Going For Eden

The guys at eden.cc, makers of freelanceswitch.com and several fantastic sites, have been doing outstanding design work for awhile now. I'm not 100% pleased with everything they do in their designs, but boy it sure does look good for at least 98% of it.

One thing that Eden does is use a particular heading font of which I was not able to duplicate. So, I tweaked an existing font I found and made a new one with Linux's FontForge. Here's that font. It's fairly close enough.

Now, to make this look great, use Inkscape on Linux, create a brown colored rectangle (or your favorite color). Now choose radial gradient, edit the gradient, remove the opacity, and adjust the gradient with the gradient tool so it sort of looks like the image on this blog article. That's your backdrop. Now type onto this with the new UltraBlack font. Take the font, add a chrome gradient, then add a solid white border and keep thickening the border until it looks like the image in this blog article. Last, copy and paste the image of the font item on top of itself, but just a couple pixels to the right and bottom. Remove all coloring and make it solid brown on line and fill. Then, take the master opacity of that item and dim it slightly. Last, lower that second font item beneath the first and you've just created a shadow.

For an even more interesting effect, take a snapshot of that with ALT+PRTSCRN and import into Gimp. Then, add a slight softglow filter. This could be used for certain conditions for emphasis or an eeriness.