Want to get up to speed on the new versions of Adobe CS3? We’ll make it fast and easy for you: Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts (SVC) is hosting a series of half-day, hands-on workshops to help you get up and running quickly.

We know you are busy, so we’ve packed a lot of great stuff into these morning sessions. You’ll learn all the new CS3 features in a rapid, fun, environment. Each workshop is led by Creativetechs’ powerhouse production guru, Jason Hoppe:

• Making the Move to Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Making the Move to Adobe InDesign CS3
• Making the Move to Adobe Illustrator CS3

Each half-day workshop comes with a class binder, a visual guide to help you apply your learning back at the office, and CDs filled with sample files and resources. The cost is $150 per workshop, or $395 for all three.

The focus of these classes is to help graphic designers and production artists get up to speed with the new features in CS3, and get back to work.

By default, Illustrator will use your selection’s bounding box when aligning or centering objects. Have you ever wished you could tell Illustrator to center everything around a particular object instead?

This week’s creative tip is inspired by a question on how to create an interactive PDF for showing off before/after examples of Photoshop retouching projects.

The technique itself may apply to a limited number of people, but it is a fun way to introduce some of InDesign’s lesser known interactive features.

This tip includes a quick tutorial on how to build interactive rollovers into your next PDF. The tutorial includes a sample file you can download to try out yourself.

Adobe’s pen tool works pretty much the same across Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Yet, as important as this ubiquitous tool is, many people get confused with how to handle certain tasks, and the differences between the various pen symbols.

Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet.pdf

Creativetechs’ resident Adobe Certified Expert, Jason Hoppe, has put together a quick Adobe Pen Tool cheat-sheet to help keep some of the basic techniques straight. Download the PDF, and pass it along to a friend.

When you find yourself brainstorming a new logo, here’s a quick way to roll through your font collection in InDesign while looking for inspiration.

If you’ve just upgraded to Adobe Photoshop CS3, here is a fun tip to help you uncover those new features a little faster. In the Window menu, select Workspace > What’s New in CS3. This custom workspace adds blue highlights to all the new or updated menu items. It is a fun way to encourage […]

As a long-time FreeHand user, I’ve made my peace with that program’s departure. But my serenity is put to the test each time we must pull up old Freehand documents from past jobs. Happily, Illustrator CS3 will now directly open FreeHand MX and FreeHand 10 documents (previously, Illustrator CS2 could only open FreeHand 9 files or older). This slight consolation in CS3 might help other long-time Freehand designers finally move on.

Next time you need to switch from Picas to Inches in one of your Adobe Creative Suite applications, don’t go digging through preferences. Simply Right-Click on the ruler and pick your new measurement. This works in Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator in versions CS, CS2 and the new Adobe CS3. Enjoy!

Over the last several years Creativetechs has encouraged many creative teams to replace their team’s older Postscript font libraries with newer OpenType font collections.

In the past, old Postscript fonts couldn’t support a large number of characters. To get around that limitation, special “expert” font sets were created to provide designers with additional typographic features such as oldstyle figures, true small capitals, fractions, special ligatures, and others.

So, what if you’ve designed larger documents (e.g. annual reports) using special characters from the old “Adobe Caslon Expert” collection? When you convert over to the new OpenType “Adobe Caslon Pro”, certain typographic flourishes disappear.

This tip demonstrates how you can use InDesign’s advanced find-and-replace feature to help make your font migration an easier one.