Need a last minute gift for that special creative pro? How about a new computer? Some assembly (and a good exacto knife) will be required.
For this year’s holiday tip, your friendly left-brain team at Creativetechs has spent more time than we can justify tracking down templates for a wide variety of cut-out Macintosh computers. Browse through the list of available computers below. Each link will download a PDF template. Print out on card stock for best results.
Enjoy.
A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) provides 5-15 minutes of battery backup should your studio suffer a power outage. More importantly, a good UPS will correct common power problems and provide clean, sufficient, and consistent power for your Mac workstation.
We’ve seen increasing anecdotal evidence that Apple’s new Mac Pros can be especially sensitive to power issues. Adding an inexpensive UPS to your Mac workstation is becoming a standard recommendation for our clients.
This is the fourth of a 4-part transcription of the video Making the Web Work for You. Featuring an extended conversation on blogging and social media with three influential leaders in the Photography community: David Nightingale (Chromasia), David Hobby (Strobist), and Seattle’s own Chase Jarvis (Chase Jarvis’ Blog).
This is the third of a 4-part transcription of the video Making the Web Work for You. Featuring an extended conversation on blogging and social media with three influential leaders in the Photography community: David Nightingale (Chromasia), David Hobby (Strobist), and Seattle’s own Chase Jarvis (Chase Jarvis’ Blog).
This is the second of a 4-part transcription of the video Making the Web Work for You. Featuring an extended conversation on blogging and social media with three influential leaders in the Photography community: David Nightingale (Chromasia), David Hobby (Strobist), and Seattle’s own Chase Jarvis (Chase Jarvis’ Blog).
This is the first of a 4-part transcription of the video Making the Web Work for You. Featuring an extended conversation on blogging and social media with three influential leaders in the Photography community: David Nightingale (Chromasia), David Hobby (Strobist), and Seattle’s own Chase Jarvis (Chase Jarvis’ Blog).
About halfway across InDesign’s Control panel is a big P surrounded by brackets. When a you select an object that has been rotated, flipped or skewed, that P changes. It rotates at an angle matching the object. If the object has been flipped, it turns to an outline. It also leans to match an object that has been skewed.
What I don’t know is why Adobe picked a P. Got a guess? Leave a comment:
How should nervous, frugal, business owners and creative managers spend money over the next three weeks? This month I’ve found myself in a couple odd year-end planning conversations with clients.
One owner of a large design firm which did very well in 2008 told me her CPA is pressing them to spend some of their pre-tax profits before December ends. A manager of an in-house creative departments has remaining funds in his 2008 budget, and wants to know what purchases will have the greatest impact for their team over the coming year.
Both are justifiably wary about today’s economy, and nervous about what budgets are going to look like next year.
Here is our list of frugal ways you might spend end-of-year dollars, while preparing your company for potentially lean times ahead.
The cursing has already started. You’ve installed CS4, but most of your studio’s active projects are still in InDesign CS3. Now each time you double-click on an InDesign CS3 document in the Mac Finder, it opens up in InDesign CS4.
InDesignProxy is a free utility that fixes this annoyance by working as a ’stand-in’ for InDesign. Drag any INDD file onto the InDesignProxy application, and it automatically opens your file in the correct version of InDesign.
[Update: Kris Coppieters has provided us a link to InDesignProxy 1.0.5 which allows you to set the Finder to open all INDD files this way automatically. We’ll be updating our tip later today to reflect the new version.]
As the economy tightens, we’ve seen a lot of design firms expressing a stronger interest in how to improve their studio’s online marketing efforts. Of particular interest, we hear a lot of designers asking how to help their web site (or their client sites) rank better in Google search results.
If that’s of interest to you, start with the source. Google has published a free 22-page PDF guide that lists some of the best practices you should use to improve your site’s search results:
Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small changes to parts of your website. Individually, those changes might not seem like much, but when combined, they can have a significant impact on your site’s search results.
