Ask FreelanceSwitch #20: Professional Appearance, Tough Side Jobs

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, Travis King and Thursday Bram look at freelance fashion and bosses who take advantage.

Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Question #1

My primary focus is Web Design and Development but the thing I am usually the most confused about is how I should physically present myself.

I’m a lax kind of person, and I’m sure many freelancers are. I mean, essentially the job allows you to sit at home and become a slob — a very professional one in many cases. But presentation means a lot and one of my biggest worries is overdressing or underdressing for an interview with a prospective client.

-Tyler

Thursday: It is incredibly easy for freelancers to fall into the habit of dressing extremely casually ? I often refer to sweat pants as my work clothes. My general rule is that if I’m meeting with a client, business casual is the best option. Business casual is a lot easier for guys, by the way: nice pants and a button-up shirt is generally fine, although a blazer can add a nice touch. Women have more options, which can make the decision harder. I had to get one of my friends with a day job come in and approve the outfits in my ‘meet with clients’ collection, because dresses, skirts, slacks, sweater sets, dress shirts and other items of apparel are all acceptable under business casual.

When possible, I like to scout out what the level of dress in the office I’m going into is: I’ll look online for any photos in the office or anything like that. If the general rule seems to be more formal than business casual, I recommend dressing to match. However, business casual has become the norm in most industries. Gallup did a poll a few years ago that concluded that 43 percent of U.S. employees wear business casual and 28 percent where casual street clothes.

Travis: I?m glad you came to us with this question, Tyler. Now I don?t want to give you the wrong impression and pretend I?m something I?m not, but I pretty much know everything there is to know about fashion.

The first mistake that new fashion freelancers make is to listen to what other freelancers say about what to wear. Many freelancers will tell you to wear whatever you like. Their reasoning is that people pay for your skills and not for the way you look. But these are the same people that wear socks and sandals. Outdoors. Where people can see them!

*shudder*

A good rule of thumb for maintaining a professional appearance is to always dress a little better than the people you are going to see. If it?s a jeans and t-shirt kind of place, kick it up with a nice pair of slacks and a fashionable tee or an open-collared shirt. Lately I?ve seen some of the Aussies around me pulling off the deep cut v-neck shirts with a healthy splash of man rug peaking out. That?s a hard look to pull off; I would suggest staying away from it.

The thing about looking good is that it gives you a confidence boost when you walk in the door. And who couldn?t use a little confidence when landing a new client?

Oh yeah, and don?t forget the shoes. Grab a nice pair of leather dress shoes that will look good even with a pair of jeans. For extra points, match your belt and watch strap to your shoe color. Just remember to forget about the white belt and white shoes?those will make you look like a doffus…or an Australian.

Question #2

This is a long one, but trust me, it’s good.

Two years ago, the boss at my primary job put up her own venture with two friends and asked if I wanted to help. The part-time job involved developing my skills as an e-mail marketer, one of several things I was already doing. Thinking the project would be great training and a worthwhile way to earn a little cash (a third of my salary), I said yes.

I worked on this other job after work and on weekends. But since the venture was so new, I ended up working late at night and throughout most of the weekend. I felt exhausted and had little time to do anything else. After three months, I decided that ‘moonlighting’ was not working, and so I ‘daylighted,’ doing most of the work at my primary workplace to save time. My boss promised me I would be paid double, but she never followed through. A year later, my boss and her two partners asked me to be part of their monthly staff meetings so I was ‘kept in the loop’ as to what was happening in the company. This involved taking time off my primary job for four hours a month.

All this time, my boss expected me to dedicate time to this part-time job as if I were a regular employee. And yet I’m still paid the same amount for my efforts. There have been times when I’d spend almost a week doing nothing but the second job, or the other way around, depending on which one demanded more attention.

Earlier this year, my boss agreed (based on my recommendations) to tap an e-mail marketing service to significantly lessen my workload. Signing up for the service certainly helped but, during the first three months, the service dues were deducted from my paycheck. At our last meeting, I was asked to now monitor the company’s social networking presence (as I set up most of their social networking accounts), although a full-time marketing and events coordinator is in charge of posting content. I feel that this is beyond the original scope of my work (which is e-mail marketing, press release distribution, mailing list maintenance, and very basic website development). My boss’ venture has become such a huge hit among customers, that their full-time employees have their hands full.

What I’d like to ask is: How do you get out of a second job, especially if you’re working with the same boss both in your day and side jobs?

- Maria

Thursday: This is going to call for a sit-down conversation with your boss, tough as that might be. There is plenty of room in a situation like this for misunderstanding and there is no guarantee of how your boss will respond to your need to end the secondary contract. Sitting down and talking about it calmly, in a situation where you are able to just lay out the matter has the best odds of success, but I’d be prepared for some problems as a result. To the extent that you can, you’ll have to ride them out.

You can handle the meeting in a number of different ways, depending on your boss’ personality and your preference. Personally, I’d go with the following approach: I’d tell my boss that I need time for some personal projects and that I need to step away from the email marketing work. If your boss has developed as many projects of her own as you mentioned, she should be able to understand that sort of need. I wouldn’t describe any particular projects (given that your first project may be focused on recovering from your busy schedule rather than on anything else). Other options include laying out the financial considerations (although that might get you an offer of more money rather than a chance to resign) or resigning and not giving a reason.

It sounds like your boss isn’t treating you fairly in this situation ? the fact that she took the costs of an email marketing service out of your pay is something I consider unacceptable. That isn’t going to cease unless you start protecting your time from your boss.

Travis: I had to put most of your email up there Maria, because it has the makings of a screenplay for a wonderful freelancer horror flick. I think I?ll call it ?Attack of the Life-sucking Boss.?

Thursday has the right advice, it?s time to sit down with your boss and bang things out. In fact, I think you?ve already left it way too long. You should have spoken up a long time ago.

I used to find myself in similar situations to you. I would let myself get walked all over until the point where I could take no more. Then I would introduce the office to my Irish temper. That?s when things got interesting.

If I were you, when I found out my boss was subtracting service fees from my pay check would have been the point when chairs would have started flying. That?s just infuriatingly stupid.

I think the problem is that your boss is a workaholic and loses herself in her projects. These types of people can?t understand why other people are not as excited as them or work as hard as they do. It?s time to tell her that you?re burning out and she either needs to scale you back or find herself a new whipping girl.

Send in your freelancing questions to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

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Exclusive 11-part Video Series by Jeffrey Way:
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Click here to learn more about what you will learn in the series.

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Doesn’t the title say it all? There are a wide variety of tools and techniques which can drastically improve the speed at which we code. Particularly during time-sensitive settings, even a savings of a few seconds per iteration can add up substantially over the course of the month. I’ll show you ten of my favorite methods in this article.

1. Zen Coding

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div#container>div#contents>ul#nav>li*4

…convert to:

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In this last year, the Zen Coding project has gained considerable attention, and has been expanded to support a wide variety of code editors, including Espresso, Vim, Netbeans, TextMate, and Komodo Edit.

“Zen Coding is an editor plugin for high-speed HTML, XML, XSL (or any other structured code format) coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions?similar to CSS selectors?into HTML code.”

