Articles by Mike Smick

Freemind is the ultimate free planning tool for designers. Using a mindmap view of your plans will help you generate ideas for a website, book or video more quickly than a just having a features or requirements list.

Read more on Freeware Friday – Freemind…

2006-Apr-28 | Mike Smick | Filed: Features | Graphic Design | Web Design

Small, web-based utility applies text / graphic effects to an image, and exports it to SVG.

I always thought SVG was a really cool graphic format. Scalable Vector Graphics that can be delivered over the web. It hasn’t been very long that SVG has been supported in web browsers, very few right now actually. Firefox 1.5 is one, but IE can with the Adobe SVG plugin. Adobe Illustrator has been able to export these vector graphics for a while now however. One vector graphic software Inkscape operates fully in SVG too.

Read more on Textorize Photos with Textorizer…

2006-Feb-16 | Mike Smick | Filed: Features | Graphic Design | Illustration | Web Design

A free painting program to free your creative mind

I remember back in 2004, I was browsing a graphics forum when I saw someone had mentioned this “really sweet free painting program called ArtRage.” Since I’m obsessed with both graphics and free stuff, I had to check it out. ArtRage 1.0 was available for MS Windows and let you paint on a big canvas with brushes that rendered realistic paint in the way the strokes would feel and paint would mix. I hadn’t really painted since elementary school, but I was pretty sure this paint was like real. I spent hours playing, blending and even saved out a few PNG files for showing off. It was a nice freebie to have in the toolkit. Finally a graphics program my mom might actually want to use.

Read more on ArtRage 2.0 for the Painter in You…

2006-Feb-15 | Mike Smick | Filed: Features | Graphic Design | News | Reviews