CreativeTechs Tips

Are you the person that other designers turn to when they have tech questions? Can you support creative pros using Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, FreeHand, etc? Have you lived with the rhythm and flow of a creative studio?

We recently talked with a couple good, technically-minded designers who were intrigued by our Mac Consultant position, but were intimidated they didn't have as much technical skill as CreativeTechs' current team. While this is definitely a technical position, we are more interested in a broad understanding of design software than deep Mac OS X troubleshooting. We've adjusted the position's wording slightly to reflect this.

Position Open: Become a Tech at CreativeTechs

Status Update: Our hunt may be nearing the final stages, so email today if you are interested. It is possible the position will be filled by one of the people we've already talked with.

Bonus Lead: Here is a lead for Seattle-area Mac techs without the design software strengths we need at CreativeTechs. The Omni Group, makers of OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, (and the intriguing new OmniPlan) have a current opening for a System Guru to maintain their Mac OS X servers and workstations.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. In honor of our fellow left-brain professionals, we've put together a couple tips that may be helpful to those of us tasked with the challenging job of keeping creative teams stable, happy and productive.

First up: A Mac Maintenance Checklist. This is something we've been playing with at CreativeTechs -- for our clients who've scheduled a regular monthly maintenance visit to keep their computers fit and healthy.

Mac Maintenance Checklist (PDF)

The checklist is a simple, low-tech way for clients to make sure their computer issues get addressed. Plus it helps the tech avoid missing sporadic maintenance details.

How to use: Hand out a packet of these forms the week before your scheduled maintenance visit. Ask your clients (or co-workers) to jot down a list of the issues they want addressed on the left side of the form. As you do your rounds, check off the items one at a time. It helps keep you organized, and it will make your clients feel better in the process.

Got a better idea? This maintenance checklist is a work-in-progress. We continue to build consensus within our own team on what maintenance steps are appropriate, and how frequently different tasks are needed. Leave us a comment below with suggestions on how you'd improve this form. We'll incorporate ideas into future updates of this checklist.

Source: This form is offered freely to anyone providing Mac support to creative teams -- or for creative studios to use with their own computer consultants. The form itself was designed by Chris Holt of Coolstone Design Works, and partially inspired by a collection of lighthearted information pads at KnockKnock.com. At CreativeTechs, we're always looking for ways to avoid showing up on one of Knock Knock's blamestorming pads!

Posted by Craig Swanson at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Providing computer support for a busy team of graphic designers, account managers, and other creative pros is a challenging job. It demands an odd combination of long-term planning and short-term crisis response.

A new book published by O'Reilly does a good job addressing the real-world, interruption-based environment most system administrators find themselves working in:

Time Management for System Administrators.

As author Thomas Limoncelli says, "A System Administrator's life is divided between putting out fires and building new buildings."

Good time management is crucial to keeping creative teams happy. There aren't many mentoring opportunities that teach these crucial skills to professional system administrators.

While this book does not address the unique issues involved in supporting creative teams, we do recommend this book for anyone who finds themselves supporting clients and their computers for a living.

Source: A related book by Thomas Limoncelli is The Practice of System and Network Administration. This book focuses on general principals of providing IT support to extended teams. The general principals can be applied to any type of computers -- although at 776 pages it is not a casual read.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is another handy Adobe tip from Brian Wood, Director of Training at eVolve Computer Graphics Training in Seattle. This tip works in both Adobe InDesign and Illustrator CS/CS2.

If you want to quickly saturate or desaturate a color in the color palette, hold down Shift while dragging a color slider.

Both InDesign and Illustrator adjust the color sliders in tandem, keeping the values in proportion to each other. Easily giving you a richer or lighter version of your selected color.

Source: QuickTips editor Craig Swanson was suffering a mild case of writers block this week. Happily, Brian came to our rescue with this and a couple other great tips. Thanks Brian!

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When you need to capture an image of a long website design, don't spend your billable hours stiching together multiple screenshots.

Mac-based designers should download a free copy of Paparazzi instead.

In Paparazzi, simply enter the URL and click Capture. Your web page loads in a small preview window. You can save the resulting image in a file format of your choice.

