The Graphic Mac

I recently had the need to use a nice clean image of a smartphone. I began searching through the numerous images found via Google and eventually came across this freely available layered Photoshop file of a BlackBerry – just what I was looking for from a user over at DeviantArt. The 6.2 MB download expands to a 15 MB PSD image containing, well, a ton of layers – allowing you to customize the heck out of it.

If you’ve updated to Snow Leopard, you may be interested to know that you can use Quick Look in Open and Save dialog boxes; just select the image you wish to view and hit the Spacebar. Of particular interest to designers, this tip also works in the Place dialog box in all the Adobe Creative Suite applications. This means you can now get a better/larger preview of the image(s) you’re going to place in your document. If you’re still running a G5 Mac, you can’t upgrade to Snow Leopard, but you can get this feature using Default Folder X – my all-time favorite piece of shareware!

With the release of the Adobe Creative Suite 4, all the major apps have adopted a tabbed document interface. At first it’s a bit difficult to get used to, but I’ve found it to be a pretty decent productivity increase. The one thing that baffled me was how difficult it was to get objects from one document to another. I of course am not one for reading manuals, so it took me a while to figure out how simple it really is. You can drag objects (or entire layers for that matter) from one document to another when they’re both open simply by selecting the object(s) or layer(s) from one document and dragging them to the tab of the second document and hovering them over the tab for a brief second. The second document moves to the front and you can let go of them to place them.

Whenever Apple releases a new operating system, the first thing creatives consider before updating is whether or not the new OS will play nicely with their existing investments in hardware and software. For most designers and artists, that means Adobe Creative Suite, font managers, and Web browsers, not to mention their existing Macs. In my latest article at Macworld, I share a brief overview of Snow Leopard, and how it might affect designers using the Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications. To make a long story short, the answer is yes, go ahead and upgrade. While the speed increases are nominal at this point; future upgrades to individual applications will boost speed in the not-so-distant future – as shown by Safari, Mail and iCal. I experienced no issues running Adobe CS4, Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2 or any other applications I use on a daily basis.

LunaBar is a pretty cool script font, available for free over at DeviantArt. You can never have too many good script fonts, I always say!

If you have an InDesign object such as a text box, or an image frame in your document and you wish to remove any stroke and fill it currently has, you can do it with a quick keystroke. Simply select the object in question and hit the Slash key ( / ). This will set either the fill or stroke to None, depending on which you have active at the time. To remove the color from the other attribute, just hit the X key to switch and hit the slash key again.