CreativeTechs Tips

Say you must produce a looping slideshow of images for a client's tradeshow booth — but you don't have many technical details.

You know the images will be displayed on a HDTV connected to a Windows laptop. You don't know what software will be installed, or what image formats that laptop might support.

Luckily, you know that PDFs can be displayed on almost any computer today — thanks to the ubiquitous free Adobe Reader. This tip will walk you though the basics of creating a self-running PDF slideshow that can run almost anywhere.

Read the Full Tip: "Build an Acrobat PDF Slideshow." »

Tip posted on May 12, 2008 |

Ten years ago, we were installing a lot of mail servers for design firms and advertising agencies across the greater Seattle area. Today, however, we rarely recommend our clients host their own mail servers.

Why the change? Email has become the key tool for conducting business. Creative teams are accessing email away from the office with laptops, webmail, and (increasingly) iPhones. And most significantly, fighting spam has become a full-time job.

In short, if you own an independent creative studio, there is one good reason to have your email handled by a dedicated hosting company: They'll probably do a better job than you.

Read the Full Tip: "Should You Host Your Own Email Server?" »

Tip posted on May 12, 2008 |

It's a sign you know your way around Photoshop when you've mastered the keyboard shortcuts for the Layers palette. Here is a quick reminder: Combine the bracket keys [ or ] with Option/ALT to select the layer above or below; Use Command/Control to move your selected layer up and down.

Read the Full Tip: "Keyboard Shortcuts for Photoshop's Layers Palette." »

Tip posted on May 05, 2008 |

One of the more frustrating Leopard-vs-InDesign issues we're seeing at clients is a bug that causes frequent crashing when using InDesign CS3's Open, Place, Import, Export, or Save dialog boxes. Designers may also experience these particular symptoms while re-linking graphics as well as printing files.

Until Adobe or Apple fixes this issue, we have an odd work-around culled from various online forums that has helped improve stability at several of our clients:

Read the Full Tip: "Leopard vs. InDesign: Crashes on Open, Import, Export, Save and Print." »

Tip posted on May 05, 2008 |

A common Leopard-vs-InDesign complaint we hear from designers is not being able to hide InDesign, either from the InDesign menu or by pressing Command-H. And worse, if you can get InDesign to hide, you can't get it back.

Happily this problem can usually be fixed by deleting the InDesign preference file.

Read the Full Tip: "Leopard vs. InDesign: Can't Hide InDesign." »

Tip posted on May 05, 2008 | Reader comments so far: 0

Seasoned graphic designers wouldn't dream of sending a print project to press without first approving an accurate proof. Your client's email marketing campaign should be no different. You need to be sure you know what your design looks like on the different email clients your readers might be using.

Unless you have a studio filled with testing computers and different email servers, you can't test all the combinations yourself. In this week's creative tip we profile two services that make proofing your email designs quick and painless.

Read the Full Tip: "Proof your email designs in different email clients." »

Tip posted on April 28, 2008 |

If you've updated to the new Mac version of Microsoft Office 2008, you may have noticed Word now saves files in Microsoft's new DOCX format. The problem is, just as Windows users found, not everyone can open this new file format yet. The easy way to prevent compatibility problems with colleagues and co-workers is to change your default file format back to the old DOC format until everyone in your life has upgraded to the new version of Word.

Read the Full Tip: "Save Word 2008 files as DOC instead of DOCX." »

Tip posted on April 28, 2008 |

We've been mining for Acrobat tips in preparation for Jason Hoppe's upcoming workshop on Building PDF Forms. This week, we'd like to link to the mother lode of PDF Forms tips:

101 PDF Forms Tips.pdf

Ted Padova, author of the Acrobat Bible, has created this free 55-page document that covers some of his most frequent tasks when creating Acrobat PDF forms. The tips range from the design stage through adding specialized JavaScripts. And since the document is a PDF (of course) Ted has provided working examples of most the techniques in action.

Read the Full Tip: "Ted Padova's 101 PDF Forms Tips." »

Tip posted on April 21, 2008 |

Managing serial numbers is a headache in almost every creative studio. If you have more than 3 designers on a network, someone has to take responsibility for keeping track of which serial numbers belong on which computers.

CreativeTechs recommends that creative teams stop buying single-user copies of CS3. For the same cost, your studio can get a site license with a single serial number for your entire team. Here's our tip from last year:

Transactional Licensing: Avoid serial number headaches with CS3!

But back to today's tip: What if you are using a single-user copy of CS3, and you need to change which serial number is installed on a particular computer? It turns out Adobe makes changing the serial number easy as can be. No need to uninstall and reinstall software if you know where this "Erase my serial number" checkbox is located.

Read the Full Tip: "Change your Adobe CS3 serial number." »

Tip posted on April 21, 2008 |

Seattle designer Darlin Gray emailed friends and colleagues links to a short video welcoming them to her new website. What makes this tip-worthy is the simple HTML trick that automatically forwards web visitors to her main website after the video introduction is complete. See her example at:

Video Welcome Page: Darlin's Place

Interested in trying this technique yourself? Apple provides a free set of scripts for integrating QuickTime movies into your website. Read on after the jump for a short tutorial on how to create this effect yourself.

Read the Full Tip: "Create a QuickTime Video Landing Page." »

Tip posted on April 14, 2008 |