Creating an iGoogle Theme, Part 2

In my last post I told you about iGoogle, the homepage you can create that displays when you go to Google's homepage. You can add widgets for weather, Facebook, calendars... just about anything. I also told you how you could use Google's built in theme creator to customize the look and feel of your iGoogle page. However, that method - While easy - isn't very powerful, and doesn't allow you very much flexibility. So as an alternative, I give you the, "Developer's Method."

Google allows developers to create custom iGoogle themes that are more advanced than what we can do with the built in theme editor. Using XML, which is basically a form of computer code, developers can write their own themes into an XML document, submit the document to Google and get their custom theme in the theme library. Unfortunately, if you're anything like me, you don't know how to write XML.

Enter igThemer. Located at www.Hawidu.com/themes, this is a free to use tool made by Brad Czerniak. Essentially, it gives you a form that you can fill out, choosing custom colors for everything on your iGoogle page. It even gives you a live preview of what your theme will look like.

The part that you can really have some fun with is the images you can upload for the banner. There are two places for images in igThemer: Center Image URL and Tile Image URL. igThemer can't host the photos for you, but you can upload them to something like Flickr or Picasa, copy the URL of the images, and paste them into the appropriate wells in igThemer. But what is the center image and tile image, you ask?

The center image is what will appear in the center of your banner, directly behind the Google search box. The tile image is an image that repeats across the background of the image. The center image can be almost anything, even transparent if you make it a PNG file. But the background image has to be able to tile, meaning that if you line up several of the images in a row, they just look like one big image. To give you an example, here's the photo that I created for my tile image.

It's a little hard to see, but if you line several of these images up side by side you won't see the seams. The images can be as wide as you want, but if you want them to display properly in your iGoogle theme they must be exactly 175 pixels tall. If you want to check out the theme that I created, you can view it here.

If you have any more questions regarding creating an iGoogle theme, post them in the comments below. I hope you found this helpful, and have fun being artistic!

Creating an iGoogle Theme, Part 1

About a week ago, I discovered something that Google does that has made my entire life online so much simpler. The thing is called, "iGoogle." If you don't know what iGoogle is, let me give you a quick overview of it.

When you go too Google.com, what do you see? Not much, probably. Just the Google logo, a search box and two buttons. But up at the top of the page, you'll see the bar that has links to common Google services like Docs and Gmail, a link for you to manage your Google account, etc. Towards the right of this bar, you'll notice a link that says, "iGoogle." Keep in mind you need to have a Google account to use it, but if you have one and you click on iGoogle and fill out a simple form, the entire homepage changes.

You still have the classic Google search box up at the top, but now you also have all these "Gadgets" beneath it. You can add gadgets, change settings, remove them and rearrange them. On my iGoogle page, for example, I have Wikipedia search, weather, a clock and calendar, top news, etc. It's a great way to aggregate all the aspects of your online life. The gadgets are mostly developed by third parties, and there are hundreds if not thousands of them... and it's all free! So now, whenever you go to Google.com, you get your own personal iGoogle page.

But how personal is it, really? Yes, you can add and arrange your own gadgets, but the page still looks like all the other Google pages. Mostly white, with some light blue borders. About as generic as it gets. But fear not, for this is where the creative aspect of things comes in: You can change the look of your iGoogle page using what Google calls, "Themes." If you look to the right of the search box and down slightly, you'll notice two links: "Add Stuff," which is where you search for and add Gadgets, and "Change theme from Classic." Click the latter and you get a nice browser with previews of some of the most popular themes. Choose one, and it applies instantly, adding different images behind the search box and changing the colors of the entire page. Click the, "More options" link and you get a full page theme browser, where you can search, select categories, sort by how many people are using each theme... and there are thousands of themes to choose from.

The themes browser is a very nice way to get creative with your iGoogle page, but we're creative people. We don't want to simply use someone else's theme, we want to create our own! Hence the topic of this two part series, "Creating an iGoogle Theme." In this post I'll be talking about the simple way to do it, but next time I'll be talking about the much more powerful way of doing it.

