Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a version of its tool set for Web and multimedia designers that includes the first native support for its Silver light technology across all of the products in the suite.

Expression Studio 2 includes five products: Expression Web for Web design; Expression Blend for multimedia and 3-D design; Expression Design for graphic design; Expression Media for storing and sharing multimedia assets; and Expression Encoder for video encoding. The new release marks the first time that Encoder is in the suite as a full-fledged product, said Wayne Smith, Microsoft group product manager for Expression Studio.

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Looking to start their new business? You must be looking for your business unique Logo. Business Logo is a vital tool of your business as it gives the first impression of your business. An effective business logo can help you attract potential visitors to your website and accordingly promote your business in the market. A business logo design is the face of the company. A logo design should be very attractive and appealing and can make use of graphic, text, symbols, and calligraphy to project the business of the company. The Logo design should represent the company in the best way possible.

There are no limitations for making Logo visually enrich, all a Logo designer needs creativity and technical skills. The only aspect to be kept in mind is how the logo can be designed such that it is good in quality and also affordable. It is not the fact that only complex designs are eye catchy , even the normal designs can be marketed provided the design is done in such a way that it can visualized, clear and simple. These logos mainly concentrate on the brand name, fonts and colors. No illustrations are done and normal images are used and no special effects or 3-D effects are expected. But even though these logos lack several features, the design can still be made appealing depending upon the creativity of the graphic designer and the concept involved in the design.

There are lots of websites available related to your website theme, and almost everything is available on the web eg: e-books, products, software, services, audios, videos, membership sites, news or newsletters. in spite of what you’re promoting, there’s a never-ending supply of prospects and customers on the world-wide-web.

Your goal is to capture and turn those prospects into paying customers, and for the same purpose you need to have a unique website that can attract visitor and force them to buy your services, rather than going to your competitors. All that can be done through a good looking website you need to have a website designer and graphic designer. Graphic and good looking of your website can hold the visitor on your website for few other minutes. Graphic design is the use of color, light, balance, contrast, emphasis, proportion, proximity, repetition, texture and a plethora of other elements to create a work of digital art that is pleasing to the eye.

In Short I can say it’s all about attraction and the good looking of your website which forced the visitor to stop clicking on other search results after getting your website. Today, graphic design and website design are two separate, but closely related, entities. Most all websites offer some visual appeal – that is, they include graphical elements.

You might be looking to boost the sales of your or client through online business, Even everybody having e-commerce website wants more sales and visitors through their websites. To achieve those entire targets first you need a eye catching website; Graphic design is an vital part of website designing meant at boosting the sales of the client.

Web designer should study the basic design requirements of their own or clients website and make use of colors, text, fonts and graphics to create magic through their imaginative designing. It is mandatory to take into account the medium, target audience, message and its aim while preparing a layout for the graphic design. There are many graphic designing firms worldwide that claim to offer state of the art online graphic design which meets the goal of the organization.

Over past few years Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) slowly-2 had became web design standard. Still so many people are comfortable with Frames, Tables etc. However, a number of people are now moving over to CSS, as virtually all the layout options can be achieved using the code.

The exact purpose of CSS is to make websites load faster and to have customized text, tables, forms, colors, and much more. When you use CSS, you can avoid the use of most html format tags making your code much easier to read. CSS allows you to create a single document of code, similar to an HTML file that lets you specify the colors, fonts, backgrounds, etc. of a web page. The CSS file is then linked to from the web page(s) that you want to have the same styles that you specify. CSS web layout will make you money through search engine friendly pages.

CSS had a lots of advantages over HTML:-

1. Faster Loading Time

2. More Web Design Effects

3. Search Engine Friendly Pages

4. Easy Website-wide Changes

5. No More Use of Tables

6. Create Roll Over Effects With Ease

7. Reduce File Size With CSS

8. Separate Content From Design

CSS, combined with the rapid development of the XML language, allow the creation of websites in a much more efficient way.

Designing good looking websites is often a little bit hit and miss. Even with the best web development tools, getting things to line up or matching colours is hard to achieve. Forunately, Firefox has a couple of great extensions that make laying out a web page just a little bit easier.

