You’re a comic genius without an artistic platform. We sympathise. Don’t let your comic musings go unseen—use the simple drag-and-drop interface at StripGenerator to create your own comic strips.
The interface is thankfully straightforward, and helpful for those just looking to get their work up. You get up to six panels per strip and a roster of drag-and-drop humans, beings, objects, shapes, and speech bubbles. The editor has lots of handy little features, like scaling of objects and the ability to clone panels, which is extremely convenient when you want to use the same background and objects as props in each panel. Once you create the strip, you can print it or publish it, which saves it to the StripGenerator servers. If you choose to publish it, you can grab a direct link, embed code, or BBcode for showing it off in forums. If you sign up for a free account, you can save your comic strips as blog entries with additional text and information attached to them—although registration doesn’t add any new features to the actual editor. If you know of any other sites for creating and hosting your own comic strips, sound off in the comments below.
Strip Generator [via MakeUseOf]You have a camera and a willing subject, but you’re not sure how to break your portraits out of the flat blandness that plagues many snapshots. Over at the photography site Digital Photography School, they’ve put together a list of best practices for avoiding the boring portrait blues. They all focus on breaking out of your default camera-pointed-right-at-subject’s-face/subject-starring-down-camera-like-hungry-wolf setup. The photograph I grabbed from Flickr here (Photo by Kevin N. Murphy.) is an example of tip #7, introducing a prop into the photo. Another way to go about injecting interest into your photos is to take a well-established rule of composition and break it:
Windows only: We know you’d never goof around on non-work stuff while you were on the clock, but if you did, it’d be nice if your goofing off tended to (literally) blend right in. Chameleon allows you to assign levels of transparency to windows, blending them into the other windows on your desktop. The idea being, of course, that if something looks less glaringly like itself—a big chat window filled with smiley faces, for instance—it’s less obvious. The application worked very well with static and relatively static things like web pages and IM windows, as seen in the screenshot here. I had mixed results with video playback, encountering some weird playback issues when layered over certain windows. For another creative way to hide your goofing off—on the web at least—check out previously reviewed Vanishd web site cloak. Chameleon is freeware, Windows only.
Chameleon [via Download Squad]You want to be the supreme ruler of your own virtual cutting room? Better break out the checkbook—your film-chopping powers aren’t going to come cheaply. Photo by FaceMePLS.
