Leopard Hack: Turn off Leopard’s 3D Dock.
Leopard Hack: Make Leopard’s menu bar opaque.
Use your font manager’s preview window.
Too many active fonts can slow your computer down, make the font menu long and unwieldy, and lead to a host of other computer problems. So to coax a little more speed and stability out of your copy of InDesign, graphic designers should keep those long font menus under control.
But what if you are brainstorming a new logo? That’s exactly the time you want access to your full library of thousands (and thousands) of creative fonts.
Happily, the big three font managers (FontAgent Pro, Suitcase, and FontExplorer) all provide a quick way to try out your fonts — without having to activate them first. Type a name or phrase into the preview window. Then scroll through your huge font collection and see what catches your eye. When you find something you want to play with, turn that font on for use in your graphics applications.
Learn Adobe’s Pen Tool with Bézier Dot-to-Dot.
Learn Adobe’s Pen Tool with Advanced Math.
Preparing for Leopard: Helvetica is Dead.
OBITUARY: After a prolonged battle with Mac OS X, Helvetica — along with younger cousin Helvetica Neue — was finally pronounced dead on October 28, 2007 with the release of Leopard, by Apple, in California.
For years, print-based graphic designers and prepress professionals have fought to replace certain Mac OS X default fonts with their existing PostScript Type 1 fonts of the same name — Helvetica being a primary example.
It’s been a losing battle.
Now with Leopard, the war for control of Helvetica is done, and Mac OS X won.
A List Aparts’ 2007 Web Design Survey.
Embed a free Flash MP3 player on your blog.
Last week we posted a fun collection of Halloween MP3s which received a tremendous amount of web traffic. Many people asked about the embedded MP3 player we used to let visitors to listen to songs from their browsers.
For this week’s creative tip, we decided to provide a short tutorial on how to setup and use a free Flash-based music player developed by Fabricio Zuardi.
To demonstrate that player in action we’d like to feature the work of Creativetechs’ newest Mac IT consultant, Dave Corter, who in addition to being an excellent Mac engineer has also published several albums of Didgeridoo music. Click on a couple titles above to give them a listen, or scroll down for a tutorial on how to embed your own music player.
November 90-Minute Mini-Workshops.
Join us at the Creativetechs office Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day.
The cost is $50 per workshop.
