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Learn to Make a Flash Video Game.

Flash skills are increasingly in demand, and there is a shortage of good Flash designers on the market today. Yet, despite the business opportunities, many print designers find the leap to interactive Flash design intimidating.

If that sounds familar, here is a great series of tutorials detailing how to create a simple Flash-based shooter game from scratch. The series was developed by Kongregate.com and includes free downloadable Flash source files for the game “Shoot” shown above. The tutorials walk novices through the fundamentals of using Flash as a game building tool, and explores the elements needed to pull together a simple, interactive shooter game.

While building a simple arcade game might appear a bit frivolous, the Flash skills you’ll pick up along the way are serious business.

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November 3, 2008
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Full CS4 Documentation Available Online

Even before CS4 shipped, Adobe released the entire documentation on the web. So if you have questions about a particular CS4 feature, you can go right to the source. Follow these links to the web documentation, a downloadable PDF manual, or jump right into a summary of what’s new in each CS4 application: Photoshop CS4 […]
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October 20, 2008
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Adobe CS4 Now Shipping!

Last Wednesday, October 15th, Adobe began shipping CS4. This week we bring you a special much-too-long collection of CS4 links for designers and photographers who are debating if and when to upgrade to Adobe’s latest creation. Link: Adobe Online StoreLink: Adobe CS4 Upgrade Eligibility ToolLink: Apple CS4 Buying GuideLink: Amazon CS4 Page
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October 20, 2008
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CSS Cheatsheet Reference Cards.

Reference cards are concise guides you can keep handy when mastering a new skill. They are cheatsheets on steroids. DZone produces an attractive weekly series of RefCardz, including this great two-part series on CSS web design: Link: Core CSS: Part 1 Link: Core CSS: Part 2 The RefCardz series is geared towards developers — however […]
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October 13, 2008
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Discover the power of GREP in InDesign CS3.

One of the most powerful (and least intuitive) features added in Adobe InDesign CS3 is the new GREP panel in the Find/Change dialog box. GREP is a powerful tool that lets you use wildcards to search and replace text. A full discussion of GREP in InDesign is beyond what we can cover in one of […]
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October 6, 2008
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Select and Distribute Guides in InDesign.

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Need a series of equally spaced guides in your next layout? No problem. You can select and align ruler guides as easily as any other objects in InDesign.

Simply use the Selection tool (the arrow) and shift-click on several guides to select them, or drag a selection box over multiple guides. Then click on the horizontal or vertical distribution buttons in the Control Panel. You can also use InDesign’s Align panel (Window > Object & Layout > Align).

Note: You can’t select guides and other objects at the same time. When you drag your marquee over multiple guides, make sure not to select any other objects on your page.

Source: This tidbit found in the September 2008 issue of Design Tools Monthly. Seattle creative teams with a Creativetechs support plan receive a complimentary subscription to Design Tools Monthly in their monthly care package.

September 29, 2008
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Expand Selections Without Rounding Corners.

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If you’ve ever wanted to slightly expand the size of a selection in Photoshop, you may have experienced this frustration. When you choose Select > Modify > Expand, Photoshop expands the size of your selected area — but it rounds the corners in the process.

Next time, choose Select > Transform Selection instead. Photoshop’s traditional transform box appears around your selection. Drag a corner to resize it, or type new values into the Options Bar. Ta-da. An enlarged selection, with square corners!

Source: This tidbit found in the July 2008 issue of Design Tools Monthly. Seattle creative teams with a Creativetechs support plan receive a complimentary subscription to Design Tools Monthly in their monthly care package.

September 22, 2008
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Adobe CS4 To Be Unveiled on September 23.

Next week, Adobe is revealing Creative Suite 4 (CS4) on September 23, in a special web event that will be broadcast at several different times in the United States and Europe. If you want to be one of the first to see the full CS4 suite in action, register for a webcast reminder at the Adobe website: […]
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September 15, 2008
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InDesign Nested Styles.

This is a short 3-minute segment taken from the live webinar InDesign Style Sheets on September 10, 2008. The full version of this workshop covers the fundamentals of InDesign’s character styles and paragraph styles, and quickly gets into tips, tricks, and shortcuts that should please even the most seasoned InDesign user. Style sheets can be a huge time saver for designers — especially in the creation of long or multi-page documents. [View all Upcoming Webinar Topics]

September 10, 2008
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Save All Open Documents in InDesign.

Here is a terrific hidden InDesign keyboard shortcut. Say you’ve got a bunch of InDesign files open that you’ve been jumping between, and you need to save them all before stepping out for lunch. Use InDesign’s Save All command to save all your open documents. Mac: Command-Option-Shift-SPC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S Source: This tip was one of Scott […]
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September 8, 2008
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