2. Split Windows

For many, a simple tab-based coding experience is more than adequate; however, others prefer a more integrated approach. Unfortunately, the ability to split windows is not widely available across code editors. Luckily, though, a handful of them do support it at varying levels of flexibility (the king being Vim).

The excellent Vim editor offers an unprecedented level of window combinations. Use :sp and :vsp to create new windows from within normal mode.

Other editors which implement a multi-window functionality include:

3. Embrace Social Coding

In the last two years particularly, the idea of social coding has gained considerable popularity – and why wouldn’t it? If it’s fun to share photos on Flickr, the same will of course be true for coding. With site likes Envato’s recently purchased Snipplr, Github, or Forrst, not only can you manage your own snippets for future use, but you can also take advantage of multiple brains by receiving community feedback on your coding techniques and choices.

Envato recently purchased the popular Snipplr.com

Another social networking site? Yes, that is true; but, I must admit: it’s fun. Plus, it’s educational!

4. Code Management Tools

Online networks like Github, Snipplr, and Forrst are fantastic, however, they can be time consuming to access, when you need to reuse a specific piece of code (assuming it’s not already part of a bundle). The solution is to install one of the various code management applications available around the web.

Personally, as a Mac user, I prefer the not-free Snippets app.

With this tool, when I’m working on code, I can simply press, on the Mac, Command + F12 to insert my desired code snippet into my project. Even better, it integrates an “Export to Snipplr/Snipt/Pastie” feature that’s extremely useful.

While many editors offer an integrated snippets utility, I’d recommend embracing a third party tool instead. This way, your snippets aren’t limited to a single editor.

What Sorts of Snippets Should I Save?

Everything you can think of! As a rule of thumb, if you tend to type some block of code more than once, save it. Let’s do an obvious one together; when producing a new website, how often do you type out the three lines or so to create rounded corners in the modern browsers?

 #box {  -moz-border-radius: 3px;  -webkit-border-radius: 3px;  border-radius: 3px; }

This takes around ten seconds to type each time. What a waste! Instead, create a new snippet, and reduce your coding time by 90%.

Alternate Options

Snippley : I used this one up until recently.
Code Collector Pro : For Mac
Snippet App

5. Choose a Proper Editor

The Holy Grail of efficient coding; your choice of code editor will have the largest affect on your coding speed. Unfortunately, there isn’t a definitive answer. Your decision will largely be dependent upon:

Which languages you code in
Your OS
The type of UI you prefer
Comfort with the command line (or lack of)

As an example, someone who predominantly creates HTML themes for a site like ThemeForest would be unwise to use a full IDE like Aptana. It’s simply unnecessary and too slow. However, the same is not true for a server-side developer.

Questions to Ask Before Deciding on an Editor

How important is speed? Should the editor open nearly instantly?
Do I require integrated debugging tools?
Does this editor offer some form of bundle functionality?
How easy to memorize are the keyboard shortcuts?
Are my favorite extensions and plugins (like Zen Coding) available for this code editor?
Do I require integrated Git logging?
Am I okay with a GUI interface?
Do I prefer speed over visuals…or Vim over Coda?

When I asked myself these questions, I determined that speed and performance were paramount. As such, I currently use Vim, which is significantly daunting at first, but provides an unprecedented level of flexibility and speed, due to the fact that even traversing your page requires a language, of sorts. However, for larger projects, which require debugging, I use Netbeans.

6. Use Bundles

Bundles: learn them…use them. Editors, like TextMate — and, subsequently E Text Editor — popularized bundles; however, they’re widely available from editor to editor.

What’s So Great About Them?

How many times have you found yourself typing the same generic piece of mark-up or code, whether that might be a new function, or the structure of a new jQuery plugin. How much time are you wasting each time you repeat this process? This is where bundles come into play.

For example, by downloading the TextMate CodeIgniter bundle, we can take advantage of a wide array of methods and snippets. Remember – less typing is always a good thing!

With this bundle installed, we only need to type the designated shortcut, and then press tab (in most editors). This will then expand the shortcut into the requested code. What separates a bundle from a snippet is that you can specify multiple tab stops to further expedite your coding speed.

Vim Users: if you miss/envy the TextMate bundle feature, check out the SnipMate plugin.

7. Use LESS.js

Tools like LESS.js and Sass can drastically increase your coding speed. In terms of which one to choose: they’re both excellent. LESS.js is particularly impressive, though, because it runs 100% on the (wait for it…) browser’s JavaScript engine.

How Does it Work?

These tools allow for all of the features that you wish CSS had — such as variables and functions.

 /* Variables! */ @primary_color: green;  /* Mix-ins are like functions for commonly used operations, such as apply borders. We create variables by prepending the @ symbol. */ .rounded(@radius: 5px) { 	-moz-border-radius: @radius; 	-webkit-border-radius: @radius; 	border-radius: @radius; }  #container { /* References the variable we created above. */ 	background: @primary_color;  /* Calls the .rounded mix-in (function) that we created, and overrides the default value. */ 	.rounded(20px);   /* Nested selectors inherit their parent's selector as well. This allows for shorter code. */ 	a { 		color: red; 	} }

Pro Tip: To make your browser update every time you save a file (very handy feature), use the watch method. Place the following at the bottom of your project. Of course, this assume that you’ve already setup LESS.js.

 less.env = 'development'; less.watch();

Get up and running with LESS.js (video and article)

LESS Compiler

Many might argue that it’s unsafe to use a JavaScript-based solution. But that’s okay; there are a handful of compilers available around the web. The best solution I was able to find is called LESS.app.

After you download it (free), you simply drag your project folder into the app, which instructs it to watch all .LESS files. At this point, you can continue working on your project, per usual. Every time you save, the compiler will run, which generates/updates an automatically created style.css file. When you’re finished developing your app, you only need to change your stylesheet references from style.less to style.css, accordingly. Easy! Now there’s no reason not to take advantage of LESS — unless you’re using a different solution, like Sass.

8. Prototype Early with Firebug

You know the drill: write a bit of JavaScript, switch and refresh your browser, receive an error, return to the editor…and rinse and repeat. Though we all do it, sometimes, there are far more efficient alternatives, such as protoyping early with tools like Firebug. By working directly in the browser, you cut out the middle man, so to speak.

The uber-talented Dave Ward recommended this tip, and has even created a screencast demonstrating this method.

Visit Dave’s website to view a higher quality version of this screencast.

9. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

When first getting started in this field, I always took issue with comments like “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” It’s not about reinvention; it’s about understanding how the wheel functions. However, once you know the inner workings of the wheel, this argument certainly is true: Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Coding each new project from scratch is incredibly time consuming.

If you want to complete new projects as quickly as possible (and who doesn’t), save yourself some time, and take advantage of the various levels of abstractions that are available around the web. A handful of my favorites include:

HTML5 Boilerplate – Whether you choose to use this template in its entirety, or in bits and pieces, it doesn’t matter. Just use it! And while you’re at it, split the sections of code into snippets for reuse! Watch the official guide to Boilerplate on Nettuts+
CodeIgniter (PHP Framework) – For higher level PHP applications, the CodeIgniter framework is a fantastic choice. Even better, the community support is second to none. If you happen to be a visual learner, our CodeIgniter from Scratch series is, also, second to none.
960 (CSS Framework) – If you require grid-like structures, both the 960 and Blueprint CSS frameworks are fantastic choices. They easily turn hours of work into a two minute process; and, if you’re worried about file bloat, you needn’t. That’s a ridiculous argument. Let us teach you how to use 960!
jQuery (JavaScript Library) – Does this one really require explanation at this point? Save yourself the headaches, and use it (that is, unless you’ve developed your own awesome library).

