Now that the busy advent season is over, it’s time to calm down and enjoy some days off. Herewith I wish all of you and your families Merry Christmas and relaxing holidays. Have a nice time.

Another baton is going around these days. I’ve been passed one by Manuela Hoffmann from Surfgarden. This time it’s all about your desktop - not the virtual but your physical one. So here we go…

I think it’s time to inform you about a small project I worked on together with Chris Messina from Factorycity. As Microformats have gained much popularity over the last year we thought it was time to standardize the way they are represented on a website. So we created the Microformats Icon Set.

How To Design A Flor Tile

R.BIRD has occupied 4 uniquely designed offices in its 24-year history and, in every case, we’ve satisfied a fetish for creating something unique out of ordinary floor tiles in our kitchenettes. See our current floor design above.

We often use a simple technique we mastered in the practically prehistoric days of computer graphics when special effects were born of imaginative thinking and not from menu items. The technique is commonly known as “pixelization.” Here’s a simple step-by-step using Photoshop and a favorite photograph.

1. Open your subject image in Photoshop and change Mode to Indexed Color. This mode disables Photoshop’s built-in anti-aliasing - the smoothing of image edges. We don’t want that. Tiles are not soft around the edge, right?

2. Oops. Forgot to mention this one. While changing Mode to Indexed Color, limit the number colors to match the palette you have available in tile. If your carpet or tile collection only comes in 16 different colors, limit the Indexed colors to 16 as well.

3. Now, scale your Image Size by a uniform percentage. Try 10 percent for a start, both horizontally and vertically.

4. Last step: scale the image by an inverse proportion to the one you just used in the previous step. In this case, 1000 percent x 1000 percent.

Voila!

If you changed mode correctly in step 2, you can now open up the image Color Table and modify the resulting palette to match as you please to what you have to work with in carpet, vinyl tile or ceramics. Using Select Color Range will also do the trick.

For a more abstract result, start with a reduction to 5 percent or less. (Find someone good at math for the inverse proportion.) For a mosaic look, start with a reduction of about 20% and an inverse of 500%.

(No, there’s not a missing letter “o” in this post’s title. We refer to Interface Inc.’s Flor system for carpet tiles.)

How about a quilt?!

How To Design A Flor Tile

R.BIRD has occupied 4 uniquely designed offices in its 24-year history and, in every case, we’ve satisfied a fetish for creating something unique out of ordinary floor tiles in our kitchenettes. See our current floor design above.

We often use a simple technique we mastered in the practically prehistoric days of computer graphics when special effects were born of imaginative thinking and not from menu items. The technique is commonly known as “pixelization.” Here’s a simple step-by-step using Photoshop and a favorite photograph.

1. Open your subject image in Photoshop and change Mode to Indexed Color. This mode disables Photoshop’s built-in anti-aliasing - the smoothing of image edges. We don’t want that. Tiles are not soft around the edge, right?

2. Oops. Forgot to mention this one. While changing Mode to Indexed Color, limit the number colors to match the palette you have available in tile. If your carpet or tile collection only comes in 16 different colors, limit the Indexed colors to 16 as well.

3. Now, scale your Image Size by a uniform percentage. Try 10 percent for a start, both horizontally and vertically.

4. Last step: scale the image by an inverse proportion to the one you just used in the previous step. In this case, 1000 percent x 1000 percent.

Voila!

If you changed mode correctly in step 2, you can now open up the image Color Table and modify the resulting palette to match as you please to what you have to work with in carpet, vinyl tile or ceramics. Using Select Color Range will also do the trick.

For a more abstract result, start with a reduction to 5 percent or less. (Find someone good at math for the inverse proportion.) For a mosaic look, start with a reduction of about 20% and an inverse of 500%.

(No, there’s not a missing letter “o” in this post’s title. We refer to Interface Inc.’s Flor system for carpet tiles.)

How about a quilt?!

How To Design A Flor Tile

R.BIRD has occupied 4 uniquely designed offices in its 24-year history and, in every case, we've satisfied a fetish for creating something unique out of ordinary floor tiles in our kitchenettes. See our current floor design above.

We often use a simple technique we mastered in the practically prehistoric days of computer graphics when special effects were born of imaginative thinking and not from menu items. The technique is commonly known as "pixelization." Here's a simple step-by-step using Photoshop and a favorite photograph.

1. Open your subject image in Photoshop and change Mode to Indexed Color. This mode disables Photoshop's built-in anti-aliasing - the smoothing of image edges. We don't want that. Tiles are not soft around the edge, right?

2. Oops. Forgot to mention this one. While changing Mode to Indexed Color, limit the number colors to match the palette you have available in tile. If your carpet or tile collection only comes in 16 different colors, limit the Indexed colors to 16 as well.

3. Now, scale your Image Size by a uniform percentage. Try 10 percent for a start, both horizontally and vertically.

4. Last step: scale the image by an inverse proportion to the one you just used in the previous step. In this case, 1000 percent x 1000 percent.

Voila!

If you changed mode correctly in step 2, you can now open up the image Color Table and modify the resulting palette to match as you please to what you have to work with in carpet, vinyl tile or ceramics. Using Select Color Range will also do the trick.

For a more abstract result, start with a reduction to 5 percent or less. (Find someone good at math for the inverse proportion.) For a mosaic look, start with a reduction of about 20% and an inverse of 500%.

(No, there's not a missing letter "o" in this post's title. We refer to Interface Inc.'s Flor system for carpet tiles.)

How about a quilt?!