Tuesday 9 May 2006

The Gimp: new custom header

Ahhhh, the joys of the GIMP!! For those of you that are not familiar with it, GIMP is a program similiar to PhotoShop. The huge difference is it is freeware! I've had this program for a few months, open it up and play with it, but never really could figure it out. Plus, I didn't feel like reading directions. So, it went unused.

This week I felt the need to get a new, better, more personalized header. The ones you make online are pretty good, but, sadly, not what I was looking for. So, once again I fired up GIMP and gave it another look. After much mouse clicking, head scratching and guessing, you can see the result in my brand-new heading above!

"
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
"

I am overly proud of it. Or, just proud of the fact I finally got something from GIMP. I worked with layers, fonts, colors, images. I wish I could write a tutorial on how I did it, but I think it was more dumb luck. I will work with it more, and if I actually figure out how I did it, I will write a post on it and give a few pointers.

But, this I can tell you. If you are trying to put an image in the 'Minima' template header, you have to delete a couple of borders in the header and description. Plus, you have to get rid of the title somehow in the 'Settings' area. Blogger won't let you not have a title. So, I put a title in, made the color white to match the background and made the font 0%. The code looks like this:
#blog-title {
font:Georgia,Serif;
margin:5px 5px 0;
padding:20px 20px .25em;
border-width:1px 1px 0;
font-size:0%;
line-height:1.2em;
font-weight:normal;
color:white;
letter-spacing:.2em;
}
You will notice that there is no code for a border color. Leave the description box empty in the 'Settings' area. Blogger doesn't care if you fill that out or not.

What fun! I can't wait to play with GIMP again.

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