When you’re dealing with text-heavy documents such as annual reports, booklets or magazines, properly formatted typography can make the difference between something people want to read now, and something they eventually toss in the trash having only skimmed the headlines. Here are a few tips for making your typography a little more readable. (more…)
Category: General
Alien Skin Bokeh plugin review
Macworld recently published my review of Alien Skin Software’s Bokeh plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks and Elements.
AlienSkin Bokeh plugin offers easy tilt-shift effects
Adobe releases CS4 printing guide
Many users of Adobe’s Creative Suite software are unaware that Adobe provides an excellent printing guide in PDF format to help in learning the ins-and-outs of successful commercial printing using the CS apps.The guide is an excellent resource for new users, serving as a training manual, as well as a brush-up for experienced users. The guide covers a wide-range of printing-related topics in Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. The free Creative Suite 4 Printing Guide is available in PDF format in both low-res (4.6MB) and high-res (17.7MB). If you’re still using Creative Suite 3, a link is available for that as well.
Get your graffiti on with the generator
If the idea for your next project includes graffiti lettering, then venture on over to Graffiti Creator to start vandalizing your desktop! The site, run by Mike Wigén, claims to be the first “graffiti generator” on the Web. I won’t argue the point, but I will say that it’s one of the best ones I’ve used. It allows just enough customization to make it interesting, yet simple enough to save the image and easily trace in Adobe Illustrator if need be (hint-hint).
Creative inspiration
If you’re looking get your creative juices flowing, two sites that are sure to inspire you are Ads of the World, and the AdGoodness blog. 
Both sites feature ads from designers and agencies around the world, complete with clickable preview images that show you the big picture, reader comments, and more information about the advertisement. Both sites have been around for quite a while and are favorites of mine.
Around the Web
4 Free graphics editors
Seashore – open source image editor using Cocoa framework. Inkscape – open source vector graphics editor similar to Illustrator & CorelDraw CinePaint – open source image editor that supports 8, 16 & 32-bit images Gimp – the most popular open source image editor with a huge following of users
Dealing with disk fragmentation in OSX
OS X does a great job at minimizing file fragmentation by rewriting files in contiguous space when a file is opened, is under 20MB and contains more than eight fragments. This works quite well to prevent heavy file fragmentation, but what it doesn’t prevent is free space fragmentation. TheAppleBlog covers disk framentation in this informative article. The article includes a brief tutorial on how to tell if your free space is fragmented without the use of a commercial program.
Adobe Creative Suite tips
InDesignSecrets offers a tutorial on how to customize your Links Panel and have the settings stick across workspace resets and app restarts. VectorDiary has a quick tutorial showing you how to converge points together using the Average function. The Average function is pretty powerful, and wildly under-used.
Typography
Snap2Objects discusses all aspects of typography, including anatomy, categories, adjustments and more in Fonts101. The article is fairly informative, and includes plenty of links to find fonts, font managers, and more type-related articles.
Twitter notes
If you’re not on Twitter, you’re missing out on a great resource. You can follow me on Twitter to receive tips and links I don’t normally post here, as well as general discussion. If you’re already using Twitter and looking for a more advanced desktop client, you might want to check out atebits on Monday – as they’re scheduled to release a desktop version of their popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie. There’s a brief intro video posted their now, and it looks fantastic. If you use the popular Evernote service, you’ll be interested in knowing that they now have Twitter integration.
Inspiration
There are plenty of sites that offer the opportunity to view other designer’s work on the Web. The latest I’ve come across is DesignFridge. The site offers a clean interface for viewing inspirational Web design from users around the world. The gallery is categorized by style, so it’s easy to find samples of just what you’re looking for.
Evolution of famous logo designs
Your business card is CRAP!
The importance of color management
I recently had a conversation with Andy Hatkoff, Vice President of OEM and technology licensing at Pantone, where we discussed the importance of color management in designer’s and photographer’s workflow, and how color management has changed and what tools we can use to get the best results. You can read the importance of color management at Macword’s Creative Notes Blog. There’s a link at the end of the article that I’ve found quite useful in explaining some of the ins-and-outs of color management for Photoshop users.
Digital printing tips
Digital printing is a great way to produce low-quantity, fast turnaround color printing. In the past, digital meant extremely low quality, but these days some of the digital presses can reach near offset quality if you know a few tricks. Here are just a few things to keep in mind when printing digitally.
Gamut
Gamut is the term used to describe the range of colors that a specific printing device can produce. If you’re coming from CMYK offset printing, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out that digital presses can handle up to a 20% wider color gamut. What this generally means is that you can use redder reds, greener greens and bluer blues. This can be a real plus when designing your marketing materials that have vivid images that traditional printing simply cannot reproduce in the CMYK color space. Now that you understand color gamut, let’s move on to how you can put it to work… (more…)