Need a custom cartoon for your marketing? ToonDoo makes it easy — and free! They have hundreds of stock backgrounds, clipart and people, or you can create your own images. My masterpiece (above) took about 45 minutes. You can create online cartoons or buy a high-res version for marketing use. Way cool and super fast.
Nerd Life by askbethz – ToonDoo – Worlds fastest way to create cartoons!.
It’s not too late to do something a little special for your Valentine, thanks to these three free tools:
This morning I was using StumbleUpon to discover new tools, and I happened upon PhotoFunia. What fun it is! The site has a bunch of backgrounds onto which you can impose your own pictures, making it seem like people are looking at your portrait in a gallery or passing you on a billboard.
It’s free, of course, and very, very easy to use. This video shows how I created a fun graphic in less than 50 seconds.
An Ask Beth Z follower wrote in this morning with a quick question:
We are looking for a free program like Print Shop.
You know, the old program that would let you make cards, posters, fliers, etc…
Please Help! Thanks, Susan
Happy to help, Susan. Here’s a quick video review of PagePlus, a free alternative to Microsoft Publisher and Print Shop. These types of low-cost desktop publishing tools are great for producing quick brochures, office signs, business cards, etc. Have your own question for Your Nerdy Best Friend? Ask it now!
The first Cheapskate Freelancer webinar just ended, and I have to say the webinar platform, Dimdim, did what it said it would do. I’ll post a review of Dimdim in the near future.
In the meantime, enjoy the webinar recording. I covered five great (and free!) graphics tools: Picnik, GIMP, FotoFlexer, Aviary and SignGenerator.org.
The goal of these webinars is to cover a handful of tools in 30 minutes or less. Next month’s topic coming soon!
A running buddy of mine who, like me, raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through Team in Training and wanted to make a collage of pictures from our last running season. I’m going to send her to Photovisi, a cool site that makes collages in a flash.
Without registering, you can choose a template, upload photos, then save your collage and download. I bet putting together a great collage of our pictures from the season would take her about 15 minutes. Way cool.
Photovisi is 100 percent free. Way cool as well.
Photovisi – Collage photo effects.
PS — want to see some of my (slightly humiliating) running pictures from Team in Training seasons? You need to click here. Oh, and if you’ve ever saved money from a tool on this blog, I’d appreciate a small contribution! Or a big contribution!
WhatTheFont is a lot like one of my favorites, Identifont. This little free service allows you to upload a graphic that contains words, and the system does its best to identify your font.
I tried it with a few logos I’ve developed where I knew what the font was. It hit about 50 percent of the time, but the misses were darn close. I could have easily used one of the fonts they came up with as a close match to the look and feel.
WhatTheFont is a tool brought to you by MyFonts, which looks to be a pretty inexpensive way to purchase interesting fonts. Of course, I still prefer dafont, which is free. I’m funny like that.
OmniDazzle is a free special effects tool for presentations. Lucky Mac users can download the software to add cool ways to highlight screens, words and points during presentations. Oh how I wish we poor PC users had a similar version! I have a presentation this week in San Francisco, and I would love to use this tool to make my favorite tools pop!
My good buddy Josh Cunningham from JoshCanHelp.com swears by this free tool. Honestly, its use is beyond my capabilities, but if Josh loves it, you may as well.
This is about the best free web development tool I’ve ever seen. Go to the CSS Sprite Generator, upload all the images referenced in your CSS file, pick a few options, and hit submit. The site will not only generate the sprite image but it gives you the new CSS values as well. Talk about a time saver!
CSS sprites help your page load much faster by only accessing a single image (like the Google one above) instead of many. This only works for non-repeating images called as a background in your CSS file. For more info, see this A List Apart article and this Smashing Magazine post.
Need a quick button for your site? I love this free tool. Cool Text creates simple logos and buttons in a few minutes. I’m more fond of the buttons than I am the logos, but they’re both worth a few minutes of experimentation.
Sample Logo:
Sample Button:
© 2012 Your Nerdy Best Friend. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 
