The university of Amsterdam conducted a research on how Magazine advertisements are read and how they can attract the reader. The results are nice to keep in kind when creating your own magazine advertisement.

The results were collected with the help of eye tracking. This way every eye movement readers had were recorded. It was possible to get an exact idea on what was looked at.

The results aren’t really that shocking. But they’re useful to use when designing that top advertisement of yours.

• The surroundings from the advertisement are important to get attention from the reader. For example, the color red on the page next to your advert will get more attention. This is also the case when there’s a lot of text on the other side. So it’s important to always ask what’s on the page next to your advert.
• It’s better to put your advertisement on the right page. It gets 8% more attention on a right page then on a left page.
• Big adverts get more attention then small ones (Yes! Really =)). If you can afford it choose the biggest size you can get. Advertisement that cover half of the page are getting 20% of the readers attention. A whole page gets 42% and a double page advertisements gets 70% of your readers attention!
• Use a lot of different colors in your design. Blue does get less attention (only 42%) then green, red or white (49%).
• A heading rule in your design get attention, use it!

So if your designing a advertisement for a magazine, it’s smart to pay attention to the things above. In short, get the biggest possible size available in the magazine next to a page with a low amount of text and no red colors on it.

Photo retouching is something I barely do in Photoshop. I just don’t get to starting of with. It’s one of the things however I really like to see and would like to do. So in my spare time I try as much tutorials about the topic. Of course I can’t keep those tutorials for my own good, so below you’ll find my top 10.

Professional Photo Retouch – Photoshop® CS4

Not a real tutorial, but it shows the possibilities to me and the end result is very nice.

Glamorous Glowing Model Effect on Your Image

This tutorial is short and easy. Even a beginner can do some real nice stuff after he follows this tutorial. That’s at least my opinion. With some really simple options and modifications your picture will get more glamorous.

Professional Photoshop retouching tutorial

This tutorial goes significantly deeper into the retouching. It explains to you what happens and you get to see how this guy does it.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly

Not the retouching you might think of. The techniques used however can come in handy when retouching your own photo’s. On the other side, creating these kind of compositions is a specialty on it’s own.

Create a High Clarity Photo (Dave Hill style)

Everybody knows Dave Hill, at least you should! He always creates some nice HDR photo’s. You can accomplish something similar on your own photo’s with this tutorial.

On the 8th of June this year, we organized a kart event for all our customers. They had to race for 100 rounds, including switching between riders and of course getting some fuel in time. Afterwards there was a BBQ which closed the event.

The whole marketing around the Q4YOU! event was made by myself as you may have seen in my earlier post about the invitation. Today we finished the photo folders. We sent these afterwards every time we have a Q4YOU!. It features a DVD with all pictures from the event and some printed photo’s which are personalized for every client. Below you can find the end result. Let me know what you think of it.

Today I presented my Immersive space to my fellow students and teachers. The presentation went very well and the reactions were positive. Let’s just hope it get’s me through the entire course! Anyway, the space has some bugs in it, sound bugs mostly. Due to incompetence and lack of time I didn’t get the time to fix those. I’m still happy with the end result and it displays my current technical knowledge about Actionscript 3 I worked with for the first time! It was difficult and time consuming, but got the job done in the end.

The space storyline is about Grave Bridge. WW2 is the setting and style. All information is in dutch, so I’ll explain it in short. First you have to collect eight or more mines / grenades. You also have to find the two pieces of information (documents) you have to find in the different scenes. When you’ve accomplished that you can exit by clicking under the bridge. Let me know what you think about it!

• Immersive Space in Flash – Grave Bridge

Note: It seems the online version doesn’t play out the outro when exiting the space. The projector file does however!

When browsing on Google Buzz today I found out a great website with a lot of Photoshop tutorials and websites. I never heard about this one before. The website features some cool tutorials about how to create a nice looking website with the help of Photoshop. You can find those here!

Another great feature of this site is an index of resources you can download freely! Think about it, free Stock Photo’s, Vector files and a lot more! This one I’m going to bookmark.

Check out www.psdvibe.com for more tutorials and resources.

Every decent web designer knows how to set up a website with HTML and CSS. When designing an email however a lot of things work differently. For example, when coding a website I always use divs, but with a HTML email it doesn’t work that great. It’s better to use tables for the layout!

CSS styles need to be inline to work at best, so creating a separate file for all CSS won’t get the job done when creating that cool email you want. And you guys know that browsers are rendering the code different. Well, email clients are even worse! Support for even some simple CSS varies considerably between mail clients, and even different versions of the same client.

On Campaignmonitor there’s a great list available where you can find out what each mail client supports for CSS. If you get it right in those 10 email clients, than you shouldn’t get into any problems at all and your mail will probably be handled correctly!