Greetings from Inside the SEOigloo!
We’ve gotten no work done around here tonight for a very good reason. We just received our copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3! Above, you will see the very cool gaucho (potentially one of my ancestors) that I have freehand drawn using this latest version of Photoshop in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard Package. I spent about an hour drawing him. I hope you enjoy him.
The thing I’m loving most about this version of Photoshop so far is the flow function. Before becoming a web designer, I had been a fine artist all of my adult life. One of the skills anyone who draws or paints perfects during the course of their exploration of art is the control of the hand. Medieval monks were past masters of this with pen and ink. The alphabets used in the fabulous illuminated manuscripts they produced are all about hand pressure and the turn of the writing implement. This fine motor control is something you have to practice to get better at over time.
One of the things I’ve always found to be so funky about the previous editions of Photoshop I’ve worked with is that there was no sensitivity that mimicked hand pressure. Not so with my brand new Adobe Photoshop CS3. With that awesome flow setting, I can do shading of all kinds. I used that extensively in my friendly gaucho above.
Just for fun, here is the same image with various effects layered onto it. These effects have been part of Photoshop for years, but I still love them.

With Watercolor	With Paint Daubs
With Sponge	With Cutout
With Neon Glow

I really like that cutout one. That looks good enough to be on a label, in my opinion. The point of this post is not to show you how to use this software; I simply thought you might like to see how powerful such a tool can be in the hands of a web designer. A good designer is going to be able to create pretty much any look, any emotion, any atmosphere your business is looking for. And, though usability and SEO in web design are what are dearest to our firm’s heart, it is so exciting when we sit down to compose the graphic elements that make a website rich with visual appeal.
I am really looking forward to further exploring all of the new functions in this new version of Photoshop. It looks like its strength is going to be the ever-finer degrees of control it puts in the digital artist’s hands.