Conclusion

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Which tools and resources do you use to code faster?

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We need to install the Ruby language and the Sinatra and Haml gems to get started.

The method for doing this will vary depending on your operating system. I like to use the Ruby Version Manager (RVM) to manage Ruby on OS X and Linux. (Windows users might want to look at Pik as an alternative to RVM.)

Install RVM to Manage our Ruby Environment

For those of you who do not have Ruby installed, download and install RVM.

Following the instructions on the RVM Installation Page, open a terminal and enter the following:

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This will download and install RVM. We need to add a line to the end of our .bashrc file. Those of you using an alternative to shell to Bash will need to amend the appropriate profile. See the RVM installation page for more details.

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Close and re-open your shell and you should be good to go!

Install Dependencies and the Ruby Language

Type ‘rvm notes‘ to check out any dependencies you may need to install for your operating system. There are serveral different versions of Ruby that RVM can manage. We will use the standard version called MRI. Hence, in the output of rvm notes look for the section that says, ‘For MRI and REE...‘. Then copy and paste the command stated for ‘ruby‘.

For example, on a fresh install of Ubuntu, I got the following output and needed to install the dependencies listed by using the aptitude command given in the output. See screenshot below.

With the tricky bit over, installing and using different Ruby versions and gems is now easy. Install version 1.9.2 of Ruby by entering the following:

 rvm install 1.9.2

RVM should now download and install Ruby version 1.9.2.

The final stage is to instal the Sinatra and Haml gems. Type:

 gem install sinatra

You should see the following output in the terminal:

 Successfully installed rack-1.2.1 Successfully installed sinatra-1.0 2 gems installed Installing ri documentation for rack-1.2.1... Installing ri documentation for sinatra-1.0... Installing RDoc documentation for rack-1.2.1... Installing RDoc documentation for sinatra-1.0...

Now type gem install haml to install the Haml gem on your system in the same way.

Step 2: Create the Sinatra Application

To begin making the Sinatra application, create a folder containing a Ruby file for the application code. In your terminal, type:

 mkdir sinatra-app cd sinatra-app touch website.rb

Open the newly created ‘website.rb’ file in your text editor and enter the following:

 require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra'  get '/' do   "This is Sinatra" end

This is a basic Sinatra application. The first two lines bring in the ‘rubygems‘ and ‘sinatra‘ libraries to do the heavy work.

The next section tells Sinatra how to respond to a ‘get‘ request. Specifically, it tells it what to do when the root url (the '/' path) is requested. In this example, Sinatra just returns the string “This is Sinatra”. This is what will appear in the browser when the root url of the application is requested.

To see it in action, go back to your terminal and execute the Sinatra application using the following command:

 ruby website.rb

You will need to restart this website.rb file every time you change it. Hence it is a good idea to keep a separate shell running in its own window or tab to start and stop it.

You should get the response:

 == Sinatra/1.0 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from WEBrick [2010-09-27 09:45:37] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1 [2010-09-27 09:45:37] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2010-08-16) [i686-darwin10.4.0] [2010-09-27 09:45:38] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=14135 port=4567

This is telling us that a webserver (called WEBrick) has started and is now serving your application on port 4567.

To view it, open your browser and go to “localhost:4567″. You should see the application’s output:

Congratulations! Your Sinatra application is up and running!

Let’s start looking at building pages with Haml and some default Sinatra conventions for special files.

Step 3: Introducing Haml

We are going to build our pages with Haml. The first step is to tell our application that we will be using the Haml gem.

We do this by adding include ‘Haml’ towards the top of you code. Change your ‘website.rb‘ file to look like the following:

 require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'Haml  get '/' do   "This is Sinatra" end

Your application will now know to use the Haml gem that we installed earlier.

The Haml Markup Language

Haml is a simple and clean way of describing HTML. It can also handle inline code, such as PHP, ASP and Ruby script.

One of Haml’s goals is to reduce the amount of duplication and repetition found in creating webpages with HTML; one example of this is closing tags. It does this by relying on the structure of the indents in the code: When writing in Haml, it is important to be consistent with indents as they describe the structure of the page.

The result is markup that is logical and much easier to read than HTML for all but the most trivial of cases.

Let’s look at some Haml markup and show the HTML it produces.

 !!! %html   %head     %title This is the Title in a title tag within the head tag   %body     %h1 This is a heading within an h1 tag     %p       This is text in a paragraph. Notice how we do not close the tag...the indents do that!

The ‘!!!‘ at the start of the code tells Haml to output the DOCTYPE tag. HTML tags are described with a ‘%‘ sign. So %html outputs the <html> tag, %head creates the <head> tag, %p creates the <p> tag and so on.

The indents tell Haml which tags lie within others. So the heading tag <h1> produced by the ‘%h1‘ markup is within the <body> tag created by the ‘%body‘ markup. The following paragraph tag marked up by the ‘%p‘ tag is also within the body tag. Following the indents, we can see that the text lies within the paragraph.

Hence, the markup above gives the following HTML output:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html>   <head>     <title >This is the Title within the head tag </title>   </head>   <body>     <h1>This is a heading within the body tag </h1>     <p>       This is text in a paragraph. Notice how we do not close the tag...the indents do that!     </p>   </body> </html>

You can see where the closing tags correspond to the indentation in the original Haml markup.

Adding Haml Templates to the Sinatra Application

With that quick introduction to Haml out of the way, we can start to use it in our application. By default, Sinatra will look for webpage templates in a folder called ‘views‘. Let’s add that folder now.

Open a terminal, navigate to the sinatra_app folder we made earlier and enter the following:

 mkdir views cd views

Now we are inside the views folder, let’s create an ‘index.haml‘ page.

 touch index.haml

Open ‘index.haml‘ in your text editor and fill in the following:

 !!! %html   %head     %title My Sinatra Website   %body     %h1 Welcome     %p       Welcome to my website made with Sinatra and HAML

The next step is to tell Sinatra to use this file for the home page. Open the ‘website.rb‘ file and change the code in the get '/' block so the file now reads:

 require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml'  get '/' do   haml :index end

This instructs the application to send the output of the Haml file, called index.haml (automagically looked for in the ‘views’ folder), when the root address is requested.

Back in the terminal running the webserver, type ‘Ctrl-C‘ to stop the webserver and then call it again using the ruby command to restart it:

 [Ctrl-C] ruby website.rb

Refresh your browser and you should see the resulting webpage.

Viewing the source of this webpage shows the HTML generated by Haml:

 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">   <html>     <head>       <title>My Sinatra Website</title>     </head>     <body>       <h1>Welcome</h1>       <p>         Welcome to my website made with Sinatra and HAML       </p>     </body>   </html>

Great! We now have our website working by using the Haml templates in the ‘views’ directory.

