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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.

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November 7, 2006
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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.

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November 4, 2006
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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.

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November 1, 2006
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Halloween Papercraft Toys

CoffinPapercraft.jpg

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:

RavensBlight Paper Toys

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.

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October 28, 2006
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Two Type Specimen Book Utilities.

FontTools6-sample.jpgIn 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]

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October 22, 2006
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Six free Internet speed test sites.

How fast is your DSL or Cable Internet connection right now? There are dozens of websites that provide free Internet speed tests that can help you answer that question. This week’s tech tip provides links to a half-dozen speed test websites you can use for free. Our favorite is Speedtest.net (pictured above) which uses an […]
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October 22, 2006
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Compare document revisions in Acrobat Pro.

Acrobat Pro (6 & 7) has a built-in feature that lets you quickly identify the differences between any two PDFs. This can be a godsend when confirming that all needed copy edits were made in complex documents or confirming corrections in long documents (book publishers love this feature). Open two PDFs you want to check […]
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October 15, 2006
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AIGA’s standard client contract.

Almost every creative studio uses written contracts of some form with their clients. Many studios invest time and legal fees in developing their own custom contracts, while other designers will borrow contract language from the back of a design business book (or from a studio where they used to work). However your studio developed your […]
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October 15, 2006
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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?

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October 15, 2006
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Change Microsoft Office’s serial number, Easy!

Over a year ago we published a tip detailing how to change the serial number on an installed copy of Microsoft Office X or Microsoft Office 2004. That tip described a technique for digging around in library preferences, and hunting down an invisible OfficePID file. It turns out there is a much, much, easier method! […]
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October 7, 2006
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