So here's the easy way to make your own iGoogle theme. Go to the themes browser (the full page one, not the popup you get on iGoogle.) and look over on the right sidebar. There's a big headline that says, "Create your own theme." Click the Try Now button below it, and you're off and running. You're then presented with a very simple interface, with a big preview of your iGoogle page. This preview is covered with a big button that says, "Upload an Image." You can use this to upload an image that will appear at the top of the iGoogle page, behind the search box. You can upload any image you want, but keep in mind that it's best if it's wide and short, not tall and certainly not narrow. You can crop it once you upload it though, so don't get too obsessive.

After you're happy with the way the image looks in the preview, you can move on to the color choices at the bottom. You can choose the color for the text in the header, or the top of the page, and the theme color, which controls the border color of the gadgets. After that simply enter in some info about the theme and the artist (that's you!) and click, "Create Theme." You can them submit the theme to the themes browser so that you, as well as the rest of the world, can use your custom theme.

And you're done! That's a very easy way to create a them, but you have almost no control over anything other than the header photo. You have basic color controls, but you're limited to the Google provided palette and you can only have two different colors. In my next post, we're going to learn about a slightly more complex but infinitely more powerful way of creating themes. Stay tuned!

Coming Soon!

I just thought I'd let everyone know that I'm currently working on my first tutorial for the Artistic Universe. I'm planning on doing a lot of tutorials, how tos and the like. The first one is going to involve the web, which clearly anyone who's reading this is very interested in. It's actually a combination of a tip on how to organize your online life, and a tutorial on how to make it beautiful. It's really easy to do, but tricky to write about. Stay tuned...

That's Not Creative... Is It?

My noticeable lack of blog posts over the last couple of weeks has been due mostly to the fact that I've been so busy lately that I haven't had the time to sit down and write anything. But, I am about to fix that. And, appropriately enough, I'll be talking about the things that got in my way over the last couple of weeks, preventing me from being creative. That is, they could have prevented me from being creative.

First of all, most of the things I was working on were actually creative projects for all the various podcasts that I do, but there were still things that had to be done that weren't even close to being artistic. Those were mostly high school related projects. Yes, I started my Junior year this week. Yes, I'm taking as many artistic oriented classes as I can (Creative writing, graphic design, etc.) But I still have to take things like history and biology. Not much there that gets the creative juices flowing. Unless you do what I did, and infuse your everyday, boring projects with some creativity.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about: I was reading about the Revolutionary War (For about the thousandth time... I get it already!) and my homework was to create a chart with actions the British took, and ways the Americans reacted. So what did I do? I quickly wrote one sentence actions and reactions, then spent the rest of my time listening to music and designing a colorful, interestingly laid out chart. Doing this with all of my schoolwork, as well as any other boring but necessary task, really helps keep me sane.

The best part is, you can do this with just about anything - Except for math, I never figured out how to make that one creative. Fortunately I'm not taking math this year (Woo-hoo!) but if any of you have some ideas on how to make math - or any other project you dislike - creative, let me know in the comments below. Now that I've successfully given almost everything I do a creative spin, I'm not only happier, but I find I get finished with my projects faster and my work usually gets more attention because it's, well... pretty. And with all my new free time, I'll be writing posts for the Artistic Universe way more often, I promise.

Perfection is Overrated

I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I've always felt like my instinct when I'm creating something is that I have to make it perfect. Everything needs to go exactly as planned and look or sound flawless, because that's what will give you the best result, right?

Well, not always. Something that I've been starting to experiment with is having my artistic projects not work out perfectly, not having them be the flawless works of art we're used to. You've heard the phrase, "It's our imperfections that make us who we are"? It's the same thing with art.

Here's a good example. One of the things I love to do is use Motion, which is a visual effects application developed by Apple, to create short intros for the Harwood Podcast Network. One of my latest projects was an intro for a show called, "Sundaes with Cindy". As you may have guessed, the show is all about ice cream sundaes. The original plan was to shoot some footage of a sundae being built and then have the title of the show appear above it. However, as often happens, the shoot didn't go exactly as planned. Here's what the finished intro ended up looking like.

You probably noticed that towards the end, the sundae starts to lean waaaay over to the right. During the shoot, we were scrambling to get the sundae built before it fell over. Less than a second after we put the cherry on top, the entire thing fell apart. Needless to say, we were all pretty disappointed, myself included. We had been hoping for a beautiful, perfect ice cream sundae for the intro. But a few minutes later, it hit me: We could still try and make it look perfect, or we could make it look like it was on purpose. What if, I thought, the title zipped in from the left and knocked the sundae over?! Insanity! Crazy talk! Or was it...

