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This is a short 3-minute segment taken from the live webinar Prepress with PDFs on August 27, 2008. This webinar discussed how Adobe PDF files can be used in graphic design prepress workflows. The full version of this online training goes in depth on how to make sure your PDFs will print properly when they arrive at your print vendor.
John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts (free) is a comprehensive PDF that shows how to access almost any special character in any font. The 16-page PDF includes cheatsheets for accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency, legal symbols, math, and greek symbols. Print out the pages for the characters you forget most often, and post them near your computer.
Link: Special Character Shortcuts PDF
Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, as well as HTML codes for web pages. There is also a special section on special nonprinting characters in QuarkXPress 7 and 8, and a handy typographer’s glossary.
Source: This tip comes from the August 2008 issue of Design Tools Monthly. All Seattle-area support clients CreativeTechs receive a complimentary subscription to Design Tools Monthly in their monthly green envelope.
Here is a technique I use every week while proofreading final drafts of this tips newsletter. When you need to proof your final documents or important email, have your computer read the text out loud to you and listen for mistakes. You'll catch errors you might otherwise miss.
In many OS X applications, you can highlight your text and choose [Application] > Services > Speech > Start Speaking Text (if you are using Mail for example, look under the Mail menu next to your Apple menu).
As with last week's tip, this trick only works in Cocoa apps. If you are using an Adobe or Microsoft program where this doesn't work, just paste the text into a new TextEdit document and have your Mac read from there.
Source: Here's how long I've been relying on this technique: We mentioned this tip way back in Issue #03 of this tips newsletter almost four years ago. The team at CreativeTechs know how typo-prone my emails can be when I don't take the time for a good proofreading. I'll be extra vigilant about proofreading this week's newsletter.
This short 7-minute segment comes from CreativeTechs' Marketing with HTML Email Newsletters webinar on August 20, 2008. This webinar covered the practical how-to's for developing an effective, ongoing marketing strategy with HTML Email Newsletters. This clip demonstrates the fundamentals using a service like Campaign Monitor. The full online training includes demos of a number of other services including MailChimp, and Constant Contact. As well as digging into ways to preview and proof your designs on a variety of email clients, and show you how to easily send good looking, desired, emails to a growing list of clients and subscribers.
Even with a well calibrated monitor, it is more precise to color correct using numerical values. This is especially useful when correcting color casts in images with neutral gray areas, or when matching specific colors between multiple images.
Shift-click up to 4 areas of your image with Photoshop's eyedropper tool to identify color sample points you want to watch in the Info palette (Option-Shift to remove them). You can also add color samples this way from within any color correction dialog box such as Curves, Levels, or Hue/Saturation.
Source: Source: Drawn from the "Color Correction by the Numbers" section in the book Photoshop CS3 Photographer's Handbook co-written by Luminious Works trainer and founder Steve Laskevitch (read our announcement about our upcoming partnership with Luminious Works for Seattle-area Workshops).
It's always fun to stumble across a little-known feature that's been around for years. When you're typing text in many OS X applications (Safari, TextEdit, Mail, etc), you can press ESC (F5 also works) for an pop-up list with words from the built in OS X dictionary.
Note: This trick only works in Cocoa apps. It works in most of Apple's built-in software, but unfortunately not in many Adobe or Microsoft applications.
Source: We've run into this tip on a number of blogs over the years, but when John Gruber of Daring Fireball singled it out as one of those great tips many Mac users don’t know, we knew it was time to include it in our collection.
This short 5-minute clip comes from CreativeTechs' Creating Interactive PDFs webinar on August 13, 2008. In this workshop, Seattle trainer Jason Hoppe explorers the many ways designers can add interactive elements to their client's PDFs. Including electronic forms, embedded movies, and many other interactive tricks. [View all Upcoming Webinars]
Note: The sound is a poor recording of a live phone call. We're working on a better way to capture sound in future webinar conference calls.
Online Webinars — Here is our secret plan: We'll post the best clips from each week's webinar for everyone to enjoy; and those of you who want to participate in the full online workshops can sign-up below:
Wed, Aug 20 - HTML Email Newsletters.
Wed, Aug 27 - Prepress with PDFs.
Wed, Sep 3 - Photoshop: Color Correction Techniques.
Wed, Sep 10 - InDesign: Mastering Style Sheets. Wed, Sep 17- Photoshop: Retouching Skin.
This fall, CreativeTechs is partnering with Seattle's top Adobe Authorized Training Center, Luminous Works. We're working to provide a hybrid workshop/webinar environment: Seattle-area designers can attend in person, and our readers from around the world can participate remotely.
Our first mini-workshop is scheduled for September 23. We'll be discussing the how (and why) of building "Findable Flash Websites." Most Flash websites are largely invisible to Google. We'll show you how to test yours, and how to modify it if necessary so potential clients can find you in Google searches.
Stay tuned for additional developments. Lots of fun stuff coming!
Wordle is a fun website that generates word clouds from any text you provide. Word clouds are a visual way of looking at the words used on a website. The image above is a visualization of the words on the front page of the CreativeTechs website. The size and color of each word reflects how frequently it appears in the overall page.
Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
If you design websites for a living Wordle is more than a toy. The words you use on your client's sites form the online brand as far as Google is concerned. So you really have to pay attention to the words you use. Do they reflect the brand that you're working to create?
For copywriters who write for the web, these word clouds provide visual feedback about word choices you might not be aware of. For web designers, a word cloud is a great reminder that Google doesn't care how your site looks.
