This week’s featured digital plaque design is a tongue in cheek comment on how our government sometimes seems to set its priorities.  I liked the way the elements in this design came together, and how the photograph compliments the thought.  Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, the design will make you wonder if our leaders are always awake at the helm.  Originally, my wife did not like the bench photograph because she did not think I would find a use for it.  I think it made a nice plaque after all.

Sometimes the cart comes before the horse...

Our calendar design for the week is a nice way to “go green” for the month of June.  The photographs came from separate areas of the beautiful Johnson County, Kansas walking and bike trails.  These trails are well traveled by bicyclists and walkers, so it is becoming increasingly hard to get shots where the trails seem deserted.

If you are a fan of green, this one is for you.

The next item is my own favorite Memorial Day photograph taken during a walk around the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.  I was particularly proud that I got this picture just as the carriage was leaving its parking spot, and managed to frame it just right, even though the shot was taken on the fly from across the street.  The matting design for the photo was also a first try on a new technique I applied.  The item makes a good print and screen wallpaper if you like this kind of subject.  I think the folks in the carriage were excited about getting a chance to take the ride.  Now all they have to do is find their photo on this site to capture the memory of that day.

Lots of people use carriage rides to mark memorable moments.

The last item for the week is a digital award design that struck me as a possible summary of many frequently used platitudes which seem to become the trademark of many people who like to give themselves and others that extra little charge from the realms of “gung ho.”  This award can be personally inscribed for anyone who lives off the business mantras coined by others, and give them something to quote from for days to come.

For sweeping platitude lovers everywhere

This week starts with a digital photo I took at a quiet botanical garden pond surrounded by some beautiful flowers.  I have dressed this picture in various matting treatments, but this one turned out to be particularly eye catching for me.  Last week, I printed out one version of this photo and gave it to some friends in a picture frame.  The version included here makes a great screen wallpaper image, or a nice 8×10 print of the photo and matting.  For people who want to print my digital designs, it is important to let me know so I can size the matting to fit conventional frames properly.

Variations in textures and shading create nice matting blend.

Next in line is a decorative digital plaque with words of wisdom from one of my favorite people who will be sharing many of his thoughts in the future.  This virtual plaque features a beautiful picture taken along the Riverwalk area in San Antonio, Texas during a trip we took to that beautiful city last year.  The matting and highlights compliment the photo, while the wood tones enrich the presentation.

Wise quotes from my favorite personality

The award for this week goes to a hard working leasing agent who provided excellent service to the residents of Weston Point Apartments, and who is leaving the position for brighter horizons.  The residents presented this nice token of appreciation to Dawn, which included a matted photo from the property, and a rich treatment to accent the photograph.  Congratulations to Dawn for a job well done.

Service award was envied by other employees

The final offering for this week is our calendar page for June that features a wood tone outer border, bright textured accent background, and another application of a matted photo we took of the spring colors found around the neighborhood.  With our digital designs, it is possible to use your photos in many different ways to keep those treasured pictures in front of your eyes.

Another angle on watching the months go by

We ask that if you download or use our material from this site, please help us by donating $3 per image for the work we have done to bring it to you.  If you have some ideas of your own that we can help you create, all our offerings are just $3 per image.  This way, you can get a matted photo, screen wallpaper, digital plaque, digital award, or calendar page for only $3 per image.  What can we do for you today?

In addition to the open invitation for our visitors to submit their entries in our friendly photo contests, I will continue to post some of the creations that I personally enjoy.  There appear to be a lot of online photo contests, so if you are not tired of getting a free offering, we think ours is worth the effort to enter. 

My first favorite offering is a decorative plaque suggesting a possible rate schedule for men to present to their wives as fair return for going above and beyond their normal sensibilities.

Men should use this to clarify the value of their services.

Biff Boff award from the moon.

Unique textures compliment the photo in this calendar page.

The last item is this week’s favorite matted photo of a brightly colored tree captured on one of my walks around the neighborhood here in beautiful Oz.  I put this photo to various applications of personal use, and felt like this little tree had a lot to say as I passed it by. 

This little tree smiled for its picture.

If you would like to use any of the offerings you find on this site, just donate $3 to the buy page for each item you use.  This will keep the designs coming, and help us pay the bills for doing all the work.  Send us an email if you want us to work with your photos, or create something special for you.  When you ask us questions, there is no obligation or charge for information.  All unique designs cost $3, so take advantage while the price is still too good to be true.  All our digital designs will help to make your photos look like a million.

