CreativeTechs Tips

For this week's tip we're breaking away from our normal weekly format. We've compiled links to over a dozen free eBooks, PDFs, and Manifestos, containing a plethora of sales, marketing, and management strategies to help you run and grow a successful creative studio. We've linked directly to the PDFs for several of these books:

1. The Word Of Mouth Manual
2. Win Without Pitching Manefesto
3. Ten Tests of Your Studio's Positioning
4. The Design Funnel
5. Time Management for Creative People
6. The Guide to Making Passive Income
7. How To Be Creative
8. Web Designer's Success Guide
9. AIGA's "Why Design?" Booklet
10. A Primer in Social Media
11. Business Start-up Guide for Designers and Makers
12. Branding vs Advertising
13. The Zen of Blogging
14. Harvard Business Review: The One Number You Need to Grow.
15. Testify: How Remarkable Organizations are Creating Customer Evangelists.

No list of marketing ebooks would be complete without including the contributions of Seth Godin whose book, The Ideavirus, is claimed to be the most downloaded eBook of all time. Here are some of his many freely available publications in roughly chronological order:

16. The Idea Virus
17. The Bootstrapper's Bible
18. Realy Bad Powerpoint
19. Bull Market: 2004
20. Knock Knock
21. Who's There?
22. Flipping the Funnel
23. Do Less
24. Pushing Past the Dip: How to Become the Best in the World
25. Marketing Mismatch: When New Won't Work With Old.

This list may continue to grow, so check back. We'll post additional free books as we discover them.

Source: Lately, we've heard a lot of studio owners expressing a renewed focus on their sales and marketing efforts. We are strong believers that healthy design firms must maintain a consistent, ongoing marketing effort.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:45 PM | Permalink

There is something immensely satisfying about discovering a Photoshop feature that's been sitting in front of you for years. The Copy Merged command has been waiting patiently in Photoshop's edit menu for well over a decade. Yet I've missed it all that time. A quick poll of savvy Seattle Photoshop production artists tells me I'm not the only one who missed this gem.

If you're working on a multi-layer Photoshop document and want to copy a portion of the combined image into another document, simply choose Edit > Copy Merged (command+shift+C) to copy a flattened version of your selection. You can paste anywhere you like — including a newly created file if you wish.

Source: This tip was featured on James Dempsey's terrific The Graphic Mac blog. To illustrate this technique, we used an image from last week: Prototype Packaging using Photoshop Smart Objects.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink

Here is a nice, quick one. If you’re working on an (ahem!) important confidential document and someone walks into the room who shouldn’t see your screen, you can instantly darken you Mac's screen by pressing ctrl-shift-eject. To turn the brightness back to where it was, press any key or move the mouse.

Source: This tip comes from a post by Matt Klein on the Small Dog Electronics Barkings Blog.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:45 AM | Permalink

Are you working on a product packaging job? Here's a way to combine digital product photography with Adobe Photoshop Smart Objects in CS2 or CS3 to create quick virtual prototypes. The process is fairly easy once you understand the technique, and can be used for some pretty remarkable results.

Step 1: Photograph your product alone. Then with a reference grid.

In our example, we took two pictures of our blue medicine bottle. The first photo is the product photo we'll wrap our label around. The second photo includes a cut-out grid that will be used as a visual reference.

We created the grid in Adobe Illustrator, printed it on a laser printer and trimmed it down. Be careful not to change the angle or position of the camera or bottle between these two photos.

Step 2: Place the Illustrator grid art as a Smart Object, and Warp.

Here's the magic. In the first step we photographed a reference image with our placed grid pattern. Now we open that image in Photoshop -- and place the original Illustrator grid as a new layer.

You'll need to group that placed grid into a new Smart Object before you'll be able to apply the warp command (Layer > Smart Objects > Group into New Smart Object).

Now your grid is ready to be warped into position (Edit > Transform > Warp). Work with Photoshop CS2 or CS3's warp tool until you've matched the reference photo exactly.

Finally, replace the underlying bottle image with your original product photo -- make sure to line it up exactly. We now have a Smart Object that has been carefully warped to the precise shape of our product.

Step 3: Place your label artwork into the warped Smart Object.

We are almost done!

Double-click on the warped grid in the layers palette. A separate window opens showing the contents of that Smart Object. Place your label artwork into this document.

In our example we placed a label we designed in Illustrator. This artwork comes in as an additional layer in our Smart Object. If we closed that Smart Object window, our logo will be warped onto the bottle with the grid still visible beneath it. However since we don't really need the grid anymore it is probably easiest to turn off that layer before we close up our window.

Voilà! Add a touch of shadows and highlights and we have a pretty decent prototype of our new label design to show our client. Plus, because this technique is built with a Smart Object, we can continue to open and refine our label design as often as we like.

Source: This tip inspired by a similar technique in Russell Brown's Photoshop CS2 Tips & Techniques. Doctor Brown is an incomparable Photoshop showman. If you ever have an opportunity to catch his live show, do so.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink

The AIGA|Aquent Survey of Design Salaries 2008 is now available.

This survey is widely recognized as the most comprehensive look into how creative professionals are compensated. The results are drawn from responses from more than 6,200 design professionals across the United States.

Link: Design Salaries 2008

Curious how you stack up with your peers? The website has a location-based salary calculator that lets you compare average salaries using a wide range of variables.

