Wide's World

We want your stay to be as pleasant as possible!

From Paper to Screen

Welcome to Wide's World. I am Widearea, and thanks to VNWR and the editorial staff of the DFN Weekly, I hope to be here to share the continuing sagas of my world as a newbie adult webmaster. The challenge is to share what I know about what I know best, and make it useful to the DFN reader, as well as to assist the DFN staff by making these offerings in a timely manner. Most important, all this must be relevant to the adult webmaster.

The intention is to offer a series of tutorials on how to create graphics for your adult sites, with some potentially relevant editorial thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, not everybody wants to deal with the design and production of graphics. As the author of a column about graphic design and visual communication, this is not encouraging in terms of building a readership. Therefore, as a designer, my foremost priority will be to focus on what is simply relevant to the bottom line of the adult webmaster.

Graphics should help you profit, not take away from your ability to make sales. All graphics must be fast loading and optimized. If it isn't going to make you money, then it doesn't belong on your site. In the following DFN installments we will all gain a complete understanding of how to make graphics for our sites, and what our primary concerns are when we create graphics for all types of adult web material. Each installment will feature a step-by-step on how basic adult web graphic elements are created. These should be easy for anyone to follow, whether you fancy yourself an artist, or if you are visually impaired.

With your computer and a few software tools, anyone can make professional looking graphics. The tools you have at your disposal may be ruled by your budget, but with some know-how it is possible to bring any good idea from paper to the screen without the expense of tons of software and all that. If you can dream it, you can probably get it web-ready for tomorrow's gallery or freesite without blowing your wallet.

For the individual lessons, I will be using Photoshop and walking through some basic image editing procedures. If you don't have Photoshop, you can follow along using whatever tools you do have, as the principles are and should be generally the same. You may also try GIMP, which is a free image editing tool with most of the functionality of other programs. As long as your software can deal with the basic file formats you should be ok.

In this first installment we will review some basic file formats and gear up for making effective titles. You can pick up some new fonts from the links below and make some creative titles pretty easily.

Moreover, they will be minimal in filesize and should offer your sites a creative edge, which doesn't hurt when trying to get listed on the linklists and such. Select fonts that are visually in line with your theme. For example, if doing a bondage site, consider how it's title should look -- bold, all capitals, scary, and so on. All that is subjective and a matter of taste. But simply considering this while looking at how your site's title looks in different type faces and experimenting will yield good graphic solutions.

In the examples below, you see how the typeface selection can reflect the niche. Granted, they are slightly simplified and perhaps a bit common, but note how bold type expresses the emotion of pain, where the more soft approach is used for the other niche.

Next week we'll design three site title graphics in Photoshop and create some .gifs and .jpegs. Meanwhile, enjoy some of the links. We hope you find them useful. As a web designer it's always good to put tools in your toolbox. Until then, happy webmastering!

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