Tip: Use Paparazzi to preview what a site will look like at different resolution. Change the Crop Size pop-up to one of the presets (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768), or enter your own dimensions. You'll get a sense for how well the site design works with different size displays.

Source: Paparazzi was recently featured on the great Mac OS X Hints website. Interested web designers might also want to dig back through the CreativeTechs tips archive for Issue #60: Test your websites on a variety of browsers (scroll down to tip two).

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft's Exchange Server has become an industry standard for providing shared calendars, shared contacts, and centralized email across an organization. An Exchange Server can be a great choice for teams that already have a solid Windows-based infrastructure in place.

But what if you run a Mac-based studio?

That's a question we get asked a lot. Especially by the owners of medium-sized creative studios. Their teams have the same need for centralized calendars and contacts. A good solution for Mac-based creative teams has been hard to find.

At CreativeTechs, we've recently started installing and supporting the Kerio Mail Server. This question is becoming a little easier to answer.

Enter Kerio MailServer

Kerio MailServer 6 sells itself as an Exchange server alternative. You can install it on a dedicated Mac server (or Windows, or Linux), and it provides full Exchange-like functionality.

For Mac users: Kerio MailServer provides full access to shared calendars and shared contacts when used with the latest version of Microsoft Entourage. (The Kerio server works with any mail clients, but full shared calendars and contacts require Microsoft Entourage).

For PC users: Kerio provides a special extension to Microsoft Outlook which allows scheduling and sharing of all shared calendars and contacts. It is easy to install, but does require an additional step for each PC user.

WebMail Access: the Kerio MailServer provides one of the best webmail interfaces we've worked with. Mac or PC users can access their email, contacts, tasks, and calendars. They also have access to shared calendars and shared contacts.

Costs:

Kerio's MailServer pricing starts at $449 for a 20-user license, with an optional $149/yr support option that includes free updates. A version with McAfee Anti-Virus mail scanning is available for $749 for a 20-user license and $249/yr support.

The Verdict:

At CreativeTechs we are starting to support Kerio at a couple clients. So far we've been very impressed with this mail server. Kerio lives up to its boast of being a valid Exchange Server alternative.

For a Mac-based studio, Kerio is the best mail server option we know of today.

But Should You Host Your Own Mail Server?

While this last question is a bit more than we want to bite off in this tip, we should mention that the choice to host your own in-house mail server does add a significant number of security, stability and maintenance issues.

Talk over the pros and cons of hosting an internal mail server with your studios' IT support group before embarking down this road.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is a great resource when you need icons for your website, blog or other design projects. There are many great collections of icons available on the web. We've compiled a list of some of our favorite sources. Enjoy...

Icon Collections:

famfamfam.com: 700+ Icon Collection

A great collection of free icons created by UK-based web developer developer Mark James. Mark's icon collection is an remarkable collection of over 700(!) 16-by-16 pixel icons that covers a wide range of needs.

e-lusion: Grayscale Icon Set

This free Grayscale icon set includes forty free icons which can be used for application toolbars, content management systems, web applications, anything you want.

Sweetie Icon Collection

150+ clean and clear icons to use in your web design. They are licensed under a Creative Commons license, so commercial use is fine. Also feel free to make derivatives with the included Photoshop documents.

Markup: Minimalist Icon Collections

A series of clean, simple black and white icons from a German wweb developer. The icons are free for private or commercial use. Collection include simple arrows, document icons, simple web navigation icons, and others.

graphicPUSH: Free icon sets for web designers.

These icons are designed specifically for blogs and content management systems. A free version contains ten core icons that will get you rolling on your site with the basics like commenting, categories and more. The $12 deluxe version includes forty designs in four different color schemes — in total, 160 icons.

IconBuffet: Free Monthly Icons via Email

IconBuffet sells hundreds of royalty free collections of icons. It's a commercial stock library that focuses on icons. We're including them in our "free icons" list because they do send out a free collection of stock icons to people who sign up for their "free delivery" email.