Let’s now work the home page into something that follows a typical structure with a header, footer, content area and a sidebar. We’ll also add some basic CSS to position and style the page. In doing this, we’ll see how to express <div> tags in Haml and how to bring link to CSS files.

Create the Home Page

Go back to the ‘index.haml’ file in your text editor and change it look like the following:

 !!! %html   %head     %title My Sinatra Website   %body     #wrapper       #header         %h1 My Sinatra Website         %h2 A Simple Site made with Sinatra and HAML!        #content         %h1 The Home Page         %p           Welcome to my website made with Sinatra and HAML.         %p           This is the home page and this is some text to fill out the home page!        #side_bar         %h1 Side Bar         %p           This is the side bar of the webpage        #footer         %p           This is the footer.

This is a typical layout with header, content, side_bar and footer divs. As you can see, <div> tags are created with the # sign. The whole page is wrapped in a <div id="wrapper"> tag created by the ‘#wrapper‘ line.

To give an HTML tag an id we just chain the # on the end, so we could write %body#my_ID to get <body id="my_ID">. Classes are marked up with a dot. So %article.my_class would give <article class="my_class">.

Save the file and refresh it in your browser. You should see something like this:

Add Some CSS Styling

Sinatra uses another special directory names ‘public’ to store assets such as CSS files and images. Create a folder called ‘public’ in your application’s root folder. Change into that directory and create one called ‘css’ to store the css files. Finish by creating a blank css file in that directory.

Do this in your terminal by typing:

 mkdir public cd public mkdir css cd css touch styles.css

Open the styles.css file in your editor and copy and paste the following in:

 #wrapper{     width:66%;     margin:auto; }  #header{     background-color:#ade; }  #header>h1{     font-size:200%; }  h2{     font-size:130%;     font-family:sans-serif; }  #content{     margin:12px 0;     float:left; }  #side_bar{     margin:12px 0;     width :30%;     float:right;     clear:none;     background-color:#ddd; }  h1{     font-size:150%; }  #footer{     clear:both;     background-color:#ade;     font-size:75%;     font-family:sans-serif;     color:#333;     border-top:solid 1px #69a; }  ol{     padding-top:20px;     background-color:#ade;     display:block; }  li{     color:white;     text-align:center;     display:inline;     padding:5px 10px 0 10px;     margin-right:2px;     background-color: #69a; }  a{     text-decoration:none; }

I won’t go into the details of the css, as it’s just a quick and dirty way of making the page elements more obvious in the browser.

We need to link to the CSS file from within the index page. I’m also going to add a link to the Yahoo CSS reset to help consistency across browsers. Open the index.haml page the editor and add these two lines to the %head section.

   %link(rel="stylesheet" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/reset/reset-min.css")   %link(rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css")

This illustrates how we can use brackets in Haml for additional tag attributes: rel and href in this case.

Your final file should look like this:

 !!! %html   %head     %title My Sinatra Website     %link(rel="stylesheet" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/reset/reset-min.css")     %link(rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css")   %body     #wrapper       #header         %h1 My Sinatra Website         %h2 A Simple Site made with Sinatra and HAML!        #content         %h1 The Home Page         %p           Welcome to my website made with Sinatra and HAML.         %p           This is the home page and this is some text to fill out the home page!        #side_bar         %h1 Side Bar         %p           This is the side bar of the webpage        #footer         %p           This is the footer.

Refresh your browser, and you should see the home page with styling and the divs positioned.

We now have the basic template for our web pages that we can reuse to create additional pages.

Step 4: Creating a Common Layout

Now that we have our basic page layout, we can see that much of the content in our index.html file might be the same for other pages on the site. In this example, we will keep the header, footer and sidebar common to both pages. We can use a layout file in Sinatra to achieve this.

Go back to the index page in your text editor; change the filename by choosing ‘Save As’ to layout.haml.

We will now edit the layout file and introduce some templating markup using the ‘=‘ tag in Haml.

Change the layout file to look like:

 !!! %html   %head     %title My Sinatra Website     %link(rel="stylesheet" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/reset/reset-min.css")     %link(rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css")   %body     #wrapper       #header         %h1 My Sinatra Website         %h2 A Simple Site made with Sinatra and HAML!        #content         =yield        #side_bar         %h1 Side Bar         %p           This is the side bar of the webpage        #footer         %p           This is the footer.

The key here is the ‘=yield‘ command. The = sign tells Haml to process some Ruby code and put the output in the browser. Here we are simply calling Ruby’s yield function that will return the contents of the page.

We can now edit our index.haml page to take out all of the code that is duplicated in the layout file. Change it to look like:

 %h1 The Home Page %p   Welcome to my website made with Sinatra and HAML. %p   This is the home page and this is some text to fill out the home page!

Refreshing the browser should provide exactly the same result as earlier. But this time, the layout file is automatically being picked up by Sinatra and the index page is being rendered as a result of the yield function.

Create the About Page

Creating additional pages that use this template is now straightforward. Create a new file in the ‘views’ folder called about.haml

Your directory and file structure for the application should look like this:

Enter the following code in the new file:

   %h1 About   %p     This is a simple application using Sinatra and HAML.

As you can see, this is a very simple page with a heading and a piece of text within a paragraph tag.

We have no way of seeing the page at the moment. To do that, we need to amend the website.rb file to tell Sinatra to handle a request for ‘/about‘ and to return the about.haml template as a result.

We do that by adding the following lines to the website.rb file:

 require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml'  get '/' do   haml :index end  get '/about' do   haml :about end

The get '/about' block simple tells Sinatra to return the ‘about’ Haml template in response to an HTTP get for ‘/about‘.

Restart the WEBrick webs server by pressing Ctrl-C in the terminal in which it’s running, as we did before, and calling ruby website.rb.

You should see the following page when you navigate to ‘localhost:4567/about‘ in your browser.

Adding more pages would be as quick and as simple as that. Just remember that you will need to restart the WEBrick server if you change the application file.

Step 5: Adding a Meny (and Tidying Up)

We need to add some way of navigating between the pages; so we’ll add a simple menu in the layout. Open the layout.haml file and add the navigation div and the links like this:

 !!! %html   %head     %title My Sinatra Website     %link(rel="stylesheet" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/reset/reset-min.css")     %link(rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css")   %body     #wrapper       #header         %h1 My Sinatra Website         %h2 A Simple Site made with Sinatra and HAML!       #nav         %ol           %a(href="/")             %li Home           %a(href="about")             %li About        #content         =yield        #side_bar         %h1 Side Bar         %p           This is the side bar of the webpage        #footer         %p           This is the footer.

Here, we create a div with the id of nav. This div contains a list with anchor tags to '/' and ‘about‘. Notice how the linked text is indented on the following line to surround it in the HTML anchor tag.

Refresh your browser, and you should see a menu which links the two pages:

Clicking on the links in the navigation menu should take you to each page. You can experiment with adding more pages. Remember, the steps are as follows:

Add a new .haml file to the views directory.
Describe the view using Haml in that file.
Add the navigation to the new page in the menu part of the layout file.
Edit the website.rb file for the new route in the same way as the ‘/about‘ route.
Don’t forget to restart the website.rb file!