Here at Matte Watch, we like new stuff, new ideas, new new and more new.  As the month of May begins, we want more to happen around here than in months past.  Since we do not have an unlimited travel budget, and would love to showcase scenes from all around, we are introducing a new challenge to our friends both old and new.

We are having a scenery photo contest for the non-professional digital photo enthusiast.  In the weeks ahead, we would like anyone who wants to participate to send in a picture of their favorite local sightseeing hangout. Photos need to be in .JPG format, and named using your full name and location.  Upload your photo entries to:

http://digitalphotoframetemplates.biz/Jamal/uploadmain.php

After your photo entry has been uploaded to the above URL address, send an email to jdir@bhotechnologists.com giving us the details about your composition and your desire to enter it in our contest, referencing the name of the photo file you uploaded.  From the entries we receive, we will select a first, second, and third place winning photo. PLEASE do not attach photos to your email messages.

The first place winning photo will be used in a decorative digital plaque design with an inspirational, humorous, or original quote based on the photo composition.  Although all our prizes will be dazzling treatments of your photo entries, the first place winner will receive the most lasting and sophisticated combination of design, prose, and photo matting available from our digital techniques. 

Sample First Prize - Decorative Digital Plaque

The second place winning photo will be digitally matted with a unique composition, and formatted as a screen saver image.  These prizes will be original and unique compliments to your photographs, using a selection of our latest matting approaches, which may or may not include thematic matte labeling.

Sample Second Prize - Digital Matted Picture Screen Wallpaper

The third place winning photo will be used to create a decorative calendar page composition for a future month.  Each page we create will be a temporal work of art thanks to your photos and our matting techniques.  You will be able to tell your friends that your photos inspired a beautiful calendar page, and the proof to show for it.  Use the calendar design as a nice greeting card to your friends for that month.

Sample Third Prize - Photo Used To Create Decorative Digital Calendar Page For Future Month

Winning entries will be posted on the site as they are selected each week, and will be available for free download by those who have entered photos used in the compositions, other people are asked for a $3 donation to download. 

As a second contest, we invite our visitors to send us an email to nominate someone they know for recognition.  You may nominate anyone you want to be recognized for anything you think they deserve to be acknowledged for.  Your ideas can be humorous, serious, heroic, or just plain stupid, but you must have the permission of whoever you nominate to place their name into competition for a free digital award.  Send us an email with who your nominee is, what sort of recognition they deserve, and optionally upload a photo of them using the same upload method as described for the other contest.  All “blame” or consequence for nominating someone for recognition is the responsibility of the person making the nomination.  Weekly winners will be posted on the site, and the honoree is entitled to a free download of their digital award from our showcase.  Anyone who protests the posting of their award or prizes in any of our contests will be promptly removed.  We will reserve all copyrights to final compositions created from submitted photos. 

Sample Prize In Award Contest

If you submit entries into our weekly contests and do not win, but would like your photos to be used for a matted picture, calendar, decorative plaque, or digital award, you can guarantee yourself a prize by placing an order with us and paying $3 per digital image design.  Do you have what it takes to be one of our winning participants?  Get started today and find out!

This week, our featured favorites show off a calendar design that is simple, but eye catching in the details.  Beyond the obvious contrast of a dual set of Fall pictures on the May calendar page, the subtle shading of colors both inside and outside the framed areas draws the eye to the pictorial content. The clean metallic tones make this a nice calendar choice for displaying various photos year round without much change to the inner matting needed.

This calendar design works well with few changes.

The next selection is an award alternative format which could be used by organizations such as the Master Gardner program to inexpensively recognize participants for completion of their volunteer work.  This award simulation is only a representation of one possible design that could be offered.

Digital awards make recognition easy and inexpensive.

Our third image for the week is the matted photograph that was used to create the previous award.  The textured matte is drawn from colors in the photo, as is the colors of the inner matte.  This simple treatment enriches the elements in the photo, while at the same time blending with the content to make the composition stand out.

Simple mattings add value to using pictures in other objects.

The last offering for the week is an inspirational plaque design that offers some nice wood, marble and metal tones to bring out a colorful contrast to the gray colors of the snow covered Spring landscape in the photograph.  Much like the award designs we offer, the decorative digital plaque designs provide another avenue for making the most of your favorite matted photos.