The Yellow Icon : Free Icons Collections from Many Artists

A huge number of icons collections from a wide number of artists. These icons are primarily intended for use as computer icons -- although there is no reason they could not be used on websites.

IconBAZAAR. Icon Clipart of the 90's.

The IconBAZAAR collection is a large dated collection of 90's icon clipart. Permission is granted for limited personal use of up to twenty images. We probably would have left this collection off our list -- except (for no justifiable reason) this animated icon of a caffeine molecule caught our eye.

Strawbee: Tiny Little Icons

There are 21 icons in this set. They were specifically designed for use with a contact management system of some sort, but obviously you can use them for what you like, as they’re fairly generic icons.

Some Random Dude: Bitcons & Sancons

Bitcons is a mini-pixel icon set (16×16 pixels) containing 121 individual red icons for various subjects. Bitcons is intended to be a very hypo-styled icon set; allowing for broad use for design on the web. Don't like red? A spin-off collection called Sanscons was created with white icons to allow for any color and many different shapes.

MaxPower: The motherload list of Free Icons!

MaxPower maintains a great updated list of free icon collections from all over the web. Most of the collections listed here are included in MaxPower's list. They also put a lot of effort into identifying what type of licensing agreement each collection of icons requires. (Note: We found the MaxPower list part of the way through building our own collection -- but we must credit them with not only turning us onto new sources of free icons we might have otherwise missed, but also providing the visual inspiration for the opening graphic in this blog entry).

Free Marketing Tip for Designers:

Looking for a way to draw more visitors to your website or blog? Here is a great marketing tip from the Maxpower blog which gets a lot of traffic:

I made this list because I too have been looking for icons… I had no idea this many people would be interested. Crazy. Attn artists: would you like 1000’s of people to view your work? Make a free icon set and publish it. Who knew?

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In honor of the 4th of July: For tip readers in America, here is the best Mac-based fireworks screensaver I've seen:

Mac Version of Skyrocket or Windows Version of Skyrocket.

Want to see it in action before deciding to download? We've uploaded a couple short video capture to YouTube. This first one is my favorite. The camera is looking directly up:

Fireworks are rendered in 3D with realistic sound, camera flares, and lighting. The camera view can be set to fly around the the fireworks display. Hypnotic.

Go into the options for this screen saver and play with some of the settings. This example has the screen angle changing and flying through the fireworks display:

Finally, here is a more sedate video capture with the camera angle changes turned off.

I've been seeing fireworks screen savers mentioned on a number of blogs lately, but it was Guy Kawasaki's blog that actually got me to download and install it. Thanks Guy!

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We've long known how to customize the toolbar in Mac OS X's Finder windows -- but recently a client demonstrated a great example why we should.

Try adding aliases of your most frequently used applications to the toolbar at the top of your Finder windows. It's like having a tiny version of the dock hovering just above your files. This allows you to quickly drag documents onto the program you want to open them in. For example, open screenshots in Photoshop instead of Preview, or Quark files in InDesign instead of QuarkXPress.

In our example we've removed a few of the default items from the Finder window, rearranged the order, and added aliases for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat and Word.

There are a couple ways you can adjust the default Finder window.

Option 1: The Quick Way...

The quickest way to rearrange your Finder toolbar is to hold down the Command key (⌘) and drag a toolbar item to a new location, or drag it out of the toolbar to remove it.

To drag an application alias to the toolbar, hold down the Command key and drag your applications up one at a time. It works much like adding icons to your dock, the other items will slide out of the way, and a small green plus sign will appear on your cursor.

Tip: Choose between displaying small or large icons in the toolbar, hold down the Control key and click in the toolbar area. A pop-up menu will give options on wether to display icons or text, as well as allowing you to choose "use small size."

Option 2: The Detailed Method...

In the Finder, choose View > Customize Toolbar.

To add an icon, drag it to the toolbar at the top of the window.

To remove an icon, drag it out of the toolbar.

To arrange the icons, drag them into the order you prefer.

To use the default toolbar, drag it to the window's toolbar.

To add an application alias, open a second window in the Finder, and drag your application's icon to this toolbar.

In the Show section, you can customize the size of toolbar items and how they are displayed.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)