This past Monday was Earth Day, a holiday to remind people of just how important the environment is.

Unfortunately, less and less people seem to actually think that it matters. A new survey done by the Huffington Post revealed that only 39% of Americans think that it is “very important” to work to restore and enhance the national environment. When Earth Day was founded in 1971, that number was 63%, and Earth is not happy about it.

In a grim reminder of the earth’s devastating power this past week has been witness to a series of deadly earthquakes.

Last Tuesday a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit south-eastern Iran, causing 40 causalities there and killing 35 in Pakistan; it was the second earthquake inside of a week to strike Iran. The weekend brought no relief as an approximately 7.0 magnitude quake struck the south-eastern Chinese province of Sichuan, killing 186 and sending 8,200 to hospitals. Enormous amounts of resources have already been allocated to the relief efforts. And today brought two quakes, a 5.6 magnitude event in Afghanistan and a 6.4 in Papua New Guinea.

Clearly Mother Earth is none too pleased with the changing public opinion but it’s pretty understandable. Americans are much more concerned with an onslaught of shootings and attacks, a terrible economy, and Kim Jong-un. Still, maybe this Earth Day provides a good opportunity to remember that we only need to mess up the environment once, and how much damage it can do. 

Have you ever wanted to give a text field in Photoshop an unusual shape? In this Treehouse Quick Tip, Photoshop teacher Allison demonstrates how to bend and curve a text field into whatever shape you need!

Video Transcription

Allison: Hi. I’m Allison Grayce. In this Treehouse Quick Tip, we’re
going to learn how to manipulate Photoshop’s Text Containers to
take on a more unconventional shape, because sometimes, a simple
box just won’t do. We’ll achieve this using vector shapes, the
Pen, and Type tool.

I want to add some paragraph text to the left of this cupcake.
Instead of the paragraph text simply being in the shape of a
box, I’d like the right side of the text to curve along with the
cupcake. I’m going to go ahead and grab the Rectangle tool, and
draw out the size of the paragraph. Head on over to the Pen tool
and click, hold, and select the Add Anchor Point tool. We’re
going to add a few points on the path where we’d like the Text
Box to curve. It can be helpful to lower the opacity of the
rectangle as you’re doing this.

Using the Direct Selection tool by pressing ‘A’ on your
keyboard, or by navigating over to the toolbar and clicking and
holding, move the anchors to position them where the text box
should curve alongside the cupcake. Remember, you can grab the
handles on either side of the anchor to get more of a curve
going.

Go ahead and select all of your text that you’d like to appear
in the text box. Select the Type tool, hover over the shape, and
when the cursor changes, go ahead and click. Notice how the text
box takes on the shape that we just manipulated. We’ll go ahead
and paste in our text and begin to style it appropriately. We’ll
go ahead and commit to our current edit here in the Options bar,
and we can delete the rectangle that we initially manipulated.
The right side of our text box now curves alongside the cupcake.
Now you have the freedom to manipulate the Type box to whatever
shape you want it to be.

Announcer: If you’d like to see more advanced videos and tutorials like
this one, go to TeamTreehouse.com, and start learning for free.

The post How to Shape Text Fields in Photoshop | Treehouse Quick Tip appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The long, painful and drawn-out death of skeuomorphic design lurched forward another step this week with a redesign by the world’s biggest social media site, Facebook.

The new look is spearheaded by a logomark that is a simplified version of the pre-existing one. Although the full Facebook logo will remain unchanged, the round-cornered square with the solitary ‘f’ has been carefully refined.

The blue strip, previously positioned at the bottom of the graphic as a nod towards a light reflection has been dropped. The letter ‘f’ has been enlarged, and the stem now connects with the outer edge of the square, creating the sense that the shape is a window through to something, rather than a box containing it. Conceptually, this tiny change makes a huge difference. The arms of the glyph have also been tweaked, with a longer protrusion on the left and a more acute angle on the right.

Along with the ‘f’ logo mark, other official pages have new icons. Facebook’s icons have always looked like something from a clipart CD circa 1998, so the new designs are a very welcome — and long overdue — update.

Viewed as a group they’re a little imbalanced with, for example, far less detail on the developers’ icon than the non-profits’. The only real complaint being that the similarity between security and privacy icons is pronounced.

It’s hard to see the redesign as anything but a positive move for the site.

What do you think of the new Facebook icons? Could you identify the icons without the accompanying text? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, Facebook image via Tomislav Pinter / Shutterstock.com

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The long, painful and drawn-out death of skeuomorphic design lurched forward another step this week with a redesign by the world’s biggest social media site, Facebook.

The new look is spearheaded by a logomark that is a simplified version of the pre-existing one. Although the full Facebook logo will remain unchanged, the round-cornered square with the solitary ‘f’ has been carefully refined.

The blue strip, previously positioned at the bottom of the graphic as a nod towards a light reflection has been dropped. The letter ‘f’ has been enlarged, and the stem now connects with the outer edge of the square, creating the sense that the shape is a window through to something, rather than a box containing it. Conceptually, this tiny change makes a huge difference. The arms of the glyph have also been tweaked, with a longer protrusion on the left and a more acute angle on the right.

Along with the ‘f’ logo mark, other official pages have new icons. Facebook’s icons have always looked like something from a clipart CD circa 1998, so the new designs are a very welcome — and long overdue — update.

Viewed as a group they’re a little imbalanced with, for example, far less detail on the developers’ icon than the non-profits’. The only real complaint being that the similarity between security and privacy icons is pronounced.

It’s hard to see the redesign as anything but a positive move for the site.

What do you think of the new Facebook icons? Could you identify the icons without the accompanying text? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, Facebook image via Tomislav Pinter / Shutterstock.com

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