Hello everyone! Today I am announcing the start of the GFXAbyss.com Referral Competition. You may be wondering, “How exactly does this work?” Well, In this post, I will explain exactly how it will work.

We have installed a referral mod, which gives you your own personal link to use when having someone sign up to our forums. You may get this link by going to your User CP, and looking underneath the “User Notifications” area. You will then see a link like this:

http://gfxabyss.com/vb/index.php?referrerid=2

Use the link given when having someone sign up to get credit toward our competition.

Rules:
- No fake accounts, We will monitor IP adresses used during sign up.
- Accounts need to be active and have at least 10 posts on them.
- No spam posts

The deadline of this competition will be October 1st, 2009.
The winner will receive 15$ USD via PayPal and two free months of Web Hosting from www.1host2go.com. The second place winner will receive One free month worth of Web Hosting.

Thank You,
Happy referring

You might be wondering when reading this as to what exactly GFX Abyss has to offer the people of the design world. There are plenty of things which I’m going do a quick overview of so you can get an idea.

1. We have our own marketplace for selling your web designs and logos. Although in order to post in this section it requires that you have 25 previous posts, none the less this alone is a great tool for all you freelancers out there trying to find another place to post your work to earn the cash deserved for it.

2. We offer unlimited information and tutorials in various aspects. This is including, but not limited to, Web Design, Graphic Design, Search Engine Optimization Help, Web Coding, and much more.

3. We hold a Signature of the Week contest every week. If you win this contest you get a free email @ GFXAbyss.com. How cool is that? That’s not the only thing you receive though. You also get a week of access to the family boards which is not currently available to normal members!!

4. We offer tons of free resources as well. From web templates and designs to free graphics made for whatever cause you need them for.

There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be part of the community of GFX Abyss! What are you waiting for? Joining is only one click away!

The world of programming is a desolate wasteland filled with less than signs and semi-colons. Well, that is what it seems like to most, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Programming can be easy and organized without all this additional confusion. With some of these easy tips, you won’t have to worry about these problems anymore.

Most of these tips will work for all programming languages, but I will give some specifics for other languages. One of the most important tips is a developer’s reference. There are some languages where it may be best to use a book, but most of the time an internet source is the best. For example, every PHP developer should have http://php.net bookmarked to get to it quickly.

Also, developers should use Google often and learn how to directly or indirectly search for their issue. For instance, if one cannot find their specific issue, they should have a general idea on how it would be done to indirectly search the method in which they can accomplish their goal. This is a very important skill because as programmers become more advanced, many times their projects will become either unique or all other options have been released as either closed source of a paid script.

Above all, programmers need good communication with other programmers. The best way to continue improving your skills is to talk with your other expert friends and having them share their tips with you and vice versa. Most people learn better from another person than from a text book in the first place, so this would definitely constitute itself as a worthwhile reference.

So overall, programming is not a very confusing thing to do; one just needs to know where to start. So through time of finding your resources, using them properly, and finding other experts to speak with, one can make their experience level go from beginner to expert fairly quickly. But as all things do, programming takes time to learn and memorize so you can program things efficiently. These tips should help, however, in making that journey a quicker and more enjoyable one!

Regards,
Dennis M.
Freelance Programmer
http://microsonic.org/

Graphics Abyss Is looking to sponsor Websites, Gaming Leagues, Gaming Teams, etc with discounted design and coding services. You may wonder our reasoning behind this? It is actually quite simple, we want to expand our presence while helping the online community, as we know what Its like to start out and maintain an online presence. If you are interested in being sponsored by GFXAbyss.com, then feel free to either post a topic in the GFXAbyss sponsor forum, which you can find HERE, or send an email with the form below to sponsor@gfxabyss.com.
Organization/Team Name:

IRC Channel:

Vent Server:

How Long You’ve Been Around:
What Leagues You Play In(if gaming team):
Brief Information About your Organization:
How would GFXAbyss Benefit by Sponsoring Your Organization?

Some of you may have been wondering whats going on with GFXAbyss, if thats the case, I’ll explain some of the things that have happened.

We purchased VBulletin so we could offer our members the most professional resource website we can give them. With VBulletin we can  offer you, the members many more features and services. As of now we already have many features for our members. As a member, here are some of the features you have access to.
-SOTW (Signature of the Week);
-Community Competitions;
-Marketplace to buy or sell your goods;
-Bank system that allows you to buy things like profile modifications, and you can sell items amongst yourselves;
-Arcade with many games, and tournaments;
-Social Groups, so you can make your own groups, and graphics teams;
-Private messaging, so you can communicate with other members;
-Design Requests, you may request design work from others

Look for more features to come soon, as VBulletin has a lot of mods, skins, and resources, as our old forums were limited. What are you waiting for? Join today!

www.gfxabyss.com

First of all I would like to say sorry that the blog hasn’t been posted on as frequent as I would have liked. You may have been wondering the reasoning behind this? Well, the answer is quite simple, I have been busy working on GFXAbyss’s new website to make it the best it can be. Check it out at www.gfxabyss.com

There are so many terms when it comes to graphic arts. Problem is, for the newcomers in this particular field, not to many divulge on what these terms exactly mean. So what am I providing for you as a reader today then? Commonly used graphic (GFX) terms! If you’re new to the graphics area, these are definitely some terms you should go over and familiarize yourself with. Once you get familiarized with these specific terms, it will help you in furthering your graphics experience! So then, let’s get started shall we?