GridFox

If you’ve recently moved from desktop publishing to web design one of the things you’re likely to miss is the ability to overlay gridlines on your website to make sure the various elements line up, much like The Gimp or Inkscape does. Designing neatly-aligned webpages demands something a little more accurate than guesswork to make sure things are in proportion. GridFox goes some way to achieving this and is intuitive and easy to use.

By default GridFox displays a set of vertical grids over your page but can be adjusted to display a set of horizontal grids as well. Go to Tools->GridFox->Options and enable the horizontal grid lines.

The colour, thickness, opacity and spacing of the grid lines can be customised in GridFox’s options menu as well. Being able to adjust the thickness of the rules is handy for making sure gutter widths are even across the site, for example.

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Graphic Design

If you are looking an opportunity in Graphic Designing filed, you need to understand first what graphic design course requirements are. There are many online Universities and colleges offering graphic designing course for entry onto a graphic design filed, the only thing needed is student’s commitment to learning about all aspects of art and design. It is fine if a learner has obtained an advance understanding of everything to do with art and design which they would have to learn both through theory and practice.

Whether learners do a basic graphic designer course or one which will lead to them obtaining a degree they need to be able to sustain high levels of research for an MA. Plus they need a mind that is not only imaginative but is open and willing to accept new ideas. If you are looking for a great career in graphic designing field then creativity and imaginative mind is must for the courseware.

Generally graphic art courses teach students about the technical side of graphic topics relating to printing or electronic pre press. Rather than actually teaching the students the things you need in order to produce a design and then execute that design.

The basic of any graphic design course is to help its students to learn and understand the importance of planning and then executing any designs that they have. These designs are then used to communicate a message according to the particular wants and needs of their client.

Through out the course as part of any graphic design course requirements the students will need to learn not only technological skills, but also conceptual and formal ones as well. Parts of their course work will cover foundation art matters such as drawing, colour and how to use 3D. Whilst in other parts of the course they will learn about phothe history of graphic design along with some elective subjects as well. Eg. the term Graphic Design was named by William Addison Dwiggins in the early 20th Century.

With the advent of web 2.0, websites and e-commerce business has got new dimensions in the world of internet. It has advantages of increasing user interactivity over web 1.0 which was a traditional way of web site designing.

Web 2.0 features added to the websites are a need for success of business on the internet.

Tim Berners Lee, head of W3C Consortium and inventor of World Wide Web also announced web 2.0 a main contributor in the internet revolution.

What is web 2.0?

It is a revolution in the world of website design, development and can be assumed as another form of web based communities like social networking sites, communities, forums and many more hosted services that aim to encourage creativity, user interactivity and sharing of views and information between users.

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media (formerly O’Reilly & Associates) and a supporter of the free software and open source movements, it can be defined as:

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Benefits over Web 1.0

In contrary to web 1.0, web 2.0 is an advanced form of World Wide Web. Its technologies such as web blogs, forums, social networking sites, wikipedia, RSS feed, podcasts facilitates user interaction in contrast with the read only websites built with web 1.0.

It provides participative platform to the user by which user not only can retrieve information from the website, but also can modify and add the data on the website.

In short, if we summarize the main difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0, then we can conclude that:

Web 1.0 was about reading, client server, HTML, wires, Netscape, web forms, home pages, portals, companies, hardware costs, dial up and owning while on the contrary Web 2.0 is about writing, peer to peer, XML, wireless, Google, Web applications, blogs, RSS, communities, bandwidth costs, broadband and sharing.

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Google is trying to ride to Yahoo’s rescue to fend off a $44.6 billion takeover bid of the Sunnyvale Web portal by Microsoft.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, called Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to offer help Friday, just after Microsoft disclosed its $44.6 billion offer, according to news reports. Read them here and here.

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The designers among us will be happy to know that IconFactory has released a new version of xScope, the popular web design toolbox application for Mac OS X. XScope is a collection of tools tailor-made for those looking to simplify common web design tasks — like measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts. Although describing what xScope does is somewhat difficult, using it isn’t.

For instance, have you ever wanted to zoom in on a page element and see a pixel by pixel breakdown of the colors used? How about a tool to view the current web page at different resolutions — 800 x 600 perhaps, or even 640 x 480? Those are just a couple of the things you can do with xScope and the new version brings a host of improvements.

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