All features are the fault of the programmer. The victories come in swells with bugs in their ebbs whilst visitors accompany mighty flows. It's an ocean worth drowning in. The calamity never seemed so calm.

I've been coding in circles about BotB's indigenous source files. The thing playing kickball in the back of my head led me to believe a task list was better than no list at all. So there it is. Things to consider when I'm in an inspired mood to truncate the database to just the living part. The dead part, the archive of the old BotB engine, holds data to old features. The steps required to truly move on require rebuilding these more obscure features and converting their data, albeit table structures or actual files. Classes will face decoupling, the framework dosed with refactoring, and old objects shall breathe again. Then, we have a book burning party and move on with our lives.

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I think I strayed from the path a bit. But that's fine! Practice is practice! Stick that in your glassy, icy stare there! The first thing I did different was created my own textures for the background instead of the ones supplied.

...and then it went all downhill from there. While I really appreciate the effort that goes into nice photoshop tutorials, I have to wonder how much time would be saved if the settings were typed rather than captured in a screenshot. Next thing you know, you are looking at 50 images of dialog boxes. I also don't understand the necessity of changing the texture images into patterns so they may be applied in the 'Pattern Overlay' layer effect. Save some time, just make a new layer with the blending mode you want.

Twaddle twad·dle (twŏd'l)
intr.v., -dled, -dling, -dles.
To talk foolishly; prate.
n.
Foolish, trivial, or idle talk or chatter.

Twaddle is the best word since MALARKY.
Malarkey, spelled correctly, lacks affect.
=p

From the depths of large image google searching comes a next level of my own personal work. I learned about the 'create layers' option which converts layer effects into their own layers. From there you can reorganize and/or distort these layers and then add more layer effects if you desire.

Total Production Time ~5 hours.

Raynor, of The RagBag fame, made an internet splash with his comparative graphic (shrunk at right). The differences are subtle, but this chart helps to see Arial's geometric short comings. Helvetica has as many square angles as possible; that is, almost all flat edges run parallel or perpendicular to the baseline. Arial, the knock-off, is just a slopped up mess in comparison.

Also, imbibing Raynor's feed into my reader has been quite the pleasure. A worthy wordsmith, that lad.

I might be preaching to the choir here. This is a design blog. Who would subscribe that isn't a designer. How can you call yourself a designer if you don't already know the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

Put your money where your mouth is! Head over to Ironic Sans and take their Helvarial Quiz. Try it without Raynor's cheat sheet first.

I scored 18 out of 20, an A- in my book.

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Overall, I diverged from the tutorial slightly. Instead of the starfield suggested I gnabbed a favorite Hubble string of galaxies photograph. For the text — I created a Gaussian blurred shadow layer to help with contrast against the galaxies, and opted for a radial blur for a motion effect instead of a solar flare.

In this tutorial, I learned how to stroke a path. I've drawn paths before in Illustrator, but the pen tool is auto stroked using vector based imaging. The pen tool in Photoshop can draw both objects and paths? It was all news too me. Sometimes I feel that Photoshop has buttons and settings in arbitrary places. Could you imagine there being both a 'shape pen' and a 'path pen' instead of two tiny buttons at the top of the screen?

And I am so glad I did discover how to make paths! You can bend the anchors, making nice, sexy curves. The 'stroking' of the path is the same as dragging a brush along said path on the selected layer. The brush settings are extremely versatile. I look forward to experimenting with this in future projects.