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!

If you’ve ever wondered how to create animated GIFs in Photoshop, we’ve created a simple tutorial with some example files you can download and try out.

We use a lot of animated GIF files in our weekly tips. They are fun to build, and better for our email subscribers because Flash animations are not supported in most email readers.

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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. Read the Full Tip »

Over the last six months we’ve been poking at a new version of the CreativeTechs website. This weekend we finally threw the switch. This is a work in progress, and we’ll be cleaning up details and fixing missing links over the coming week. Please give us a visit:

Link: CreativeTechs Website
Link: CreativeTechs Tips Blog
Link: CreativeTechs Workshop/Webinar Calendar

The new tips blog now supports comments. You can now respond to tips that catch your interest, ask questions, or give us an occasional vote of confidence. We invite you to please say hello.

We get frequent questions from designers wanting to use HTML email for client projects or their own marketing. Here is our comparison of the four prominent email delivery services on the market today.

1. Campaign Monitor
2. MailChimp
3. AWeber
4. Constant Contact

Implemented properly, email newsletters are a powerful marketing tool. Financially, they are one of the most cost-effective ways you can keep in front of clients and prospects. We’re seeing more creative studios using email as a core part of their own marketing effort. And we’re seeing a lot of design projects with studios creating email marketing templates for their clients.

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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 these two free guides are a great resource for web designers deepening their CSS skills.

Note: DZone requires you sign up for a free account to download your guides.

Source: Long-time readers know that we love cheatsheets. Here’s another great CSS cheatsheet we wrote about two years ago.

It is pretty easy to embed an iPhone-optimized video in any website you are designing. Which can be a nice flourish to welcome the growing hordes of iPhone users who might be visiting your site soon.

Sound hard? It’s not. Apple has added a special Export to Web option to QuickTime Pro ($30) that makes the process nearly automatic.

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If you are a web designer, your clients may soon start worrying how their websites work on an iPhone. That’s because after only eight months, iPhones now account for a remarkable 71% of all US Mobile Browser web traffic.

Designing websites that take advantage of the iPhone web environment requires more than simply designing for a smaller screen size. The iPhone automatically scales websites when needed. iPhone readers use multi-touch gestures to zoom or move around the page. Flash isn’t supported, and neither are larger animated GIFs (a surprise to me).

Tucked away in Apple’s free iPhone Software Development Kit is a terrific iPhone Simulator you can use to test and preview your websites. In the full version of this tip we’ll show you where that iPhone Simulator application is hidden, and include a few tips on how to test various iPhone features.

Download Apple’s Free iPhone SDK

Note: You’ll have to register for a free developer account and agree to Apple’s terms. Read on and we’ll show you where the iPhone Simulator application is hidden, and include a few tips on how to test various iPhone features.

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xScope ($27) is a great utility for Mac-based web and UX (user experience) designers. It provides a number of floating tools for measuring, aligning, and inspecting on-screen graphics.

xScope

You have to play with xScope to get a sense of how helpful it is. It has on-screen rulers, floating guides, and a nicely designed screen overlay that shows the usable space for any screen (including new templates for the iPhone). My favorite feature is a new dimensions tool (shown above), which instantly identifies the pixel dimensions of anything on your screen. Link to the movie below for a better sense of how cool this feature is:

Movie: xScope Dimensions Tool

Download a free trial of xScope and give it a spin.

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Last week we posted a fun collection of Halloween MP3s which received a tremendous amount of web traffic. Many people asked about the embedded MP3 player we used to let visitors to listen to songs from their browsers.

For this week’s creative tip, we decided to provide a short tutorial on how to setup and use a free Flash-based music player developed by Fabricio Zuardi.

To demonstrate that player in action we’d like to feature the work of CreativeTechs’ newest Mac IT consultant, Dave Corter, who in addition to being an excellent Mac engineer has also published several albums of Didgeridoo music. Click on a couple titles above to give them a listen, or scroll down for a tutorial on how to embed your own music player.

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