Today I decided to spend a little time creating a graphic header for this blog. I don’t have much in graphics art tools. I could download Gimp, figure it out, and probably get disappointed that it can’t do something I want. Or maybe buy something else, install it, figure it out, and again get disappointed when it can’t do something I want. Looming over all of this is the fact that I just want to build a nice little image to head up a BLOG. This isn’t a book cover or some other professional endeavor, so why exert that much effort. Other tools like an ai image generation application can also help elevate the quality of your graphics.

Instead, I figured if I could just layer the things that I want, a snapshot with Jing should do the trick. For starters, I’m a big Tron fan, so I figured some tiny image from the movie would look nice and be alright under Fair Use. In my mind, I could visualize some source code overlaid on it. Remembering how my mac’s Terminal app is slightly transparent, I figured out how to increase the transparency and reduce the brightness of the text. By placing the Terminal window over the image, it made a nice layered image.

I grabbed a screenshot with Jing and uploaded it to the blog. Unfortunately, the title and description displayed on top of the image looked terrible. I needed to layer the text on top of the image with some special formatting. Unfortunately, positioning a text editor on top would include the window frames and look terrible.

Next step: LibreOffice. I created a new text document and inserted the layered image I built before hand. Then I created a couple of text frames, changed the text color to white and background color to transparent. Tweaked the fonts, and put it in Print Preview. Zoomed in to 100% and grabbed another screenshot. Perfect! Uploaded to blog and requested the image be displayed in lieu of the text. Awesome!

The trick to all this? Thinking with a UNIX-like mentality: use several tools that each do one job well, and string them together to build a final product.

Now this I can do.  –Sam Flynn