If you’re anything like me, you’ve got an incurable addiction to air, you spend most of your time NOT traveling near the speed of light, and you could always use an extra graphical toy or two. Therefore it was with some degree of delight that I came across this TUAW post that spoke of rolling your own Mail.app icon! My delight was dashed, however, when I found it was a Photoshop template. While that’s great for the well heeled graphic artists or maybe those with an old copy of Photoshop laying around their hard drive (from that contract job 4 years ago), my heart went out to the masses (teeming as they were) of users that would like to create their own icon but didn’t have access to Photoshop.

Thus, it was with enthusiasm and eagerness that I set about kicking the software requirement DOWN a notch. First I opened the file (created by John Godfrey and available here) and noted the three layered ingredients; the postmark, the stamp, and the place where the image goes. I carefully exported each layer as a PNG graphic then placed them into Keynote in the proper order. Because Keynote is really good at masking to shapes, I thought it’d be a neat idea to create a shape that’s the same size and orientation of the center of the stamp, making it easy to toss your image inside it. That was created in short order and there we had it! Except...

Photoshop has all kinds of imaging effects available that programs like iWeb, Keynote and Pages don’t. One such effect is Multiply. Because of this, the white area under the postmark will show through on the picture part of the stamp. I may try to re-create it at some point in the future to be more low-end friendly, but just be aware of this limitation for now (and if anyone out there gives it a shot and gets it done, email it to me and I’ll include it for everyone to use!).

Once everything was set up, I created a Keynote file with the masking area AND included the original split up .png files all in one .zip file you can download from here. Additionally, in the Apple discussions, a user wanted a stamp-like frame for a photo. One reply had a link to a frame generator that had, as one of it’s frames, a stamp. I liked the idea and it seemed simple enough for me to be able to do the same thing with a shape in iWeb. A short time later, I’d figured it out and posted a horizontal and vertical version of the stamp shape I created. You can download the Clips.data file from here. You can follow the link above to the Apple discussion on how to install it or see my prior page here.

This tip is “snail-mail-ware”. Send a letter (extra points if written by hand!) the old fashioned way, just for the heck of it! Marvel at how it arrives at it’s destination!