the lights were actually casting light on my image. You can create some really cool effects by duplicating your art layer and using 2 different layer styles.

I still don’t think that the background fits very well, the orange and the blue is just too contrasting for me. I decided to make a duplicate of the background. Select the duplicate and make sure it is above the original copy of the background. From the Image drop down menu, hover over Adjustments which will give you another menu and select Hue/Saturation. Select colorize icon in the bottom right and then move the top slider to the color most fitting to your image. I chose a light blue which was 209.

You’ll notice that the particular image I choose happens to have a pretty grainy look and we don’t want that. From the Filter drop down menu, choose blur, then Gaussian Blur. Pick something that just takes the grain away (I chose 1.2). Now that you have a colored and slightly blurry background, go back to layer styles again and look through them 1 by 1 again to see if any produce an effect you like. Multiply layer style gave me a really nice look that gave it realism and looked great.

700+ Designer Links, And 10 You Might Care About

Michael Skwarcan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:23:45 +0000

I’m so tired of people throwing up these 100+ Designer Links Every Designer Should know. Because I get about 7 links into the page and I start hitting sites that don’t even exist anymore or are outdated and worthless. But I promised you 700+ links so here you go:

For Web Designers.com - 598 Links and more! This site continually puts up more and more links to anything and everything. Most of it is junk.
10+ Resources for Web Developers - (121). Some good links here. Unfortunately I don’t have the next 3 days to sift through them all.

Well, that wasn’t to hard, I met my quota already, but here’s some links that are actually worth while:

Ultimate Photoshop Resources - Marcofolio.net. Provides tons of information categorized in easy to find format. Also labels his personal favorites in each section (Choose those).
TextureKing.com - I actually found this site from the site above but it deserves its own spot. Create for creating all different kinds of effects. Very nice for getting that popular grunge effect.

Brusheezy - Take the work out of Photoshop. Download a couple brush sets and that those effects that usually take hours can be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

UrbanFonts.com - Download all your fonts here. Though there is a limit of downloading about 30 or so a day. I have downloaded a ton of fonts here, so many that using the text tool in Photoshop makes my program lag.

Problogger.net - Great information about blogging here. Some great articles they have are How to Make Money from Blogs and 10 Tips on how to Find more Readers.

Stock Exchange - Stock photos easily found with categories. Plenty of good information here and great for using on websites. Flickr is another popular stock photo site but I find it better for inspiration rather than actually use.

AuthenticJobs.com - So you have mastered all the sites above? Looking to put those skills to use? Developer and Designer jobs are in abundance and you don’t even have to sign up for anything.

Computer Arts - Tons of really great and very advanced information. The tutorials are awesome, but require a good amount of skill to be able to follow them. Cover everything from Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, Illustrator, and more.

PopUrls.com - I’ll be the first to admit this last one is a little weak, but staying up to date is a top priority as a web designer. Trends change daily and new information flows out fast in this business. If anyone knows of a better site for staying up to date on design, please let me know.

Liked my list? Does it need some changes? Think it is just plain terrible? Let me know with your comments.

So you think you can Design?

Michael Skwarcan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:56:09 +0000

It’s been 6 months. I have been designing this site for release for just over 6 months now and I know how to design a site. This is my 3rd draft for my site, my first two were created but never released publicly (view them in my portfolio).

I learned a lot over the past 6 months, especially since I consider myself a graphic designer and a web developer and that is finding where to draw the line. So many designers (or artists in general) have the problem of finding that point between chalking the design full of graphics while still making the site very usable.

As we travel through this era of “Web 2.0” where everything revolves around gradients, reflections, and rounded corners, I find it’s actually harder to create good design. Half of the sites I see today look the same with just different colors and content. More and more programs are coming out and with all the tutorials out there today, it doesn’t take much to become a wizard in Photoshop anymore.

And so it boils down to content.

I’d like to think I have something worth saying just as much as the next person, without having to flood my sites with Top 10 Lists or 800 Links Every Design Should Know. It’s gotten to the point where everything seems to be have said already. Or has it?

The difference between a good and a great designer is that a great designer assumes he knows nothing.

If it didn’t make sense, I’ll reiterate. I would like to consider myself a good designer. But if I stop where I’m at right now, that’s all I will ever be. By assuming that I know nothing, it pushes me to learn even more. I know that there will probably always be someone better than me at something, but it is the ability to be very good at multiple things that will make you stand out from the rest.

I don’t know if anyone has been keeping up with the latest internet trends, but it would appear that an overflow of designers is on the way and I’m not going to be pushed aside. Think you awesome at Photoshop and Illustrator? Try learning PHP. Are you a Ruby on Rails and a Python guy? Try learning Flash. The key to being a good designer is the combination of various skills that will allow you to accomplish anything.