A couple of hours later, I had finished the intro you see above. I don't want to brag, but you can't deny that it's hilarious! You're expecting perfection and instead you get the opposite, something that's fun, unusual and that stands out in people's minds. That's the key right there, if you saw that same intro but the sundae didn't fall over, would it stand out in your mind as much? I don't think it would.

Now am I saying that you should deliberately misspell the title of your novel, or put a splat of paint in the middle of your masterpiece? No, certainly not. I'm just suggesting that perfection in art is extremely overrated, that sometimes it's better to do something completely unexpected. Or, do what I did. Make an accident look like it was on purpose. No one will ever know! Unless you write a blog post about it... Dang!

Artistic Education

Let me start off by saying that I have been extremely lucky when it comes to school. I have always been home schooled, meaning that my parents - specifically, my mom - has been my teacher all the way from kindergarten through high school. This has given me the freedom to pick and choose classes that I'm interested in, such as Video I and II, or creative writing. Of course there are mandatory classes that I've taken too, Algebra being one of them. Not my strongest subject, but I survived.

However, high school will be over for me in a couple of years and after that I'll be heading off to college. The question of where I was going to go to college has been without a certain and specific answer for a long time, but recently I've come up with one. The Academy of Art University in San Francisco will be my school in a few short years and I can't wait. In fact, I'm so impatient that I've already started taking classes that they offer online for undergraduates like me. The Academy is such a great place for artistic and creative people. They have a department for everything, Motion Pictures and Television, Fashion, Music, Multimedia... the list goes on. That's all they teach, though. You don't take a handful of artistic classes and a bunch of science and math classes on the side, they focus entirely on your creative potential.

I'm personally very interested in their Multimedia Communications department, because it focuses on new media like Podcasting. I'm heavily involved in the Harwood Podcast Network (shameless plug: www.HarwoodPodcast.com) so an entire department focusing on the new way to create media sounds like heaven to me. Plus, I can minor in something else, like Cinematography for example.

Now that's just me, maybe you'd be more interested in their fashion program or their sculpture class. And maybe the Academy doesn't work for you because of their location or majors they offer, but either way my recommendation to you would be to look for a school that focuses entirely on what you love. Elementary and High School gives us plenty of general knowledge, college is supposed to focus on what you're going to do in your life. So why not make it something you love?

Check out the Academy here

Tools Can Be Obstacles

I don't think I'm alone when I say that when it comes to my artistic projects, the gear I use is a big part of my fun. The idea of editing video on a sixteen core Mac Pro is certainly exciting, as is the idea of shooting photos with a Canon 5D Mark II, but I've started to think that maybe we've placed too much importance in the gear we use. Having the latest and greatest insert-gadget-here would be nice, yes, but it's not nearly as important as the person using it.

Here's what started me thinking about this. A few weeks ago I was in a book store looking for a magazine that had something to do with creativity, when I found one that was on web design. Now I'm certainly no web designer, but it is something I'm interested in so I brought it home and started to read. I was expecting to find articles talking about interesting design, tips on how to make a webpage easy to navigate, maybe some examples of good color schemes. I was severely disappointed, however, because the entire magazine was focused on gear. Articles looking at different HTML editors, reviews of monitors and keyboards and a thousand different ways to monitor the traffic of a website. That's all well and good, but I didn't see a single page that talked about how to design a good looking, easy to use website.

As I said before, I love gear and I have nothing against it. But I have found that some people... myself included... Use the fact that they don't have a good enough computer or the best software or camera as an excuse. I used to think that because I didn't have the top of the line HD camera that I wanted, I couldn't make good videos, when the reality was I simply didn't have enough skill yet. If you give a bad photographer a great camera, he's still going to take bad photos. But if you give a great photographer a really bad point and shoot, he's still going to take some amazing photos with that camera.

The bottom line is, I think that it's more important for us to keep learning more about whatever it is we do than moan about how we don't have the latest gear. I once made an hour long documentary on a camcorder from the late 90s. And you know what? It was a pretty good little documentary, despite the fact that it wasn't shot in HD with a shotgun mic, a lighting kit or even a tripod half the time. Your gear can't limit you, unless you let it. That's what I've decided. Although, there's this new camera that just came out...