Learn Adobe’s Pen Tool with Advanced Math.
Preparing for Leopard: Helvetica is Dead.
OBITUARY: After a prolonged battle with Mac OS X, Helvetica — along with younger cousin Helvetica Neue — was finally pronounced dead on October 28, 2007 with the release of Leopard, by Apple, in California.
For years, print-based graphic designers and prepress professionals have fought to replace certain Mac OS X default fonts with their existing PostScript Type 1 fonts of the same name — Helvetica being a primary example.
It’s been a losing battle.
Now with Leopard, the war for control of Helvetica is done, and Mac OS X won.
A List Aparts’ 2007 Web Design Survey.
Embed a free Flash MP3 player on your blog.
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.
November 90-Minute Mini-Workshops.
Join us at the Creativetechs office Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day.
The cost is $50 per workshop.
Classic Halloween Vinyl Records on MP3s.
Check out this MP3 collection with almost 100 old spooky, corny and kitschy vinyl records from the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s. If you are the right age, you might remember a few of these classics from your own childhood LP collections.
The entire MP3 collection is available for free — just in time for Halloween parties. Download your favorites to your iPod, or burn CD’s right from your computer.
Jason at the Scar Stuff blog provides the MP3s in zipped files for each album. For immediate gratification, scroll down this post where you can play tracks from a few of our favorite albums.
Enjoy! And Happy Halloween from Creativetechs in Seattle!
Apple iWork ’08 opens Microsoft Office 2007 files.
Build a PowerBook and MacBook repair toolkit.
Over the last week we’ve had a lot of Apple laptops in our office for various repairs and upgrades — including one of our own MacBook Pros that was upgraded with a larger internal hard drive.
It is a good reminder that however skilled you are at hardware repair, you won’t be able to open a MacBook Pro case without the right set of screwdrivers. We’ve asked Creativetechs’ hardware guru, Jasson Lewellen, to compile a list of tools and training materials for people who are interested in doing basic Apple laptop repair.
So whether you run an IT team headed towards self-service, or you are an intrepid DIY home-user willing to void a warranty, here are a collection of links for you to start building your own laptop repair toolkit.
Use Safe Boot to Clear Font Caches.
If you suspect that fonts are causing problems in your applications, an easy troubleshooting step is deleting your Mac’s font caches.
We’ve covered font cache problems before in our Garbled Fonts Troubleshooting Guide — which delves into font problems more deeply. However we did overlook a quick and easy method to delete font cache files.
Photoshop CS3’s clone tool adds “Ignore Adjustment Layers”.
Photoshop guru Jason Hoppe teaches non-destructive retouching techniques in Photoshop. In classes at Creativetechs he shows many ways to improve your images without overwriting the original image data. Done properly, image quality doesn’t degrade as you make edits, and you retain flexibility when clients come back with later change requests.
Here’s a classic example of those non-destructive techniques in action: We’ve added a separate cloning layer instead of cloning directly onto our image. And we’ve used a color adjustment layer to correct our subject’s skin tone without directly changing our photo’s original colors.
However, you must be aware of a subtle-but-important detail when using a cloning layer on images that have been color corrected with adjustment layers. In this week’s creative tip we’ll discuss that issue, and we’ll show why retouchers know to always turn off their adjustment layers before cloning on an image.
Plus we’ll show Photoshop CS3’s new Ignore Adjustment Layers button that makes life better for Photoshop retouch artists.