Conclusion

There’s certainly much more to both Sinatra and Haml than we have seen here. Sinatra is a great choice for website and web-services, whereas a heavier framework such as Ruby on Rails might be overkill. Further, I find the simplicity and clarity of Haml complements Sinatra beautifully, and make for a very productive development approach.

What Gestures Do People Actually Use?

I thought this was interesting. Luke W. writes up some notes on a talk given last week in Chicago at the Design for Mobile conference by Dan Mauney, Director of Human Factors and Research at design consultancy HumanCentric. The subject was a study Mauney and his team did on what gestures forty people in nine different countries intuitively and comfortably use when interfacing with mobile devices. One point was particularly interesting to me:

“The study didn’t find see a lot of variability between experts and novices — move and zoom had the biggest variability.”

If true, that’s a world of difference from the paradigm of desktop computing. Hopefully Mauney will make his presentation available in full, but in the meantime you can read Luke’s notes here.

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Create a Handmade ?Back to School? Style Postcard

In this tutorial you will learn some easy methods to create a realistic looking corkboard composition for a back to school sale postcard. We’ll go over how to create cool paper letters, add some cutouts, realistic shadows, and add bleeds for printing. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

The following images were used during the production of this tutorial.

Step 1

To start, open Photoshop and create a new document with the settings shown. Make sure that the Units are in inches, the artwork Resolution is set at 300 dpi, and the Color Mode is set to CMYK for printing. The postcard will be printed on an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper with two on a page, so the actual cut size of one panel of artwork will be 8" x 5". Since we have art that bleeds off the edges, we need to include the bleed area in our Photoshop file. Most bleeds in the US are 1/8″ or 0.125″, so our final postcard size adds .125" for each of the four sides, making our artwork 8.25" x 5.25". Click OK to get started. Then create the guides for the bleed by making sure rulers are on, View > Rulers (Cmd/Ctrl + R), click the ruler area and drag the guides to the 1/8" marker in each corner like shown. Next, lock your guides, if they aren’t already, View > Lock Guides (Alt + Cmd/Ctrl + . (If you are doing this for a web only project, you could set the DPI to 72 to reduce the file size)

Step 2

Starting with the background, go to File > Place and select the cardboard texture of your choice. I used the texture titled “890067_16350024.jpg" but you can use whichever one you want. After placing the image, scale it up a little (Hold ALT + Shift when you click to scale from the center). Make sure it covers the bleed area, then hit enter to set the image. Name this layer "Corkboard".

Step 3

To create our light source we are going to add a Gradient Overlay to the "Corkboard" layer by going to the menu Layer > Layer Styles > Gradient Overlay, or you can click the FX looking icon in your Layers Palette and select the Gradient Overlay option. Choose a black to white gradient, set the Blend Mode to Multiply at 75% Opacity, set the style to Radial, click the Reverse checkbox so the white is in the middle, set the angle to -145, and then set the scale to 150% as shown. Click the Gradient drop down to edit it and move the white part out to the 47% marker as shown, this varies, but you just want a little darkness in the corner, not too much. Click OK. While in the Gradient Overlay menu, click anywhere on the artboard (you will notice the arrow change to a 4 pointed arrow), which means you, can drag the gradient to position it. Our light source goes from top right to bottom left, so move the gradient until the bottom left corner has some black coming up. You may want to set Opacity to 100% so you can see what’s happening here, and you can always re-tweak the gradient.

Step 4

To complete the paper letter effect there is a good amount of work here so let’s get an idea of what we’re going to do. We first need to create the basic letter text, add layer styles to get the right effect, then break the text into single letters and change their colors. Then we reposition each one to give it the random handmade look and place a paper texture over them. Next we go under each letter and add shadows where the letters overlap and curl away from the corkboard. Then for the final touch we add the staples that hold the letters to our corkboard.

First things first, we need to set the font for the letters we will be using. So with the Type Tool (T) selected, choose your font settings as shown (“Freshman” Font at 64pt Font Size, 100pt Tracking to space it out a bit) then click the artboard, type out “Back to School Sale!” and hit Enter.

Step 5

Now we apply the layer styles to the text layer, which includes a drop shadow, a gradient overlay and a stroke effect. So select your text layer and open up your Layer Styles menu. First, select the Drop Shadow and set your Opacity to anywhere between 50% and 75% (In this example I chose 75% so you could see them clearly, but normally I would tone them down to 50% or less because the light source is pretty soft). With the Global Light checkbox selected, set the angle to 45 degrees, the distance to 15px and the size to 5px.

Next select the Gradient Overlay checkbox, and for a color I chose a bright gradient for now. Set the Scale to 150%, and then set the Angle to 45 degrees, and reverse your gradient (if necessary). The letters should be dark at the top right and get lighter towards the bottom left where they curl away from the corkboard.

To finish it off, we add a Stroke effect, with Size at 10px, set the Color to white and the Position to Outside. Before clicking OK, save this new style by clicking the New Style button and name it something you will remember. You can always use that later to replicate the letter effect.

Step 6

Next we need to break the letters apart and position them as if they were done by hand on a real corkboard. What I did here was to remove the text except for the first letter. Then with the Move Tool (V) and the one letter layer selected, ALT + Drag the letter over to the right to create a copy. You have to do this for all the letters in your string of text, so in the end we will copy the original ‘B’ 16 times. Then change them into the correct letter with the Type Tool (T).

Now you have a bunch of layers with just one letter of text, so select all your text layers (hold Shift when selecting) and hit Cmd/Ctrl + G to group them, or go to the menu Layer > Group Layers, and then rename that group "Letters". Now they’re nice and tidy for the next step.

Step 7

Hopefully you have some colorful gradients in your Photoshop Color Palette that you can use for coloring the letters, but if you don’t, I included the Gradient Swatches I used in this example. To change the color of each letter, expand the Layer Styles in the Layers palette by clicking the little down triangle then double-click the Gradient Overlay effect. With any gradient you use, make sure it goes from dark at the top right and lighter as it moves to the bottom left. Use the Reverse Gradient checkbox if necessary. I used some bright gradients here that are nice and bright, alternating the colors randomly for the handmade effect.

Step 8

Now that we are done coloring all our letters, we will need to make them appear crooked and out of line. The letters need to look like they were "stapled" to the corkboard. The way we do that is by rotating and positioning them with the Move Tool (V) randomly and quickly. Allow some letters to overlap so shadows can be created there too. The less time you think about it the better, and that goes for this whole handmade style (you can always tweak where needed).

So use the Move Tool (V) and select the layer that contains your first letter. Click the corner and rotate the letter to the position you want and hit Enter to set the transformation. Then move the letter around by dragging it with the Move Tool (V), or use the arrow keys with the layer selected to bump it around. Repeat that process for each letter. See below for the results.

Step 9

It’s time to zoom out and take a look at the "Letters" group. We just want to make sure the text is centered on the artboard and that it is up at the top, leaving plenty of room below for the other stuff. With the Move Tool (V) selected, click the "Letters" group and the locked Background layer to select them, and then hit the centering marker up top (circled). Now we don’t want to mess with the positioning of the text after this because we are about to add some shadows manually and some staples to hold the letters on that board. All these are in separate layers and groups, so moving the text later may result in stray objects that you will have to fix. So with the "Letters" group selected, use the Move Tool (V) to position the layer about a 0.5" from the top and make sure it looks good.

