Archive for March, 2007

Seven habits of highly effective junior designers

Seven habits of highly effective junior designers

Talent alone simply isn’t enough anymore. You have to be a well rounded person to be successful creative in today’s market. There are a lot of things you can do to help yourself on the way, and LifeClever: Tips for design and life has some tips to get you started in the article titled Talent isn’t everything: 7 habits of highly effective junior designers. The seven habits covered are:

  1. Work quickly, produce a lot
  2. Attend to details
  3. Be versatile
  4. Make an effort to learn
  5. Anticipate problems
  6. Set goals
  7. Display a positive attitude
03/27/2007 Read More
DIY lightbox for better digital photography

DIY lightbox for better digital photography

Strobist shows you how to build a light box for shooting perfectly-lit close-up items for all you digital photographers on the cheap. I particularly like this one as it’s something I’ve often done myself. The only real expense is a large piece of white poster board, a cardboard box, some tissue paper (or tracing paper), some tape, scissors and some lights (any lamps or bright lights will probably do the trick).

03/26/2007 Read More
Get to know InDesign’s Info Palette.

Get to know InDesign’s Info Palette.

CreativeTechs has a great article covering InDesign’s Info Palette. The info palette is often overlooked in InDesign because unless you know about all it has to offer, you don’t immediately see the value in using it. Most people who have at least opened the Info palette know that it will tell you the document’s location on your hard drive, the size of the file and the date and time of the last modification made. But there’s so much more. As the article at CreativeTechs explains, the Info palette also informs you of the size, type, resolution, color space and embedded color profile of any images you click on in your InDesign document. And for text, it can offer even more. Characters, paragraphs, lines and word count of the document is just the start. You can also find out that information on just the text you have selected. And for the text you can’t see, you can check on the word count of text that is hidden in the text overflow. Very handy! Now you can tell your writing partner that they need to shorten their copy by “x” amount of words, rather than saying “cut a whole lot of it.”

03/20/2007 Read More
Designers must write to be successful

Designers must write to be successful

Design is not solely visual. Those who believe it is, make an unconscious decision to confine themselves solely to craft. This limits these individuals from growing and taking on more complex and broad challenges.

No more true words have been spoken about what a designer really is in the advertising business. Production artists exist to be craftsman. People who know and understand the tools (software) like the back of their hand. Designers on the other hand must learn to be more than someone who can simply draw pretty pictures, they must learn to be communicators! Ideasonideas.com has a great article titled Designers must write. It’s a great read for the novice or pro designer.

03/19/2007 Read More
File extensions: What app made that?

File extensions: What app made that?

Every once in a while, you get a file from a client or vendor and have no idea what app it was created in. It doesn’t open in Photoshop, Graphic Converter, Quark or InDesign, so what could it be? Well, you can always check over at FileInfo.net. FileInfo.net contains a searchable database of file extensions with detailed explanations of each file type. Every file extension entry contains information about the file format, a description of the file, and how to open the file. Programs for opening the files are listed for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. The information can be browsed by file type:

  • Text
  • Data
  • Image
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Web
  • Fonts
  • Plugin
  • System
  • Executable
  • Compressed
  • Developer
  • Backup
  • Disk
  • Game
  • Misc.
03/19/2007 Read More
OS X Startup keyboard commands help in troubleshooting

OS X Startup keyboard commands help in troubleshooting

When troubleshooting, performing maintenance, or otherwise starting up your Mac OSX computer in an abnormal fashion, there are a few keyboard shortcuts that you may or may not know about that can help you. Below is a list of them with an explanation of what they do:

  • X = Force Mac OS X startup
  • Option = Brings up a screen with startup volume choices (slow process, may take a while)
  • Option+Command+Shift+Delete = Bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume (such as a CD or external disk)
  • C = Start up from a CD that has a system folder
  • N = Attempt to start up from a compatible network server (NetBoot)
  • T = Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode (very handy for plugging your Mac into another as an external hard drive)
  • Shift = start up in Safe Boot mode and temporarily disable login items and non-essential kernel extension files (Mac OS X 10.2 and later)
  • Command+V = Start up in Verbose mode.
  • Command+S = Start up in Single-User mode
  • Command+Option+p+r = Zap PRAM. Hold down until second chime.
  • Command+Option+n+v = Clear NV RAM. Similar to reset-all in Open Firmware.
  • Command+Option+o+f = Boot into open firmware
  • Hold mouse button down = Force eject a CD/DVD
03/18/2007 Read More
Go old-school bitmap with HyperDither

Go old-school bitmap with HyperDither

In the Mac’s early days, bitmap graphics were a big deal. Apple’s Bill Atkinson developed a fantastic dithering filter which converted grayscale images to 1-bit, black-and-white bitmap images that could be displayed on the Mac’s screen. To some observers, the Atkinson filter is thought to be better than the modern Floyd-Steinberg model (also known as the error-diffusion filter) used by Adobe Photoshop today. Read Go old-school bitmap with HyperDither for an OSX solution to getting the grand-ole-dither back.

03/14/2007 Read More
Retain spot colors and transparency in Illustrator

Retain spot colors and transparency in Illustrator

If you’ve tried to design with spot colors and transparency effects you certainly know how frustrating it can be. In fact, if you’re using Photoshop, you’re probably making more work for yourself than is necessary. Thank goodness for Illustrator guru Mordy Golding. Mordy has penned a great tutorial at CreativePro, titled Retain spot colors without losing your marbles, on not only how to retain spot colors with transparency effects in your Illustrator artwork, but he’s done so with yet another “Apple Glossy Aqua Orb” tutorial.

03/11/2007 Read More