This is a short 7-minute segment from CreativeTechs recent "Google for Graphic Designers" webinar. In this clip we discuss the importance of building an online brand that Google understands by paying attention to the words you use. The final three minutes includes a demonstration of Wordle in action.
For a list of upcoming webinar topics, visit creativetechs.com/webinars.
Source: We discovered Wordle through a recent post on Debbie Millman's blog showcasing a fascinating Boston Globe feature that compares the words used by the McCain and Obama presidential campaigns.
Three months ago we published two Photoshop actions we developed to clean up shadows in Leopard screenshots when using the command-shift-4 plus spacebar screen capture technique. We received a number of thank-you emails, so those tips must have touched a nerve for some people out there.
This week's tip covers a different way to remove the shadows from Leopard window screen captures: A simple terminal hack that disables shadows in the screen capture itself.
While this doesn't matter much to most users, those extra Leopard shadows can be a real pain for some designers (and tip writers) who regularly use screen captures in documentation.
For more technically inclined users, here are the terminal commands that will remove shadows from Leopard window grabs. Please consider yourself sufficiently warned that using terminal can break your computer if mishandled.
Turn OFF Shadows in Leopard Screen Captures:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
To make the change take effect, logout and login, restart, or kill the SystemUIServer process using the following command:
killall SystemUIServer
Now, when you grab a window using the command-shift-4 plus spacebar shortcut, the shadow is not included.
Turn ON Shadows in Leopard Screen Captures:
And here are the commands to set shadows back to normal.
defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow
As before, logout and login, restart, or kill the SystemUIServer process as before.
If you use screenshots in a lot of documentations, this tip can save you a lot of time. But it depends on how picky you are. With shadows disabled using this terminal technique, the small rounded edges in the top left and right of your windows are not as nicely maintained.
The Photoshop action used here is shown with a custom layer effect turned off to show only the edge transparency. That action is available in our earlier tip: Clean up Shadows in Leopard Screenshots.
If you are the type of person who cares about the subtle transparency details in your screenshots, this terminal trick isn't going to satisfy you. However, if you find yourself doing a lot of quick-and-dirty Mac documentation, and want to get rid of those annoying Leopard shadows, this terminal command can be a great timesaver.
Source: This terminal tip comes from the archives of Mac OS X Hints which we first discovered through a post on the TUAW blog.
This is a short 7-minute segment taken from CreativeTechs' Google for Graphic Designers webinar on August 6, 2008. In this workshop we dig into how designers can build their websites for maximum exposure in today's search engines. [View all Upcoming Webinars]
Note: The sound is a poor recording of a live phone call. We're working on a better way to capture sound in future webinar conference calls.
You've been provided an image file with your client's logo sitting on top of a flat background color. You want to quickly remove the background so the logo is isolated on a transparent layer in Photoshop. This is a classic production challenge, and we've seen production artists tackle this issue dozens of different ways.
In this tip we'll demonstrate an elegant solution to this perpetual challenge using Photoshop's layer blending options. The technique works with any color logo or background, avoids the white fringing that many techniques leave behind, and creates a fully transparent background.
When a client provides their logo to you as a TIFF or other image formats, it opens in Photoshop as a background layer. To apply this technique, you'll need to convert the background to a layer. You can do this by double-clicking on the background layer in the layers palette and giving the layer a name.
To access the blending options controls for your logo layer, double-click on the layer thumbnail in the layers palette. Slowly drag the white slider in the "This layer" gradient until the background behind your logo becomes transparent.
Note: If your logo is on a completely white background, it will become transparent after moving the white slider a single pixel.
Don't click OK yet, we've got another step in this window.
At this point, your logo may seemly look great on it's transparent background. But we're not done yet. If you were to place this logo in it's current shape onto a darkly colored background, you'd quickly discover that while you've removed the basic flat background, there is still an ugly white fringe around your logo.
To remove this fringe, hold down the Option key (Alt in Windows) and continue dragging half of your white slider farther to the left.
Drag this half of your white slider until just before the blackest part of your logo becomes slightly transparent. If your logo is a solid black on a white background, you should be able to drag this slider almost entirely to the left edge of the gradient.
Finally, we have to make these blending adjustments permanent. Because as good as this technique looks right now, if we leave our transparency set entirely by blending options, we'll run into odd problems later when we incorporate our logo into other layered documents.
The easiest and quickest to make these changes permanent is to use Jason Hoppe's patented merge down trick: Add a new empty layer below the one we've been working on, select our original layer and choose Merge Down
Congratulations. You should now have a nice clean version of your logo with a fully transparent background.
Once you've isolated your logo on a transparent background, you can easily apply a wide range of Photoshop effects. In the example below, the logo color is changed using a clipping group with a colored layer above, while other layer styles are used on the logo layer itself.
Source: This tip inspired by recent projects with Seattle designer Pat Hansen of Hansen Design Company, and founder of Noteable You Gifts. This particular technique has come in handy on many occasions, and we've ben meaning to write it up for several months now. Thanks Pat!
Here is the easiest ways to remove System Preference Panes you've added over time and no longer need. Simply control-click, or right-click, on a preference icon in the Others section of your System Preferences (the Other section contains the custom preferences installed by users). A pop-up menu lets you remove the selected preference pane.
This is a great way for those of you who don't want to go digging through various Library folders looking for the actual preference pane manually.
Source: This tip comes directly from James Dempsey's terrific The Graphic Mac. Want a more advanced preferences tip? Check out Jordan Bojar's post on how to Manage Account Preferences across your entire studio from a Mac OS X Server.