Ever wondered how web designers make those little icons up in the address bar? Can’t figure out how to make a glossy button, complete with faded out reflective web 2.0 goodness? Or how about how to create those little badges and buttons you see gracing the sidebars and footers of your favorite blogs? I’m here to help.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to own an $3,000 software package and a bleeding-edge beefed up computer. In fact you can pass as a pro without even opening up Photoshop… for, dare I say, free! Thanks to the advancement of web technology and all of the love being spread by the web design community, you should have no problem convincing your friends you’ve spent back-breaking hours creating a pixel-perfect masterpiece.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 great online tools to help you become a web design (insert musical genre of choice here) star.

favicon.ico Generator
This tool is great for creating favicons. You have the option of importing an image to trace over with a very intuitive user interface making this task a snap. Favicon.cc even gives you the ability to create an animated icon! What more do you need? I’ll answer that, nothing.

Button Maker
This Button Maker by Adam Kalsey is the perfect tool for creating your own zany badge & button images. Choose your own custom messages, colors, and crispy pixel perfect positioning options.

Websnapshot 1.0
This is an Adobe Air application, which means you have to download and install it, but it’s free. This tool takes snapshots of any given website and creates 3 different sizes on your command. Perfect for bloggers and web content publishers.

Photoshop Express
Did you know Photoshop has an online web application that let’s you “Upload, tweak, rotate, edit, share and store your photos” for free? I’ve used this in a pinch a few times, and it’s very handy. There are a few filters as you see in the thumbnail.

Silk Icons
This set from famfamfam.com has over 700 icons you can use for any purpose, and make any changes you like. We use these on our in-house project management system, Athena. This is the most expansive free icon set I’ve seen.

stock.xchng
I can’t stress enough how great this site is. Users get hundreds of thousands of high quality, hand picked stock photos and graphics – all free! It’s also a great way for you to share your own self-produced stock art as a way to give back to this wonderful community.

Squidfingers’ Patterns
The web design community truly is a sharing bunch these days. Squidfingers has been sharing these beautiful pixel patterns for years, before it was trendy to be so giving. If your looking for web page background ideas, don’t sleep on this site.

Web Developer Firefox Extension
This tool comes in pretty handy if you dabble in html and/or CSS at all. It gives you easy access to actions such as: validating html and css, displaying image information, clearing your browser cache, viewing outlined css page elements, and much, much more.

ColorZilla Firefox Extension
This tool is perfect for grabbing a color for inspiration in your own designs. With two clicks you’re armed with the HSB, RGB, and Hex values for any given color on a webpage.

MeasureIt Firefox Extension
All too often we need to know the dimensions of areas on a web page. This is the rich man’s version of “print-screen, fire up Photoshop, paste, selection marquee”. If you understood that last sentence, congratulations, you are just as geeky as me.

I hope you find these gems as useful as I have. Feel free to share your favorite tools I left out in the comments!

Student using Global Origins

If you find yourself wandering through the Asian Art Galleries here at the IMA, take a quiet moment to follow the sounds of the Qin music. You will be led to a giant LCD display with a touch panel overlay and a hair dryer-esque sound dome above your head. Global Origins represents one of the first applications developed in-house by the IMA and marks a pivotal point in how the museum approaches technology.

I’ll step back a moment now and introduce myself. My name is Charlie Moad and I am an Applications Developer (a.k.a software developer) here at the museum. Now before you conjure up thoughts of suspenders and lisps, let me assure you I am quite the contrary. I have never played Dungeons and Dragons and I was only addicted to World of Warcraft for 6 months! I started at the museum 2 years ago and we have since hired another software developer and a graphics designer. Together we form what we call, the Applications Team. Traditionally museums outsource their technology which can be very expensive and time consuming. Each project requires bringing a new consultant up to speed on the basic operations of the institution. We allow the museum to retain knowledge and be more flexible when approaching technology.

Now back to Global Origins (GO). GO is an add-on to the NASA developed 3D world viewer, World Wind. Visitors are presented with a spinning globe and a series of stamps with works of art on them. Touching a stamp spins and zooms the globe to the respective origin and provides more information on the work and the culture. The application is meant to provide users with a visual orientation of where some of these works originated.

Global Origins using World Wind by NASA

We have been secretly collecting stats on this application since it was placed in the galleries almost two years ago. I pulled these stats a few days ago and found some impressive numbers. From October, 17^th 2006 to August, 28^th 2008 we have recorded 372,366 individual touches of the display. This averages almost 550 clicks per day with single day totals peaking over 3000. The graphic below represents where on the screen people have been clicking. The “hot spots” are in the expected places with one exception. People have a tendency to touch in the middle of the screen where the red and white target is located once a work is selected. While touching these targets has no effect, it definitely indicates the user wants more information about these geographic locations.

Click Heat overlay of Global Origins

Now let’s take a look at what works of art the users are interested in.  Below is a table which contains the 11 works that appear in GO.  Following that table is a chart containing the number of times a work has been selected by a visitor.  The spread seems fairly even except for two standouts.  It’s somewhat refreshing to see that the bright woodblock print of Mt. Fuji has a slight lead, and I suspect that the shar pei dog came in a strong number two because people like pictures of funny animals.

woman’s ceremonial skirt (33.682)	ritual wine server (guang) (60.43)
vase (maebyeong) (2001.223)	head of Buddha (1994.1)
Buddha of the Future (1995.1)	bull-shaped vessel (75.301)
seated shar pei dog (1999.2)	Fine Wind, Clear Morning (60.12)
storage jar (81.378)	Ichikawa Kakitsu as Ishidome Busuke and Arashi Kichirodku as Sagihira (72.47.271)
vase with dragon and cloud design (60.82)

Number of Views by Work

This post will be followed by similar ones that offer the outsider a peek into the technology operations of the IMA.  There is a common theme that allows us to be productive.  Open source software allows us to create a wide array of applications varying from the in-gallery interactive mentioned above to the blog you are reading right now.