Inspirational plaques draw on matted pictures to enhance message.

If you are using any of our images from the site in a digital picture frame, the resolution is designed for 1024 x 768 viewing.  We can make images designed for other resolutions on request.  Please donate $3 per image for any of the content you download from the site.  If you would like us to design something from your photographs, send us an email and let us know what you want.  All custom designs are $3 per image page, and set at 1024 x 768 resolution unless otherwise specified.  We make all our items for use as screen wallpapers or digital picture frame content, but the work can be printed conventionally as well.

The short answer to the question in the title of this post is, yes.  Conventional wisdom would point to this blog and say that the purity of blogging should not be used to sell products, (or so I have heard from a few people.) 

If this site is a blog and also intended to be a point of sales, how the heck is that supposed to work? 

My answer to this question is that I don’t have a deviously brilliant plan associated with the approach.  The point is that I have a bunch of ideas for creating a wide range of interesting digitally designed products, and a vision for the stuff that keeps rolling out of sight in its potential for unique and original work that I would love to get paid to do for people, businesses, organizations, and whoever else wants to raise their hand.

Secondarily, I like to blog about my digital design ideas and bring things from my work table to the site as they come to life.  There are no other real “experts” in the digital designs industry (other than me,) so it seems like a good time to start bringing the potential of this beautiful technology forward, without working toward the conclusion that digital picture frame technology needs to be warped into becoming yet another full featured computer system lying around unused with high potential.

Matte Watch is a site where I dream that people wandering by will look at the images we post and be inspired to want more than the examples they can download from here.  By looking at the high quality images that are possible from cooking up these virtual ingredients, and seeing that we are only asking $3 from any of them, we hope to make some bells go off in your head about how much more we can offer than other commercial sites.  Go ahead and search the web to see if you can find others who offer you this level of work for the price in the real or virtual universe.

Do we have any limits? 

Sure we do, and if you reach them, we will let you know; after all, what do you expect for only three bucks?

If you are not interested in digital picture frame technology, does Matte Watch have anything for you?

The answer here is YES.  You do not have to be a digital frame fanatic to enjoy the expanding scope of images and material we can offer to make for you.  The versatility of digital designs allows them to be used in so many different ways, we are sure you can find at least one way to take advantage of what we provide.  The images work as images on DVDs, computer monitor wallpapers, prints, and even presentation projections. 

If you do not think this idea is exciting, or that the quality of the examples is not worth paying $3, then take some time to tell us why.  If you want something you do not see, send us an email and see if we can make it for you.  Our virtual factory is efficient and ready to start delivering more dazzling creations fueled by your requests.  Get the flow of recognition and rewards started that has been blocked too long by a high price tag.  With virtual designs, the value of three dollars goes a long way, because whether we are working with photos, metals, fine finishes, or any other virtual material to create your design, it is all an electronically produced image, so it all costs the same.  You can own some truly fine virtual designs that would cost hundreds or thousands to own in real world materials.  I am here “priming the pump” waiting for anyone who is ready to open their eyes and take a drink.

The game of golf has been around for a very long time, and continues its strong traditions moving forward.  As with many different sports, there are a range of golfers from casual players to high stakes professionals.  One of the distinguishing aspects of golf is the dedication shown by those who love to play.  It is a sport that pits the athlete as much against themselves as it does an opponent.

While working through some digital designs, I thought that local clubs could have new ways to tap into the competitive spirit in the hearts of their members.  By offering some elegant, yet inexpensive ways to recognize personal achievements in casual play, digital award designs might offer club members a way to be rewarded for their own level of play. 

Depending on programs a local club might offer as an incentive to boost membership, digital awards for reaching personal best game scores, weekly best scores, or other casual “tournaments,” could help provide incentives to keep moving forward, and a nice extra for joining the club. 

In the following examples, the three winning plaques represent first, second, and third place rewards.  As a digital design, the graphics could be offered in a digital picture frame, with each subsequent win added to the content, or printed out in a hard copy. 

Virtual awards make it possible to reward many levels of play.

Digital awards can bring recognition to clubs and members alike.

Digital awards make excellent ways to recognize personal accomplishments.

Since digital awards are electronic there are many different ways they can be used by recipients, and they will remain fresh as the day they are created.  Because of this, they can be duplicated easily and displayed at clubs and in players’ homes at the same time at the same cost.  Images that look like a million cost only $3.