Fading an image so you can see stuff on top of it

Very useful tip

When you're designing for, say, one of the new notepads / message pads (pt=133 for your rss feed, if you were curious), you might want to include an image right where folks will be writing their messages.

The answer is to fade out the image. Here's an example. Click the image, then click customize and have a look at the layers it contains:

New Blood On Dartmoor by HightonRidley

Achieving the fades

What you need for this is a transparent white image that you overlay on top of the image - but keep underneath everything else (to be transparent it needs to be a png or gif file).

If you went to "customize" you'll have seen that I actually used many layers of 20pct white. I used enough of them so that the image was faded enough to still allow for easy reading / writing.

Download the transparent image

If you want to try this out for yourself, you can download the white transparency here (in Firefox, right click the link and choose "save link as" or the equivalent in your browser).
Note that if you left click the link, your browser might report errors when it tries to display it - I've no idea why this happens, but it's fine for use on Zazzle as described.

Other uses

If you've got a really nice image that you want to use on the inside of a greetings card use this technique and you can turn it into a great background.

See what I've done with headed stationery on this example:

A Walk In The Park personal stationery by HightonRidley
More Trees Stationery

With this one you can see how I've used a few extra copies of the transparent white image at a smaller size to define the "writing area".

Happy Zazzling!
~~Mark (HightonRidley)