Link: AIGA|Aquent Salary Calculator

Play with this handy tool and you can uncover a wealth of details:

• What's the average salary for a Creative Director in Seattle?
• How do salaries compare between design studios and in-house design departments?
• How do different cities compare in creative salaries?
• What is the trend for designer salaries over the last several years?

Enjoy the research.

By the way, you can also download a PDF of the full report as well:

Salary Survey 2008.pdf

Source: This tip comes from the July 2008 issue of Design Tools Monthly. Seattle creative teams with a CreativeTechs support plan receive a complimentary subscription to Design Tools Monthly in their monthly care package.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:45 AM | Permalink

RSS feeds are a great way to stay updated whenever new articles (or tips) are posted to your favorite blogs. But the usefulness doesn't stop there. As you become more comfortable using RSS feeds, you'll discover all sorts of handy ways you can use RSS to grow your business.

For example, you can turn any search on Craigslist into a personalized RSS feed that notifies you whenever newly posted listings fit your search criteria.

Turn any Craigslist Search into an RSS Feed.

Visit Craigslist.org and chose a nearby city from their growing list. Then type in a simple search you want to be updated on.

In our case, we've done a search for "graphic designer" in the Jobs section of the Seattle-Tacoma edition of Craigslist. Which results in this search result:

Result: seattle.craigslist.org/search/jjj?query=graphic%20designer

On the Craigslist results, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you should find a small orange RSS icon.

Click this icon, and the RSS feed version of your Craigslist search should launch in your default RSS reader. If you happen to be browsing the web with Apple's Safari browser, you'll automatically switch to Safari's handy built-in RSS reader.

Drag the URL of that feed into your bookmarks bar, and Safari will notify you when new posts fit your search profile.

We wrote a short tip two years ago on reading RSS feeds in Safari: Subscribe to RSS news feeds in Safari.

Some Example Craigslist Searches & Feeds:

To help spark your imagination, here is a small collection of RSS feeds for some example searches that might be of interest to a Seattle-area creative professional:

Job Searches:

1. All art/media/design jobs in Seattle Area
2. Graphic Designer jobs in Seattle Area
3. Creative Director jobs in Seattle Area
4. Flash Jobs in Seattle Area
5. Web Designer jobs on the Eastside

Gig Searches (Potential Projects):

6. Graphic Design projects in Seattle Area
7. Photography projects in Seattle Area (Omitting Weddings)
8. Logo projects in Seattle Area
9. Web Design projects in Seattle Area
10. Photoshop projects in Seattle Area

Other Types of Searches:

11. Mac G5's for sale in Seattle Area under $1,000
12. Seattle Office Space for Rent (500-1500sqft and under $1000/month)
13. Free Macintosh Stuff in Seattle

Learn More About RSS:

Still fuzzy what RSS is about? Here are two more tips to clear things up:

Bonus Tip: What is RSS? A Fun (Short) Video.

Bonus Tip: Subscribe to RSS news feeds in Safari.

Source: This tip loosely inspired by our upcoming July 30, 2008 workshop, Blog Your Studio, in which we'll demonstrate how (among other things) to create an RSS feed of your studio's portfolio, so interested clients can always stay updated on your latest work.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:45 AM | Permalink

Try this test on your Mac: Select a collection of ten image files in the Finder and open them in Photoshop. You can either double-click the files, or drag them together onto the Photoshop icon in your dock.

Do they open up in the order you expected? Do they open in alphanumeric or chronological order? Chances are Photoshop opens the images in a seemingly random order. How frustrating!

This annoyance isn't limited to Photoshop. With a few notable exceptions, opening a list of files from the Mac OS X Finder results in a random order in most applications. In this tip we'll describe 3 workarounds to solve this annoying behavior.

Workaround #1: Use Column View instead of List View in the Mac Finder.

The easiest way to avoid a random sort when opening multiple files from the Finder is to use column view instead of list view. In the Finder menu, choose View > as Columns, or click on the column view icon in the top of your Finder window.

Double-click on a collection of files in column view, and they'll open in alphanumeric order in the final application.

Tip: Want to open all your files in a specific application? You can't drag the file to an icon in the dock — that opens them with the same frustratingly random sort. Instead, right-click or control-click on the selected files and choose Open With from the pop-up menu.

Workaround #2: Select Multiple Files from the Open Dialog Box.

Another easy way to avoid the random sort is to simply select them all directly in your application's Open dialog box. This works in Photoshop, and many other applications.

Workaround #3: Open Files using Adobe Bridge Instead.

Finally, you can avoid the Finder altogether. When you open a collection of files using Adobe Bridge, the correct sort order is maintained. Plus, when using Bridge, you have a greater number of sort options available when browsing your files (chose View > Sort from the main menu).

Editorial: Why is this still a problem?

The first public beta of Mac OS X was released in late 2000. We are currently using the fifth major release (Leopard 10.5). It seems inconceivable that this tip still needs to be written. Here is to hoping that in in the next release (Snow Leopard 10.6) we won't still need these types of silly workarounds.

Source: This tip is inspired by a range of frustrated phone calls we've received about this issue over the years.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:45 AM | Permalink

Each week we get emails and phone calls from readers outside of Seattle who want to sign up for one of our workshops. We've been promising an online test of these classes for people in other parts of the country.

So we're opening the question up to you: What topics are you most interested in? Visit this quick survey and simply check off any topics you'd like to see offered as an online webinar:

Survey: CreativeTechs Online Workshop Topics

The responses we get to this survey will help us determine whether to offer online workshops. So if you are interested, please participate.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:42 PM | Permalink