The long-and-short of it for me is: mehhh. The first thing I did was turn on the Use Legacy “New Dialog” in the General tab of the preferences so I can avoid the highly annoying New Document dialog box that cuts off the Margins & Bleed entry areas to make room for giant useless icons for standard documents that used to live in a tidy little drop-down menu.

The new “Spectrum UI” is a huge leap backwards. You used to be able to adjust the brightness of the entire interface with a slider in the prefs; tweaking it just to your liking. Now you have four options: Dark (too dark for me, and too much contrast), Medium Dark (can’t decide if it wants to be dark or light and fails at both), Medium Light (which has no contrast at all and makes the entire interface look like a giant gray box), and Light (which is bright but useable).

I like the “flatter” interface, but it’s nothing to write home about.

Since David Blatner did a whole lot of work writing it up, I’ll point you to his review at InDesignSecrets.

Since you’re heading over to InDesignSecrets, take a look at these tips while you’re there:
Adding Alt Text to Images With Object Export Options
Naming Items in the Layers Panel

It’s nice to see Adobe updating InDesign regularly, but I’m starting to feel a bit neglected with the lack of new features, bug fixes and overall speed increases.

Start by framing your bigger picture before adding those smaller bullet points. Tell compelling before-and-after stories. Hiring managers will see what you have done — and can do for them. You’ll show how you’d improve their organizations, based on what you’ve done in the past.

I completely agree that telling a potential employer of specific actions you took that resulted in positive outcomes is much better than simply telling them your title and typical job duties.

For many projects, one font isn’t enough to create visual interest and establish the information hierarchy. And when you have multiple typefaces, you want to be sure that they work well together.

Check out 8 tips for combining typefaces.

Digital Photography School has put together a fantastic collection of links for their best articles on macro photography. If you’re a photography hobbiest, it’s well worth browsing through the articles.

Photo credit: Macro look of the Green frog by Rosan Nepal.

If you’re making a presentation in front of people you don’t know, it can be a little never-racking, to say the least. Especially if you’re not used to doing it. PublicSpeaking is a site which offers some helpful advice. Check it out.

Photoshop Etiquette is a site dedicated to offering some best practices for web designers using Adobe Photoshop. Of course, many of the tips are applicable for print designers as well.

Naming layers and using folders to group appropriate layers is a pet peeve of mine. There’s nothing worse than opening a PSD file with 75 layers all named “Layer Copy 1 Copy” and set in no particular order.

Got any tips not listed that makes life easier when using Photoshop? Share in the comments below.