Step 10

Before we add the cool paper texture to the letters to make them pop, we have to prepare the texture to bring out the contrast. Go to File > Open to open a new file and select the "papertexture9.jpg". Three adjustments need to be made. First, we desaturate it , so make sure your Adjustments Palette is open (Window > Adjustments) and click the Hue/Saturation icon. Set the Saturation to -100 and darken/lighten it a little bit if needed, I lightened it to +7.

Next we mess with the curves to bring out the contrast so select the background layer and find the Curves icon in your Adjustments Palette. In the Curves presets, select the Strong Contrast option and you’re done with Curves unless you need to tweak it a little bit.

Finally, we select the background layer again and click the Levels icon in the Adjustments Palette and set up the sliders as shown (79, 0.53, 213).

When you’re done with that click the "Levels" layer and bring it to the top (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + ]), then move the "Hue/Saturation" Layer so it’s in the middle and the "Curves" layer should be at the bottom. Hit Cmd/Ctrl + S to Save As and save this file as a JPG, naming it "papertexture9_contrast.jpg" with the max settings shown (for printing). This texture can also be used with the displacement filter so feel free to save the PSD as "papertexture9_displacement.psd" if you want to use it later.

Step 11

Before placing the texture we need to copy and convert the text to a smart object so we can use the selection from that to mask our paper texture. First, select all the letters within the "Letters" group, Alt-Drag them to the top of the "Letters" group to copy them all, then right-click (with all letters still selected) and select the Convert to Smart Object option.

Next go to File > Place and select the paper texture "papertexture9_contrast.jpg". Make sure its at the top of the "Letters" group, resize it if necessary to cover your letters, then change the Blend Mode to Overlay and set the opacity to something around 75% (depending on your letter colors, you can adjust until the texture blends in, or change the blend mode to Multiply). Move the texture around into a position that looks natural. Avoid showing an obvious crease line across multiple letters so that each letter look unique. You may want to try rotating, scaling, or even duplicating the texture.

Once it’s in place and you like how it looks, it’s time to mask it with the smart object we just created. Cmd/Ctrl + Click on the thumbnail for the Smart Object to select it, then click the paper texture layer and click the little Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette (shown) to create the mask. Then hide the smart object or delete it by dragging it into the Trash Can icon. Now the letters have some random depth that was created by a single texture.

Step 12

The next step is to create all the shadows under the letters. The key to drawing the shadows is to follow the lead of the drop shadows that are already there. For all the letters you want to accent those shadows, but the places where they overlap the shadows should be more prominent. This part can be done quickly and messy since it will be blurred afterwards.

To start, select the "A" letter layer, then grab the Pen Tool (P) with Black selected as your primary color, and start tracing to create a new black Shape Layer. Roughly trace the outline of the letter "A", going out about 5-10px from the shape of the letter as shown. After you draw the shape, set the Blend Mode to Multiply and set the Opacity to 75% (adjust this as necessary).

Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and blur 5px. It will ask you if you want to rasterize the layer, hit OK. From now on, you can just hit Cmd/Ctrl + F to apply the blur effect. Repeat those steps for every letter, with each shadow layer under its letter layer.

Feel free to move around or exaggerate the shadows on the letters to give them some depth, like the highlighted areas below.

Step 13

The final touch for our letters are the staples. The staples we create are just some basic layer styles applied to a rounded rectangle, and when copied and rotated around randomly, look like they’re done by hand. Just like the letters, the randomness in the placement and rotation of these staples adds to the effect so just remember the less time you think about it the better

With white selected as the primary color, select the rounded rectangle tool from the Tools Palette (U, then Shift + U to cycle through), set the Radius to 3px (up top) and draw out a rectangle that’s about .0375" by .15". Name the layer "Staple", then open up the Layer Styles for this layer. We are applying a Drop Shadow, Gradient Overlay, and little Inner Shadow. For the Drop Shadow, set Opacity to 50%, check the Global Light checkbox, set the Distance to 1px and the Size to 3px.

For the Gradient Overlay, you need to create a gradient that goes from black to white to a medium-dark grey (K=60%). Set the white Position to 76% as shown. Click OK then set the Opacity to 25%, and keep the other default settings.

Lastly, select the Inner Shadow effect and set the Opacity to 17%, keeping the defaults.

Now just like you did the letters, rotate and move the staple into position. Then ALT + Drag to copy the staple for each letter, rotating and positioning randomly to make it look handmade. You can see some spots where I doubled up on staples, so have fun with it and feel free to get creative. It should look something like this when it’s all done.

The staple looks good like this, but to give the final touch of realism we need to add shadows. So get out the Brush Tool (B), make sure black is your primary color, and select a soft brush about 10-15px in diameter. Create a new layer under the staple layer, rename it "Shadows". This layer will hold all your shadows, so make sure you get your staples in the right position before doing this. Then for each staple, just click the brush on the ends of each staple as shown. After that set the layer’s Blend Mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 75%. Finally, select all the staples and the "Shadows" layer and group them, then name this group "Staples & Shadows".

Step 14

In this section we are going to stage the products and our other items on the corkboard, add realistic shadows, and hold them up with pins. Feel free to grab some photos of your own that you would like to showcase, but for this part of the tutorial I am going to assume you’re using the images provided. When you are done with this part, the postcard will look something like this.

Step 15

To get started place the "shoe1.jpg" onto your artboard (File > Place) and hit enter to set the image. Quickly trace 1-5px from the edge with the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L, then Shift + L) using long lines where you can but still leaving the edges rough and pointy. When you have traced the shoe and have your selection, click the Mask Icon to mask the shoe, then right-click the layer and select Rasterize Layer. Repeat that for the other 2 shoe images, "shoe2.jpg" and "shoe3.jpg".

Scale the images down the Transform Tool (Cmd/Ctrl + T) to about 40%. Then you can scale them down a little bit more with the Move Tool (V) and rotate and arrange the shoes. Try to make the silhouette more abstract and less square looking which will make the background look less boring.

I did this by rotating one shoe and sending it to the back of the layers, and horizontally flipping the other (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal) and moving it to the top of those layers. I used the same process for the Hat and Glasses images, and for the watches. Spread them out into 3 columns as shown in the preview.

Step 16

Once the items are cutout and arranged the way you want them, we give them the cutout paper background. Get out the Pen Tool (P), with white as the primary color and roughly trace the area around the 3 shoes using medium to shorter strokes than before. The shape should be rough and jagged, leaving 25-35px of space between the edges and should look as if cutout with scissors. Name the layer "paper bg" and then apply the layer styles as shown.

First, add a Drop Shadow and keep the default Blend Mode and Opacity settings, make sure the Global Light checkbox is checked, then set the Distance to 4px and the Size to 5px.

Next, add a Gradient Overlay and set the Blend Mode to Multiply at about 86% Opacity. Use a white to light grey (K = 12%) gradient at a 45 degree angle, making sure it goes from dark at the top right to light at the bottom left. I also changed the scale to 10% to bring out the gradient more.

When you are done, click the New Style button in the top right of your Layer Styles dialogue box to save that style as "paper bg". You can use that later for the other groups’ paper backgrounds when using the pen tool.

