Following up

Remember some time back I asked for help with selecting an image that summed up 'Woolly Wormhead' for an advertising opportunity?

Well, the advert was finished and sent. And then I figured I'd reuse the template with different images to change things up a bit - now that I have it, there's a fair few places I could use it. And seeing as I'm rather chuffed with it, I thought I'd show off some of the results. It was very hard to choose *one* image that did all the talking, but with your help I've been able to group images, based either on style or composition or mood & lighting etc. Once I've finished all the photoshoots and editing I'll have even more to images to choose from - definitely feel as if I'm onto something here!

It was suggested that I cluster the 4 thumbnails in this way, and the rest of the graphics is pretty typical of my style I think, especially the sideways text/logo. As usual, all of the layout was done in Libre (Open) Office, and with PNGs with transparencies being supported, I was keen to try a few different things with the images. Lo/Oo is so much more than a word processing software; it's not as flexible as a full DTP software but it has a surprising amount packed away under the task bar and I haven't yet failed to do something that I wanted to do.

In terms of software:

I use Gimp to edit my images, and if you fancy playing around with rounded corners and transparencies then this tutorial is a good place to start.

LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice a few years back, and has slightly more functionality with images and vectors (.svg etc) than Open Office. It's now also the suite of preference that comes bundled with the Ubuntu distros and while it hasn't yet got quite the support that Oo has in terms of forums and posts, it's getting there. And everything you can do in Oo can be done in Lo.

I'm a great supporter of open source and community managed software. I've no problem with buying software and do donate when I can. But I do have a problem with the way that a lot of the corporates and big name softwares operate, especially in terms of accessibility and customer service, and I'm not prepared to buy into that. All of these open source softwares can be downloaded and used on your computer, regardless of your OS and format. Similarly, the file formats are compatible with each other and don't require you to buy into one particular family.

BTW - I have seen folks refer to these open source softwares as freeware but they're not - there's a difference, primarily because most freeware is closed source.