General
Design tip: Choose your fonts wisely
A quick tip for designers who find themselves re-branding a company or designing a campaign. Choose your fonts wisely. That really cool font you download from the Internet probably looks great in the headline. But keep in mind that you’ll likely find out later on that the client wants to use it in the body copy of their brochures, posters, annual reports, etc. The last thing you want to be stuck with is a font family that has only a regular and bold font.
Try to use font families that offer a wide range of fonts. You’ll likely need a light, regular, semibold, bold and black version, as well as condensed versions of all of them.
You may have known that you can create and maintain multiple iPhoto libraries by holding down the Option key when clicking the iPhoto icon in the Dock. This is a useful feature for those who have large collections of photos. In the past, you had to hold the Option key down while launching iPhoto in order to access the dialog box which allowed you to choose which library to open. With iPhoto ’09, you can now just double click the iPhoto library in your Pictures folder to access the library you want to work with. Keep in mind that iPhoto will “remember” the last library you had open, so clicking the iPhoto icon without holding the Option key down will open the last library you worked with. Why would you want to create multiple iPhoto libraries? Well, I like to create a new library for each year. Not only does iPhoto load faster, but it makes it much easier to back up each library to DVDs.
If you use brushes in Adobe Photoshop as much as I do, you no doubt have a few favorite brushes you use often. It can be a real pain if you have several (or in my case, dozens) of brush sets loaded, scrolling through them looking for your faves. Thankfully, you can change the order your favorites appear at in the brushes panel – possibly saving you lots of scrolling each time you use the brush. To rearrange the order the brushes appear, simply go under Edit>Preset Manager and choose Brushes from the pop-up menu. Then click on your favorite brush and drag it to anywhere in the panel you prefer. To move more than one brush, shift + click on multiple brushes to move them all at once.
If you’re like me, you don’t particularly care for OSX’s Dock magnification feature. I just don’t like trying to hit a moving target, especially when I’m dragging files to drop on an icon on the Dock! But every once in a while, I do have the desire to have the feature enabled. You can quickly enable Dock magnification, without turning it on in your System Preferences by holding down Control + Shift while hovering your mouse over the Dock. When you release the keys, Dock magnification is turned off.
Long, long ago, Adobe gave us transparency in InDesign version 2. In each subsequent version of InDesign, Adobe has added ways to enhance documents with transparency, making it even more enticing. There’s one thing that hasn’t changed, however, and that’s the need to flatten transparency for output to a PostScript device. In the article 
When you’re working in Adobe Illustrator, keeping your artwork on different layers can be a huge time-saver and makes it much easier to edit with complex illustrations — much like Photoshop. But sometimes you can’t be bothered to name your layers properly and you rely on the little icons in the Layers Panel to tell you which layer you want to work on. The problem is that those tiny layer icons can be difficult to identify the more you put on each layer (See the image above). Thankfully, Illustrator gives you way to make the icons in the Layer Panel larger. 
First, open the Layers Panel flyout menu and scroll all the way to the bottom and select Panel Options. Next, select the Other: radio button and enter a pixel amount in the size box (I chose 50 pixels). Obviously, this is the size you want your Layers Panel icons to appear. I recommend staying 75 pixels or under — anything larger and you’ll be scrolling quite a bit to see the layers in the Panel. Now just click OK and you’re all set. As you can see by the image below, the icons in the Layers Panel are now much easier to decipher. 
Though my sample illustration isn’t difficult to begin with, you can easily see the advantage of making the icons larger when you compare it to the first image.
Moving objects from on InDesign document to another is as easy as drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste. But what about when your Indesign document contains items on multiple layers and you don’t want to lose them when you move the objects to another document? By default, InDesign merges all the objects when pasting in a new document onto the default layer. InDesign has a simple solution for this earth-shattering dilemma. Simply visit the Layers Panel flyout menu and select