The Graphic Mac

Change is Everywhere. GM Signing Off.

Apple announced the new, long-awaited MacPro. Major new macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS shipping soon. And now, Jony Ive leaving Apple.

Apple announced the new, long-awaited MacPro. Major new macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS shipping soon. And now, Jony Ive leaving Apple. There’s a whole lot of change in the Apple world right now.

For just shy of 20 years, I’ve been blogging about graphic design, Adobe products and Apple in general. It started at my personal blog (originally named “CreativeGuy,” where I gained quite a nice little following. That lead to writing for other sites like CreativeBits (thanks, Ivan!), Macworld.com, TheAppleBlog, AppleLife, PCWorld, and several others. I also had the pleasure of being published in Macworld and Popular Science magazines.

TheGraphicMac was a source of creative release for me. I never did this for money. In fact, short of a few text link ads in the sidebar or footer and an occasional sponsorship banner, I never ran ads on the site. And despite being a designer for a living, I never put much effort into the design of this site either, preferring to focus on the content. I was posting articles and reviews multiple times per day for years, eventually slowing to every other day.

Since starting CreativeGuy in 1999, I’ve gotten married, moved from Las Vegas to Phoenix, and my wife and I had a son. My freelance career has done quite nicely, and my wife recently started a small business.

Because of those things, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t posted here at the Graphic Mac on a regular basis the last few years. Not only do I no longer have the time, but I feel like The Graphic Mac has run its course, and I’m ready to retire it.

I hope you’ve found the site useful over the years! The site will cease to exist sometime in early August, but I will still be sharing free design resources and articles from other great sites both on Twitter and the GraphicMac Facebook page.

Thanks for reading, and the thousands of emails over the years. It has truly been a pleasure.

General

Free Artsy-Fartsy Apple Screensaver

I don’t see my screensaver come on very often, but when I do I prefer to see something gorgeous. I use an official Apple screensaver, which I “acquired” some time ago. I also use the Apple TV Flyover screensaver. But I came across this beauty and felt it was worth having.

Resources

Free Paper Bag PSD Mockup

If there’s one type of file worth collecting, it’s really nice 3D mockups for showing off logo designs and corporate identity.

Apple | Mac

Grab This Free Alternative to Bartender App for macOS

I’m a huge fan of Bartender, the $15 menubar manager that, among other things, allows you to hide the icons for apps that live in the macOS menubar. A cluttered menubar drives me crazy, and so does not having control over the order of their appearance in the menubar regardless of how many there are.

But $15 may be a bit much for some people, particularly those who simply want to hide a few of the menubar icons and don’t need the other features found in Bartender.

Apple | Mac

New Advanced Video Downloader for Mac

VideoDuke is a powerful video downloader which downloads YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo videos to your Mac as well as videos from many other websites.

Apple | Mac

Create Your Own Dynamic Wallpapers for macOS Mojave

While not a killer feature of macOS Mojave, Dynamic Wallpapers are a cool customization tool limited only by the fact that Apple only provides two, and offers no built-in way to create your own.

Dynapaper changes that.

Apple | Mac

Turn the MBPro TouchBar Into the Dock

Use TouchSwitcher to launch and switch between apps on the new MacBook Pro with TouchBar. The most recent apps are right next to the TouchSwitcher icon. Juggling several apps is fast and easy.

General

DPI:WTF? Dots Per Inch Explained

Learn what DPI is and when you should and shouldn’t worry about it.

Apple | Mac

Mojave Dark & Light Modes on Per-App Basis

The hacking of macOS Mojave’s Light and Dark Modes continues. Today I found an app that allows you to run apps in Light Mode and Dark Mode side-by-side.

Adobe InDesign

Getting an InDesign Story’s Word Count

If you work on any sort of project that has editorial content, the writer, your client, or someone involved in providing the text content is likely to ask you for a word count. For many designers, that means copy & pasting some bogus text from the design into an app like MS Word or Apple Pages to get a character, word, or paragraph count.

That’s just silly and unproductive.

Adobe InDesign

Add Bleed to Your Image Right Inside InDesign

I’m fairly O.C.D. about things when it comes to my InDesign layouts. For example, having bleeds is not enough, they must be EXACT amounts, no more and no less.

Here’s a great way to fix images that bleed inside InDesign… no switching to Photoshop or fiddly image resizing is necessary!