I've been getting my feet wet with Windows CardSpace and my self-issued card. In watching Kim Cameron's demonstration of how he integrated CardSpace with Wordpress, I saw his nifty looking card with his portrait on it. Right then and there I decided I too must have one. What do you think of the results? Here's how I did it.
I made a self portrait with my Canon EOS 20D and an EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. I extracted the headshot with Photoshop CS2's Extract filter, did some complexion touch up and resized it to what you see here, about 60x64 at the shoulder. I created a new 120x80 image according to the guidance provided by Vittorio Bertocci in his great article about how images are mapped onto cards. From here, it's all a composite. There's a layer for the black rectangle across the bottom, a layer for the gradient background, a layer for my portrait, and a layer each for the text. It took some experimenting with fonts and text transformation to arrive at the setting you see here - by far the largest part of this entire exercise. My Layers palette is reproduced here for your reference. Frankly, I'm surprised by the result because I'm by no means a Photoshop guru. But I think I now have something cool to liven up casadehambone.com with!
Vista does one annoying little thing in the reflection it places on the top third of the card when it renders it within the Windows CardSpace UI. I can see how they're trying to be cool, but I think it detracts rather than adds to the overall experience.