We are going to create shadows for this paper layer the same way we did for the letters, using the drop shadow as a guide. Get out the Pen Tool (P) with black as the primary color and create a rough outline around the shoes, exaggerating the outline around the bottom left as shown. When done, rename the layer "paper bg shadow" then apply a Gaussian Blur (Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur) with a size of 5px. Repeat that process for the hat and glasses and watches.

All done! Now let’s organize our layers a little bit by grouping the objects and their backgrounds, and naming them “Shoes”, “Hat and Glasses” and "Watches", respectively.

Step 17

In the next few steps we will be working with our fonts, but first we need to create the paper to put the text on. This is done the same way we created the "paper bg" and "paper bg shadow" layers in the previous step. The only difference is that I varied the color to make it interesting. And remember these are going to be pinned down later on.

Use the Pen Tool (P) with white as the primary color and roughly create a jagged rectangular shape as shown. Name this shape layer "paper bg green".

Then we add a Drop Shadow, a Color Overlay and a Gradient Overlay as shown. I used a tan gradient with a color overlay to make the paper color more subtle. So the base tan gradient is made with C=29 M=29 Y=41 K=0 and C=14 M=15 Y=23 K=0 and the green Color Overlay is made with C=27 M=0 Y=73 K=0.

Next we add the shadow layer with the Pen Tool (P) the same way as in Step 16. Roughly trace around the “paper bg green” layer, using the Pen Tool (P) with black as the primary color, then change the Blend Mode to Multiply and set the Opacity to 75% (keep in mind that you would probably want to tone that down for production). Rename this layer “paper bg green shadow”. I made the shadows a little more exaggerated with these paper tags.

Then, apply a Gaussian Blur of 5px. Repeat that process for the other two pieces of paper, with C=33 M=1 Y=0 K=0 for the blue and C=2 M=18 Y=0 K=0 for the pink Color Overlay.

Step 18

Time to add the text. With the Type Tool (T) selected, set the primary color to C=73 M=66 Y=56 K=52, set the Font to "Walk Around the Block", set the Font Size to 30pt, the Line Height to 30pt, and the Tracking to -75pt. Then click the artboard and type out "SHOES" and hit Enter. Set the Blend Mode to Multiply at 90% Opacity. Rotate the text and move it into position on the green piece of paper.

Then do the same for the other two pieces of paper, type out "HATS ‘N’ GLASSES" and "SUPER FRESH WATCHES". Rotate and scale if necessary to get the text to fit. In this case I scaled the hats part down and made "Super Fresh" a smaller font size before scaling. Make sure your layers are in the correct group as well.

I’m going to add an arrow in there to fill up space on the shoes part, so with the Pen Tool (P) setting the mode to Paths as shown, draw an arrow shape starting from the top left (drawing my arrow I needed to use the Convert Point Tool as well, inside the Pen Tools Menu).

Next, switch to the brush tool and select a brush that’s around 5px in Diameter and set it to 90% Hardness.

Open the Brushes Palette, Window > Brushes (F5) and check the Shape Dynamics checkbox, changing the Minimum Diameter to 50% and leaving the other settings as shown.

Change the primary color to the same as the text color (C=73 M=66 Y=56 K=52) then create a new layer, Layer > New > Layer (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + N). Switch back to the pen tool and right-click the path you just created. Choose the Stroke Path option, and when you are prompted with an options screen select the Brush Option and check the Simulate Pressure Checkbox and click OK.

To delete the path, use the Pen Tool (P) and right-click the path, choose the Delete Path option. Rename that layer "arrow". This will create a realistic pen fade effect that you can re-use later in your designs.

Step 19

Since we have paper in our design, we have to add some creases in there to keep it real (but don’t over do it). For the creases, we are just manipulating our shape layers to give the effect of a folded piece of paper. This is nothing more than creating a couple triangles and adding a shadow afterwards, just like we have been doing this whole time. So we are going to continue using the Pen Tool (P), and find a good spot to create the crease. I chose the bottom left corner of the green piece of paper where it bends.

So using the pen tool, make sure you are back to using Shape Layers (icon up top) with white as your primary color, draw a triangle that you want to be your crease. Rename that layer "crease". Then copy the Layer Styles by ALT + Dragging from your "paper bg green" layer onto your crease layer. We won’t need a drop shadow though, so drag the Drop Shadow effect into the trashcan icon to delete it.

Change the Gradient Overlay angle to -90 degrees. Then change the Color Overlay Blend Mode to Multiply, alter the color by adding 20 to the K value, so the color is now C=20 M=0 Y=73 K=20.

Now we just alter the mask of the "paper bg green" layer so it doesn’t show past the crease. Since it’s still a shape layer, we can just move the points so they align with the crease. First, click the thumbnail for the "paper bg green" layer so you can edit it’s vector mask, then with the Direct Select Tool (A) just click the points you need to move and drag them until they line up with the bottom of the crease. You may have to erase the extra shadow that sticks out where the vector mask used to be, so use the Erase Tool (E) with a big soft brush on the "paper bg green shadow" layer to remove the excess.

Then we add a custom shadow to the "paper bg green" layer the same way as you have in Step 16. Just remember the light source will make this shadow shift a little towards the bottom left. So with the Pen Tool (P) and black as your primary color, draw out a reflection of the crease as shown, then set the layer’s Blend Mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 75% to make it a little lighter than the drop shadow. Next, rename this layer "crease shadow", then go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur (clicking OK to rasterizing the layer) and set it to 5px, click OK. Now you can move your shadow layer into place under the "paper bg green" layer.

Then, I did the same thing for a crease on the pink piece of the paper and here’s what it looks like when it’s finished (I changed the Gradient Overlay Angle to 45). Feel free to get creative, try it on the letters or apply it to the images as well. Just try not abuse the effect too much.

Step 20

Next we add some pins to hold things up and throw some extra staples into the mix as well. Pins are easy because they’re just circles with some layer styles applied. To begin, let’s add a pin to the "SHOES" group.

With white as the primary color, make an ellipse with the Ellipse Tool (U, Shift-U) about 40px by 40px, or 0.15". Name this layer "Pin". We are going to copy this layer lot, so place it at the top of your layers.

Apply a Drop Shadow with the default blend mode and set the Opacity to 50%, make sure the Global Light checkbox is checked, and then set the Distance and Size to 13px. This will give the illusion that our pin is higher above the board.

For the Gradient Overlay, set the Angle to 45, the Scale to 150%, and change the Style to Radial. Then change the gradient color and use the default black to white gradient, change the black to grey (K=35%), then switch it so the white is on the left and click OK.

Now that one pin is done, just ALT + Drag them out to copy them, and use the Move Tool (V) to position them in place. I used pins for the images and the paper, positioning them according to the light and just what looked good. Then I scattered some pins around the corkboard too.

When you’re done, select all those pin layers, and use Cmd/Ctrl + G to group them. Name that group “Some Pins”.

Step 21

Now that our art is basically done, it’s time to add some finishing touches. First, lets add some stray staples to the corkboard just like we did with the pins. So open your "Staples & Shadow" Group and click on a staple layer and ALT + Drag it up to the top of your layers. Position it randomly on the corkboard, rotating it if necessary. Then ALT + Drag that staple out and position it randomly somewhere, again rotating if necessary. Do this 10-20 times or so, until you’re satisfied, making it look nice and random.