GFX Basic Terms

1. Stock – Word used to describe the picture that you will be using. This is generally a picture that has no copyright infringement attached. In other words, you are legally permitted and allowed to use these pictures in your own graphics.
2. Render – A 3D object you will be including in the picture. A render is generally made by/on the computer.
3. Font – The text you will be using for the picture.
4. Typo – Text/Colour
5. Blending – How well the stock blends in with the background. Mainly a comparison.
6. WIP – Work In Progress
7. KIU – Keep it up! As in keep up the great work.
8. BG – The actual background of the picture you are creating.
9. CnC or C&C – Critique and Comment. This is so that once you’ve completed your picture, you can ask others to point out some flaws and perfections of it. This will help you improve your work over time, by taking other peoples opinions into consideration.
10. Ripping – Stealing others people’s GFX. In other words, stealing another users work.

Little More Advanced GFX Terms
1. Opacity – This is used to see how much you can see through an image.
2. Saturation – This is used to dramastically brigthen a dominant color in your graphic.
3. Depth – Creating a 3D look to your picture so that it stands out from the rest of your graphic. Making it the key focal point.
4. Sprite – A .gif material stock. (.gif is an extension normally used for animated picture)
5. Contrast – Putting contrast up on an image can make the picture brighter, but can limit the colors, while putting contrast done will make the whole colour scheme of your graphic darker.
6. Hue and Saturation – Your colour
7. Brushing – Used to create effects on your pictures. Such as splatters, blobs, and much much more.

These are some basic terms normally used by GFX artists. If you’re planning on going into the field, I highly recommend getting used to these terms. Although these are some helpful terms, there are plenty more out there that are commonly used as well. So keep your eyes peeled and your brain moving and learn as much as you can!

There are many ways you can make money on the side of free lancing. In this article I will give you a few different methods.

Blogging
Blogging is a great way to get extra revenue. In this portion I will post a few ways you can make money through blogging.

1. Adsense- Google Adsense is a good way to bring in profits. Sign up for Google Adsense here. Place advertisements on your QUALITY blog posts. I recommend 250×300 pixel ads.

2. Text ads- Another way you can bring income in is selling text ads to readers. The one downside to this is that the ads can start to be irrelevant to your blog.

3. Banner Ads- You can also earn extra funds by selling banner ads, If your using Wordpress, a lot of the themes have built in 125×125 advertisement spots.

Unused Client Work
Have old client work that was never used? Most designers have old files sitting around taking up space. Take the time and finish the old work you have and then you can sell it on websites like talkfreelance, istockphoto, themeforest, DigitalPoint and GFXAbyss

Thanks for your time,
Daniel Johnston

What has GFX Abyss have up their sleeve the past week with free resources? FREE Web Templates!
We plan on uploading quite a bit of free web templates with source codes onto the GFX Server and forums for download.

As for now, we only have 50 free templates that are available.
You might be wondering if we’re planning on adding more. Of course we are!

Through out the next couple of months me and Daniel will be personally adding more free templates for you guys to use and mess around with coding wise. We hope you enjoy all these free resources!

All together, we are planning on having a total of 158 free web templates available for download within the the next few months. If you’d like to access these free web templates and download them for your own personal use, it’s absolutely no problem at all.

The only thing we ask you to do, is show us some love and sign up for the community and tell us what you love about it.

You can sign up for our free graphic, web design, and coding resources community right here!

If you were just looking for a direct link to where the free templates are going to be located, then check out this!

We hope you all enjoy!
Plenty more free resources are coming in the future, so stay tuned with

Hello everyone, you may have thought about opening your own community in the past, or will in the future, this is a general guide of how to open up your own forum community.

Common Forum Types

There are endless amounts of forum systems out there, but I will be outlining a few for you to look at.

Free Forums

Phpbb- phpbb is an open source board that has been around since around 2000. I highly recommend phpbb to people new into the forum “scene.” It has an endless amount of free mods and themes to fit your any need, and a very easy-to-use admin system. For more info on phpbb, visit their site [here].

Simple Machine Forum- SMF is a free board that doesn’t need a lot of resources to host. It is very friendly towards coding, so you can code your own mods for the board if you can’t find a mod you want out of the huge selection. There is an easy-to-use theme builder built into the forums as well. For more info on SMF, visit their website [here].

Paid Forums

IPB- Invision Power Board Is one of the two most used paid forums. There are loads of free and premium skins, mods, and resources around for IPB. IPB also features a great, easy-to-use system for the users, and a easy-to-use admin panel. For more information on Invision Power Board, visit their website [here].

Vbulletin- Vbulletin is the other main premium forum used other than IPB. Vbulleton has loads of mods and themes available for use with the forum. Vbulleton is unique in which they set up the admin panel, they have it organized differently then most of the forums out there. Overall, it is a great forum, for more information on VB, visit their website [here].

Finding your Niche

This is one of the hard parts you will run into when making a community. When making your community, you want it to stand out from the others in a market that isn’t overrun with forums on the subject. You must pick something that you are knowledgeable in and can provide unique, quality content on.

Advertising

Advertising plays a big role when making a website. When buying advertisements, I would stick to places that have a page rank of at least 2-3 so your links are valued by Google. You should also advertise on website related to your niche. If you properly market and advertise your community, you will find yourself succeeding.

As you may tell, I have lined up a few tips for you to follow when making a community, If you would like me to write into further detail, just get ahold of me.

Thanks,

Daniel Johnston