CreativeTechs Tips

Interested in Adobe Creative Suite? This is a weekly newsletter for creative professionals who use Macs (but Windows users are welcome too). If you're new here, you may want to subscribe via RSS or Email or Twitter for a mix of new tips each week. Thanks for visiting!

As we head into the shortened Thanksgiving week, we’d like to offer our traditional holiday papercraft project. This delectable roast turkey was found on a Japanese site. We’ve bundled the templates into a single easy-to-download PDF:

Papercraft Turkey PDF

Continue across the jump for links to the original site (with Google translations into English). Read the Full Tip »

In honor of Halloween, we offer up a fun collection of zombie papercraft templates. Download a PDF template, print, fold, and enjoy.

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We like to take a break from our technical focus during long weekends. So, in honor of the extended Labor Day holiday, we encourage you to get away from your computer, and enjoy a little low-tech paper folding. Apple’s iTunes U serves up a fun collection of tutorial podcasts by physicist Robert Lang who is also one of the world’s foremost origami artists and theorists.

Link: Robert Lang on iTunes U

Subscribe to the podcast collection and learn how to fold a square piece of paper into a duck, a sparrow, and a swallow. A nice way to tip your toe in the pool of origami paper folding.

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We like to take a break from our technical focus during long 3-day weekends. This Monday take a break from your computer. Download a free PDF template from Corbis, and build a working 35mm pinhole camera. Perfect for sunny spring days.

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We’re taking a break from our regular technical tips this long weekend. Longtime readers of this newsletter know we like to collect papercraft PDF projects. If you find yourself looking for a creative project this summer, download these plans for a working 35mm paper camera.

dirkon_en.pdf

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Over the years we’ve collected a variety of papercraft Macintosh templates. So when we found this foldable iPhone template at iPhoneCountdown.com we knew it must be added to the list!

iPhone Readymech.pdf.

Find yourself waiting impatiently for the June release of Apple’s revolutionary iPhone? This project might buy you an hour or two of release.

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From all of us here at CreativeTechs we wish you a safe and warm holiday season. And a prosperous new year.

For anyone looking for one last paper-folding project in 2006, we invite you to pull out an old box of business cards and visit HXA7241 for a step-by-step recipe to create your own business card polyhedra.

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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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Longtime readers of this tips newsletter may notice we collect clever folding templates. So when we stumbled on the Letterfu website, we knew it would eventually show up as a creative tip. (Past paper folding tips include pocketMod guides, or our collection of paper Mac templates.)

Basically you print a Letterfu design on a sheet of paper, write your letter on the back, fold it up, stamp it, and send it. The letter becomes its own envelope. It holds itself closed, secured by the stamp - so it doesn’t even need any glue. You use the entire sheet of paper, so there’s no cutting.

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Here is another tiny booklet in our collection of Mac-focused PocketMod guides. This one is loosely based on a form Apple provides on their Mac 101 website.

One of the big problems we at CreativeTechs run into while supporting creative pros is helping our clients keep track of all those crucial details: Passwords, network settings, mail server addresses, email addresses, hardware specifications, serial numbers, etc. Thus we give you the Mac Memory Book:

My Mac Memory Book! (PocketMod Edition)

This topic is less exciting than our first guide, My Mac Won’t Start — and a scrap of folded paper does not replace the need for good organization. But if you’ll fill this guide out for each computer in your office, and keep it handy, this information will come in useful time and time again.

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