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.
Leopard Hack: Turn off Leopard’s 3D Dock.
For our first Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard tips, we’ve been collecting a variety of popular visual tweaks and most-requested adjustments to Apple’s updated interface. Because our readership includes a mix of users, we’ve presented each hack in a technical and non-technical format. If you’ve recently upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard, and find yourself disliking the new 3D […]
Leopard Hack: Make Leopard’s menu bar opaque.
For our first Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard tips, we’ve been collecting a variety of popular visual tweaks and most-requested adjustments to Apple’s updated interface. Because our readership includes a mix o fusers, we’ve presented each hack in a technical and non-technical format. If you’ve recently upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard, and find yourself disliking the new translucent […]
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.
The problem with grasping Adobe’s pen tool is that you can’t really learn it by reading a description or watching a demonstration. To master the pen tool, you must actively draw with it. Eventually, after enough repetition, something clicks and the pen tool starts to make sense. So, how does one teach a skill that […]
Learn Adobe’s Pen Tool with Advanced Math.
Okay, we don’t actually expect anyone to learn Adobe’s pen tool through the study of cubic Bézier curves — but we love this cool animation of how the Bézier spline is actually derived from the mathematical equations you control with your handy pen tool. You can read more than you care to know about the […]
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.
In April 2007, A List Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing a treasure trove of data on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. The Web Design Survey 2007 If you are a web […]
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.
