Dot Effect

Dot effect, hmmm, that doesn't really sound right for this technique but what else would you call it? This has become a very popular technique to display graphics and text on the web. Lets take a look at how it can be done with Photo-Paint.

Create a new image with the following settings:

Notice that the background on the image is RGB 0, 0, 0 (100% black). This is so the final dots stand out, but you can make the background pretty much any color you wish since we will be working with floating objects over the background.

The next step is to draw a box that is filled with RGB 185, 255, 255. This is done with the square tool. Use the following settings in this tool's Tool Settings Rollup:

Once you have the tool set correctly, draw a mid sized square, once you do this, your image should look like this:

We need to give the image some shape so we don't end up with a simple cheesy looking square. This is where you can push the envelope with filters to get creative. Try using different filters from the 2D and 3D effects menus. For this example here I will use Swirl from the Effects, 2D effects, Swirl menu. Set the tool up like this:

Notice the cross hair is in the center of the original. You can move these crosshairs around with the tool just below the window above the word: Direction. This will help you achieve a variety of shapes.

Once we have a cool shape, we are ready to blur the edges to make the dots radiate from large in the center to small at the edges. The more blur you apply the farther the dots will radiate and the smaller they will get at the edges. In this example I will use Effects, Blur, Gaussian Blur with a setting of 10 pixels to smooth out the edge. This should fuzzy the shape slightly.

Now we can use the Halftone tool to create our dots. Simply choose Effects, Color Transform, Halftone.

The settings on this tool are adjustable, you will notice that you have two controls: Max Radius and Channel Angle. The Max Radius setting controls how big the dots are, the Channel Angle controls, um, the angle. You will notice that I only have Cyan selected, this is because the box was a Cyan box, if it were a mixture of all three colors we would have different dots controlled by each color channel. This way we have a single channel of dots to work with. We could have easily created the box using Magenta or Yellow and done all the other steps the same, then used the other sliders to control angle. Whatever right? The gist is that with Max Radius and Channel Angle you can control how the dots plane and how big they are. Play around with it, push the envelope. I would say that for your own good until you get use to this process that you stick with singular colors like in this example. Boxes of other colors are going to get crazy when you run this tool, but hey, that can be alright too.

After we apply the above filter, you can add text or web graphics to make cool banners, buttons, or just about whatever you want. It's an object so you can stretch it, shrink it, mask it, and paint it a different color. Here is what my completed image looked like:

After you do some manipulation, you can create cool little graphics like this:

If you make something cool with this, e-mail me.