The web never fail to give me surprise. Just when I thought the free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop – Paint.NET and GIMP are good enough, I got to know another excellent alternative that I strongly endorsed.

Introducing http://pixlr.com – an online picture editor. It got 2 major advantages – it’s free and it’s online. It’s almost like web-based “Photoshop”. Once you click on pixlr editor, it’ll go into a workspace that is rather similar to that of Photoshop, though not as cluttered.

Those who have used Photoshop would surely love this free and convenient tool as you can easily edit picture – crop, resize etc. without launching the heavy-weight Photoshop.

Give it a try. I’m very sure you’ll love it.

An avatar is cartoon representation of a computer or internet user. It is an alter ego iconic image of the user which is used commonly in forums and social community portals such as Facebook.

Avatar is normally used when the user prefer not to use his/her own real picture in online social media and wish to have some form of privacy or simply for fun of seeing themselves in cartoon form.

There are quite many avatar creators online but these 2 are the best IMHO :

DoppelMe – Very intuitive and fun avatar creator. This is my personal favorite as it can create great looking avatar at the shortest possible time.

Portrait Illustration Maker – Another great avatar creator which gives you more options for a close representation of yourself.

Now, if you’re not using your own real picture in forums and social media, go ahead and create a nice looking avatar for yourself.

Checkout these 2 free banner makers :

Animated GIF banner – http://addesigner.com
Remarks : Designing a simple animated banner couldn’t be easier. Best of all, this is FREE. You’d need to register a free account with your email – not to worry, no spam. Many banner templates in there to choose and customize. My only little complain is the small little text ad at the bottom right corner which the owner has included for that powerful viral marketing effect. Well, it’s free anyway.

Static GIF banner – http://www.bannercreator.nu/banner-maker.html
Remarks : This is one of the best resources to come up with a simple static banner fast. No (viral) ad added for this free tool. With more time, I’d use Photoshop. But if you’d like to save time, do not have Photoshop or not sure how to use Photoshop, then this banner maker is for you.

You can save a lot of time when you use OUTSOURCING correctly.

Given enough time, I can design beautiful graphics such as banners from scratch with Photoshop. But time is money to me. Instead of spending days or weeks to get the design work done, I’d rather outsource graphic design to the professionals. And the good news is that while it’s a great time saver, the price to get your graphic done is highly affordable.

Take for example, Google image ads. There are 8 formats :

Leaderboard – 728 x 90
Banner – 468 x 60
Skyscraper – 120 x 600
Wide Skyscraper – 160 x 600
Small Square – 200 x 200
Square – 250 x 250
Medium Rectangle – 300 x 250
Large Rectangle – 336 x 280

Instead of spending time to design on those graphics, I’d rather focus more on my e-business to get them deployed ASAP.

Now let me show you the trick how I save huge bucks while I outsource to get the Google image ads in 8 format done.

Yes, there are 8 formats. To save money, you only need to get 3 of them done – Leaderboard, Wide Skyscraper and Large Rectangle.

Because of the similarity in SHAPE, you can resize the Leaderboard to become a Banner, a Wide Skyscraper to a Skyscraper and the Large Rectangle (rather squarish) to the rest.

These can be done easily with Photoshop. And when you outsource, the graphic designer will normally also hand over the .psd files which you can use Photoshop to edit ie. increase the size of the fonts if they appears too small when you sized it smaller.

See, you can get all 8 Google Image Ads formats done at minimal fee