The Zen of CSS Web Design.
Is your personal name URL still available? Get it!
A couple years ago I was checking to see if CraigSwanson.com was still available. It was not. In fact to drive that point home, I found this blog entry by another Craig Swanson commenting on being one of thousands of people with the exact same name:
“‘Craig Swanson'” is quite possibly the ‘John Smith’ of the late 20th century.”
Somewhat sobering to be just one in thousands of Craig Swanson’s out there. Too bad I wasn’t the first one to register the domain. If your name is still available, grab it.
Disable Microsoft Messenger’s Security Warning.
Microsoft Messenger 6 for Macintosh was released in September. The new version is a Universal application built to run on both PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs, and brings a number of new features, including spellchecking, improved corporate server compatibility, and the ability to communicate with friends on the Yahoo! chat network.
There is one security feature we’ve been hearing complaints about: Messenger 6 now begins every IM session with a stern (and longwinded) warning:
Warning text: “Never give out your password or credit card number in an instant message conversation. To help prevent infection by a computer virus or worm, never accept or open any file or link in an instant message until you verify its authenticity with the sender.”
There’s no checkbox or preference to turn off the persistent warning, but if you’re willing to pry into Messenger’s application structure there’s a hack to make it go away for good.
Transparent Gradients in Illustrator.
Update: Illustrator CS4 now adds easy transparent gradients! We have a video showing the new Illustrator CS4 Gradient Annotator in action. If you are using an older version of Illustrator, read on for the tip below.
Here is a great question we recently fielded from an in-house designer at Pixar in California: “How do I fill an object in Adobe Illustrator with a gradient that goes from an opaque solid color at one end to transparent at the other end?”
Creating a gradient with transparency is so easy in Photoshop, you might assume the same would be true for Illustrator. However the process is somewhat more involved.
The answer involves using a special Opacity Mask to add a transparent gradient to your object. Once you understand how to use Opacity Masks in Illustrator CS and CS2, the effect is easy to reproduce.
Halloween Papercraft Toys
We try to do something different with our tips newsletter on holidays. So in honor of Halloween we’d like to share a fun collection of Halloween papercraft templates created by artist Ray O’Bannon at his RavensBlight website:
Here you’ll find an assortment of PDF templates, all free for you to print out and fold together. The templates include coffin gift boxes (shown above), Halloween masks, a cemetery, a haunted house, a fun old-style robot, a mechanical flying bat, and quite a few other dark delights.
Two Type Specimen Book Utilities.
In any given month three or four designers ask us for a good way to print type specimen books. While several tools offer this ability, here are our current favorites:
Vennix’s Font Tools 6.0 (screenshot shown here) prints meaningful font specimen pages, not only from active fonts, but from inactive
fonts as well. It sports an attractive interface including a special type book creator which allows you to easily select and print font samples in a variety of layouts. Font Tools can also scan Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign documents for used fonts, and collect the results to help aid archiving. [Cost: $50]
Lemke’s FontBook 4.4 has a much wider selection of layouts available for printing books. However it offers few options to select which fonts you wish to print, which can waste a lot of time (or paper) when printing larger type collections. The software itself feels less polished than Font Tools, however the choice of layouts and lower price may appeal to some designers. [Shareware: $10]
Six free Internet speed test sites.
Compare document revisions in Acrobat Pro.
AIGA’s standard client contract.
How to Answer: “I’d Like the Computer Files.”
The October issue of the Creative Business newsletter has a valuable two-page white paper titled “How To Answer: I’d Like The Computer Files”, which discusses the legal and business issues involved when a client requests a copy of the original files used to build a recent project.
This increasingly common client request can pose a dilemma for many creative studios. Should you give them up? Do you have to? How do you respond to your client’s request?