Then create a new layer for the staple shadows, and the same way we did the staples at the end of Step 13, use a 10-15px soft brush with black as the primary color, with the Blend Mode on Multiply and the Opacity at 50% and click on each end of the staple to create a little indent shadow for each staple. Name that layer "staple shadows 2", move it below all the staples, and then select it and all the staples and group them. Name that group "Random Staples".

Step 22

Next we are going to add two tags, one will be the Psdtuts+ Logo, and the other will be a sale tag that we will add text to. These are the same techniques we have been using in steps 16 and 17.

Place the "psdtutslogo.jpg" image, rotate and move it into position in the upper left corner. Use the Pen Tool (P) with white as the primary color and roughly create a rectangular shape 5-10px around the logo and move that layer under the logo image. Move the points around with the Direct Select Tool (A) so it looks like an uneven rectangle that was cutout by hand. Then copy the layer styles from your "paper bg" layer into this layer and name it "logo tag bg".

For the shadow, select black as your primary color and draw a triangle shape with the pen tool like shown. Set the Blend Mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 75%. Use Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur of 5px to blur the shadow. Move this layer under the "logo tag bg" layer and name it "logo tag bg shadow". Then copy a pin above this layer and position it to hold the logo tag up in the top right corner. Grab all the logo tag layers and group them, name the group "Logo Tag".

For the sale tag, we are going to put text on it so we just need to copy the "logo tag bg" layer and rename it "sale tag bg". Move it to the top right and rotate it to fit so most of it is within the bleeds. The shadow I created is curved, using the Covert Point Tool on the shadow path. Again copy a pin from the "Some Pins" group and position it above the tag to hold it up. Select all the layers associated with the sale tag and group them, name the group "Sale Tag" then move it and the "Logo Tag" group under the pins and staples layer.

Step 23

Finally we add some sale text, the website URL, some random text, or whatever you want here. In this case, I need to add some sale text first. So with the Type Tool (T), set the Font to Jotting, the Size to 17, the Tracking to -75 and the Color to C=73 M=66 Y=56 K=53. Click the artboard and type out "All Gear 25% Off!". With the Move Tool (V) scale and rotate the text into place so it’s still within the bleed marks and fits within the sale tag. Set the layer’s Blend Mode to Multiply, the Opacity to 90% and then move this layer into the "Sale Tag" group, making sure it’s at the top of the group.

For more visual appeal, we can put some more random hand drawn text around the artboard. So with the type tool still selected, click the artboard and type “Visit our website for more styles!” (the same font settings for the sale tag text should be used). Scale it and place it like shown. Set the Blend Mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 70%. I also copied the arrow layer from the "SHOES" group and rotated it into place here. I copied it twice to make it darker.

Next, with the Type Tool (T) still selected, change the font to Mia’s Scribblings, then click the artboard and type “SUPER FRESH GEAR SALE!”. Scale and rotate it into position as shown under the logo and set the Blend Mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 70%. Place that text layer in the "Logo Tag" Group at the bottom of the group.

Then do the same thing and type out the web address, "HTTP://PSD.TUTSPLUS.COM" and move it to the bottom right corner. Scale it up so it’s easily noticed and read. Now select this layer, and the 2 arrow copies, and the "Visit our website…" text, and group these layers, name the group "Text Flare" and place it at the top. If you have your own tablet, now would be the perfect time to add some doodles. Now look at that, you’re done!

Step 24

Saving the file for final output is fairly simple but a lot depends on how your print shop wants it. In this case we included bleeds in the document size, and we could go in and manually add the crop marks, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we assume our printer will do this for us (There are many tutorials already covering this aspect).

So go to File > Save as to bring up the file save menu and choose Photoshop PDF. Make sure you save it without the layers selected and then choose save as a copy as shown and make sure a color option is selected. When you click Save you are prompted with a warning, ignore it and click OK to bring up the Adobe PDF settings dialogue.

I saved the files using the Press preset and tweaking a couple settings to get the file size down to an email size. Saving this file as a full quality PDF would result in a file size of about 48MB, which isn’t good for email, but will work if you have an FTP connection you can upload directly to your printer. When printing, the higher quality is always best, but if I need to email I have to tweak a couple settings.

First, in the General options, de-select the Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities checkbox and select the View PDF after Saving checkbox so you can see your final PDF. In the Compression Menu set the Downsampling option to 300 and 300 pixels per inch. The biggest difference in file size comes from the Image Quality option. I set mine to Medium and the file size was about 12MB as opposed to 41MB with Maximum.

Conclusion

Finding other resources to customize this effect is easy here on Psdtuts+. There are a couple tutorials you can visit to get a better idea of some more objects you can add, such as How To Create A Desk Environment In Photoshop From Scratch and Create a Bulletin Board With Realistic Shadows [1] [2].

Really this tutorial was made to show you that creating the effect is the easy part. Your imagination should open up and all sorts of possibilities should come out of there. Create a photo corkboard, create a map of your area, create a cool wallpaper, add some post-its, use it for website design, anything you can think of you can make it happen. Hope you enjoyed and if you have any questions or a better or quicker way to do something, let us know!

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Question #1

Question #2

PSD Files:

Exclusive 11-part Video Series by Jeffrey Way: Object-Oriented Programming in PHP

Also Exclusive to the Tuts+ Marketplace:How to Code a Custom HTML5 Video Player

Other Tutorials by Jeffrey Way:

CSS: Noob to Ninja

Your First Client Project

Tumblr Theme Design, Start to Finish

Integrating PHP and jQuery: Video Tutorial

How to Create a Slider to Zoom Photos

Combining Modern CSS3 and HTML5 Techniques

CRUD With Prepared Statements

Working With Advanced 3D CSS

1. Zen Coding

2. Split Windows

Other editors which implement a multi-window functionality include:

3. Embrace Social Coding

4. Code Management Tools

What Sorts of Snippets Should I Save?

Alternate Options

5. Choose a Proper Editor

Questions to Ask Before Deciding on an Editor

6. Use Bundles

What’s So Great About Them?

7. Use LESS.js

How Does it Work?

LESS Compiler

8. Prototype Early with Firebug

9. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Conclusion

Step 1: Install Ruby and the Gems

Install RVM to Manage our Ruby Environment

Install Dependencies and the Ruby Language

Step 2: Create the Sinatra Application

Step 3: Introducing Haml

The Haml Markup Language

Adding Haml Templates to the Sinatra Application

Create the Home Page

Add Some CSS Styling

Step 4: Creating a Common Layout

Create the About Page

Step 5: Adding a Meny (and Tidying Up)

Conclusion

Tutorial Assets

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7

Step 8

Step 9

Step 10

Step 11

Step 12

Step 13

Step 14

Step 15

Step 16

Step 17

Step 18

Step 19

Step 20

Step 21

Step 22

Step 23

Step 24

Conclusion

Exclusive 11-part Video Series by Jeffrey Way:
Object-Oriented Programming in PHP

Also Exclusive to the Tuts+ Marketplace:
How to Code a Custom HTML5 Video Player