Creating band laptop skins doesn’t have to be hard. All you need is an image or design of your favorite band that is at least 500KB or larger in filesize. For a laptop skin, something closer to 1 MB+ in filesize will provide higher resolution.
You can find images suitable as band skins for laptops on desktop wallpaper websites, flickr, and also try Google and Google Images (which you can choose large/extra large for search results).
This is really cool - design your own cellphone. That’s right, not a cellphone skin, but designing the actual cell phone. Of course it helps if you know how to use CAD software.
Loads of praise for the new Blackberry Bold, which is due out in a couple weeks. And one of our favorites, the N series, has announced the new Nokia N85 slider loaded with features.
An interesting entry to the cell phone market is the HTC Diamond, or S740, it’s not to be confused with the touch Diamond. With its slideout keyboard it just needs a wifi hotspot ti take advantage of its HSDPA. It also offers what sounds like an interesting feature - a built-in RSS hub to alert you of the latest in news, entertainment and content as it appears.
And Google’s cell phone OS entry Android images were leaked this week. It runs on the HTC Dream phone and has a full QWERTY keyboard as well as a trackball and shortcut keys. Hope to see it by the end of the year.
If you’re looking to customize your cell phone with a skin, you’ll want to start off right. The following instructions are a general guide to help you make your own cell phone skins.
First, you will need a graphics program. We’ll assume you have Photoshop as it is the most common. Next, you should figure out the approximate dimensions of your cell phone. Good places to check for specifications like this would be electronic retail websites such as BestBuy or even Amazon.
Using the Motorola Razr V3 as an example, it was easy to find the dimensions on the Bestbuy website. The Razr measures about 3.9 x 2.1 inches.
Keep in mind there are 4 surface areas, but for the sake of this example we will discuss how to make your own cell phone skin for the exterior of the phone.
Open up photoshop, and when creating a new doc you should set the dpi to 200, and for each inch use 200 pixels. So, we’ll say 3.9 is 4, and multiply that by 200 for height of pixels, which gives us 800 height. And for width, we’ll round the 2.1 up to 2.5 and multiply by 200, which gives us 500. That means our design working area is 800 heightby 500 width, at 200 dpi. Hope this makes sense so far.
Now you either select an image or pattern you want to use, or get busy designing one. Note that your finished output should be a non-progressive jpeg that is at least 400 KB for reasonable quality. A good source of images and ideas to check would be desktop wallpaper websites.
Creating laptop skins for a 17″ laptop is not much different than for smaller sized laptops. As with designing other laptop skins, keep in mind that you should use 200 pixels per inch. To figure out the depth and width of your laptop skin design, refer to an electronics website such as Bestbuy or Amazon.
Let’s suppose you had an HP Pavillion 17″ laptop, and on the Bestbuy website it says the dimensions are about 15.6 x 11.2 inches. So we would say it is approximately 16 x 11.5 to make it easier, and keep in mind the edges won’t be used. So, if you multiple 16 by 200, you have 3200. That would be your width. And take 11.5 and multiply by 200. That gives you 2300 for your depth.
So when you go to create a new document in photoshop or your favorite graphics program, you’ll start with 3200 wide by 2300 and use 200 dpi. Also keep in mind that any images you might use should have a good resolution, so you’ll want them to be close to a half meg or more in file size. Your final design should be over 1 megabyte (MB) to provide a good clear picture for your 17″ laptop skin.
The great thing about custom laptop skins is it’s a unique creation. It’s fine to choose from a gallery of images if you are not familiar with a graphics program like Photoshop, but there is something cool about having your own design on your laptop.
And even if you’re design skills are not great, there is something called typography that you can play with. This is the art of arranging type (AKA fonts) by size, arangement, and font selection to create something unique in design. You’ve seen it before. Here’s an example, and even more at smashing magazine.
I’m not a designer, but you could say that typography is often combining a photo with text. Although you’ll see a real difference between what I could do and a designer’s version. A lot of music posters are good examples too.
Don’t be discouraged by the examples. You can make some great designs using typography, and it’s not as hard as it seems. I guess it depends on how detailed you want to be. Something like this might be for more advanced designers…
And an interesting video that discusses it further;
A great resource for some fonts to start with is at dafont, and more at smashing.
The Sony S-Airplay ( AIR-SA20PK ) is wireless multi-room system for iPod that adopts Sony’s S-Air technology allowing audio to travel wirelessly up to 50 meters. Setup doesn’t get much easier than this! The system should retail for about $400, and the wireless speakers about $130 each. Should be available in September.
It’s always a challenge to locate some decent laptop bags for women, so we compiled a short list of places you might want to check with some noteworthy notebook cases…
Some of the laptop bags at Knomo (like pictured above) are very stylish, with some in leather too.
There was one laptop bag in particular we liked at Mobile Edge called the Milano.
If you want something a little more colorful for your laptop, be sure to check casuri.
Another favorite was the laptop bag by zegari. What they lack in selection they make up for in style.
Also read about stylish young designer Lexie Barnes which has released an updated laptop bag line for women
This might fall under the sub sub notebook, or nano notebook category. Wibr
ain unveiled it’s UMPC i1. It will have 1.1Ghz CPU and a 1.3Ghz version, buildt-in HSDPA module, optional an 30GB or 60GB drive, and also SSD memory up to 64GB, and up to 6 hours of browsing time! The split keyboard mini computer will run on Windows XP or Linux.
In the above picture is a fold out wifi antennae and a webcam.
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