www.nickhodge.com

As prom­ised, I am start­ing to doc­u­ment the tech­niques shown at the recent Adobe roadshows

Illus­trator 10: Illus­trator 10: Mak­ing Good Text Go Bad. Pho­toshop 7: Pho­toshop 7 File Browser Auto­matic Num­ber­ing Technique

Apart from writ­ing the above art­icles, I decided to noodle around with the GD lib­rary that is a part of PHP4. GD per­mits the dynamic chan­ging of images pro­gram­mat­ic­ally, rather than hav­ing to do it by hand in an image edit­ing tool. In my example, the code is grabbing a ran­dom Neil Finn lyric from the Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric Server. The end res­ult looks like this:

The text is gathered from a SOAP stream, and com­pos­ited on top of another dynam­ic­ally served image.

OK, I have another con­fes­sion. I abso­lutely can­not miss an epis­ode of Meet the Osbournes. Its partly the fact that this dys­func­tional fam­ily seems to work, a Simpsons in real life. Ozzy, obvi­ously suf­fer­ing from too many non-natural sub­stances in too great quant­ity, is really a pussy cat. This per­sona belies his 30-plus years of a proto-high priest of the dark side. The irony of see­ing Ozzy go bana­nas over his noisy neigh­bours is deli­cious. What a riot.