If you’ve ever wondered how to create animated GIFs in Photoshop, we’ve created a simple tutorial with some example files you can download and try out.
We use a lot of animated GIF files in our weekly tips. They are fun to build, and better for our email subscribers because Flash animations are not supported in most email readers.
Next month, I’m giving a talk at Seattle’s Graphic Artists Guild about online social marketing. Want a sneak peak at some of the topics we’ll be discussing? Here are three short, manifestos to get you started:
The Care & Feeding of Your Network.
Build Your Brand in Bits and Bytes: Building Your Personal Brand Online.
I hand-picked these three from a terrific collection of manifestos at ChangeThis.com. They are all a quick read, and each has a couple nuggets of wisdom that I’m hoping to incorporate into next month’s talk.
Every graphic designer eventually finds themselves facing this client request. You’ve designed a newsletter layout in Adobe InDesign. The client loves it, but they want a template in Microsoft Word they can edit themselves.
Creativetechs happens to be located in Seattle, just across the lake from the Redmond campus of Microsoft. Needless to say, we get this question a LOT from various graphic designers in our area. There isn’t a perfect solution, but here is a technique that does a surprisingly good job.
We’ve seen sporadic cases of Photoshop, InDesign, or Acrobat that stop working at various design firms, with the dialog box show above.
“Licensing for the product has stopped working. This product has encountered a problem which requires that you start your computer before it can be launched.”
If this happens to your, make note of the error code, and take a look at this handy, exhaustive entry in Adobe’s Knowledge Base:
Adobe: “Licensing for this product has stopped working”
In that article (far too lengthy to summarize), Adobe helpfully explains nine different ways your legally purchased and properly installed Creative Suite products might have licensing failures, and the variety of ways those issues can be addressed.
Source: Creativetechs technician, Jasson Lewellen, has discovered and solved many of these issues firsthand at various studios around Seattle. This issue is also covered this week in our sister technical blog, Make Mac Work: CS4 Licensing Stops Working
In December I published a tip on Frugal Ways to Spend Before Year End. Around that time, I asked a friend and colleague, Jason Knopp at Apple specialist The MacPac, to pull together a list of their used and refurbished Mac inventory as a resource we could point readers toward as part of saving money on computer purchases.
Well, he put in a fair bit of work, and under the pressure of deadlines, I never included it in my story. To make up for that, I’d like to correct the record now. If you are looking for good deal on new, previous generation, or used Apple products, check out the MacPac Clearance page:
Note: That link isn’t available for the general public. Jason pulled it together in December just for our readers. Sorry for letting it languish Jason!
You thought the old InDesign vs. QuarkXPress rivalry was dead? In the past three months both Adobe and Quark have published free downloadable guides showing how their competitor’s customers can best work with their software.
Adobe: Quark to InDesign CS4 Conversion Guide (PDF)
Quark: QuarkXPress 8 Integration Guide for Adobe Creative Suite (PDF).
These are both well designed and useful guides. Interestingly they are both geared to QuarkXpress users. Adobe’s ebook helps you plan a migration and smooth your transition from QuarkXPress to InDesign CS4. While Quark’s ebook helps you stay with QuarkXpress, while integrating with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications.
Source: I ran across these books at different times on two of the best online resources for QuarkXPress and InDesign knowledge: PlanetQuark maintained by Jay Nelson of Design Tools Monthly. And InDesignSecrets founded by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Last year we published a tip showing how web designers could test their website designs on Apple’s iPhone Simulator. Here is another, simpler, tip along those lines.
Many companies today are creating special versions of their website that automatically display for iPhone visitors. Some examples include Amazon, Google, Bank of America, and even our Creativetechs Tips blog.
Turn on Safari’s Developer Menu option and you can easily tell Safari to impersonate an iPhone (or other browser types) when visiting different webpages. It isn’t the same as a full iPhone simulator, but this can be pretty useful for web designers testing custom site designs.
Mactracker is a free utility that maintains detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made. Including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. The collection also includes information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, Wi-Fi Cards/Base Stations, Newton, and Mac OS versions.
For long-time Mac users, browsing through the history of Mac models can be a fun trip down memory lane. On a practical level, this information can be useful when manually compiling an updated inventory of your studio’s computers.
Wow. We had a fantastic Photoshop class today!
Today we experimented with adding a live Twitter chatroom for webinar participants to interact with each other during the workshop. That was a lot of fun, and in the process #creativetechs ended up becoming a trending topic on Twitter’s search page.
That’s largely thanks to an extended Twitter conversation about bacon. Which ended up spilling out into the live classroom. (Don’t worry, that will become clear once we get some video clips posted.)
Today was a LOT of fun. Thanks to everyone in person and online who joined us.
