The Graphic Mac

ColorBurned has made available a high resolution set of Lens Flare Photoshop Brushes for download. The brushes are based on the Knoll Light Factory plugin set. They’re not as flexible as the plugins provided by Knoll, but they’re free! It’s not often you find yourself needing a lens flare in an image, but when you do, it’s nice to have something a little nicer than Photoshop’s rather lame built-in lens flare tool.

If you have multiple hard drives set up on your Mac, you may find yourself wishing to move a file (or files) from one drive to another. This generally requires you to copy the file(s) by dragging it to the destination drive, then going back and deleting the file from its original location so you don’t have duplicate copies on your hard drives. Rather than doing that, try holding down the Command key while dragging it to the new location. Your file will be “moved” instead of copied, releasing you from the need to go back and delete the original.

In an effort to promote their stock photography, Crestock offers a Daily Free Stock Photo from their Web site. This isn’t just a Web-sized image, these are full resolution, high-quality images you can download in a variety of sizes. A new image is available each day, but once the new image is posted, the image from the previous day is gone forever, so you have to remember to grab it. Crestock has an RSS Feed for the free images to show you which image they’re giving away each day, or you can just add it to your start tabs in your Web browser. All you need to do is register with Crestock to download these images. I’ve been downloading these images for quite some time, and have used several of them for print projects, as well as this site. I like Crestock because the images they provide seem to be more colorful and creatively shot than many stock photo suppliers. They’re one of the first places I search at when I need an image for a client project.

If you have multiple calendars set up in Apple’s iCal application and you receive an invite from a friend, family member or client, you can easily decide which calendar you want the invite to be placed in. Simply hold down the Accept button, rather than just clicking on it, to get a pop-up menu which allows you to choose which iCal calendar it should be placed in.

Bittbox has posted the latest Free Texture Tuesday offering. Paint Splatters, a group of high resolution textures available for download now. You can grab textures from all over the Web, but Bittbox consistently offers very nice textures, which are high resolution enough to use in most all print work. In particular, I like the black-only paint texture (the last preview image on the page) in this weeks download. Don’t forget to check back at Bittbox each Tuesday for a new set of textures.

The arrow keys in Adobe InDesign are more useful than for just moving the text cursor through lines of text. Use the arrow keys while drawing a polygon with the shape tool to add or subtract sides on the polygon, and adjust the inset value of the polygon on the fly. It’s simple to do, just start drawing your polygon, then hit the up or down arrows to add or subtract the number of sides, and the left or right arrow keys to increase or decrease the inset value. As you can see on the video at the upper right, sides are added quickly and easily, on the fly, so you can see just what the polygon will look like before you finish drawing it. This makes it so much easier to draw the perfect starburst in your ads – because I know your New Year’s Resolution was to draw more starbursts in your ads… right?

Design contests, it’s a hot topic in the design community. Most designers frown upon these online design contest sites where designers compete against each other designing logos, ads and Web sites for the chance to win a few hundred bucks. For the record, I have no problem with these design contests. It sharpens your skills and provides the opportunity to earn some extra cash in these tough times. If you’re willing to put in the work for a chance at winning a small fee, so be it. In my opinion, it’s not only not worth the money, but it really belittles the skills of designers everywhere. We’re not talking about spec-work for a potential big client. No, this is just some stranger on the Web looking for the cheapest, fastest work – basically preying on junior designers. But the other day, I came across a site that made my stomach turn. No, it’s not yet another design contest site like 99Designs, it’s much worse. Logo-Instant offers anyone and everyone FREE logos. That’s right, absolutely free. I have no idea who is designing these Web 2.0-style logos, but they should be taken out back and beat about the head, neck and shoulders with their keyboard. While the logos currently available aren’t completely horrible, you have to wonder why anyone would want to use them. After all, you don’t have exclusive rights to the logo. Anyone in the world can download the Photoshop or EPS files provided on the site, customize the name and use the logo as they see fit. Not only that, but the logos I downloaded were all screen-resolution, suitable for Web use only. What does that say about the work we do as designers? It’s really sad that legit designers are forced to compete with these hacks who are willing to provide design services for what I can only assume is virtually nothing. It’s even more sad that people & companies are willing to accept these “stock” logos as part of their branding efforts. I really didn’t even want to link to these people, but I thought you should check it out and offer your thoughts in the comments.