Create a rainy window in Photoshop.
Free server planning sessions in Seattle.
The bad news: Your network is overloaded and slowing to a crawl. You team is producing larger files, but your server can’t handle it. And you’d rather not admit it, but your studio’s archiving and backup strategies are held together with duct tape and WD-40.
The good news: For a lot of companies, it’s budget planning time, and you might get a chance to fund some solutions to your server woes in 2007.
As a service for Seattle-area creative teams, we are offering a complimentary server strategy session with Creativetechs’ lead consultant Craig Swanson. Take this opportunity to map out your creative team’s server strategy for the coming year.
We’ve set aside 4 days through December, and have 16 open slots. If you manage a creative team, we encourage you to call and schedule a session. We’ll make sure it is a valuable use of your time.
Great CSS Cheatsheet.
Layout Gala: 40 simple 3-column CSS layouts.
Macs creating files with “._” prefix on servers?
We get occasional calls from Mac-based corporate creative teams, asking about strange files their Windows-based co-workers are seeing on shared file servers. The files have familiar names, but all start with a “._” prefix.
Here is the explanation of where those oddly named files come from, and why they are important to the Mac-based creative team.
Great Web Developer extension for Firefox.
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.
