The Zen of CSS Web Design.
Transparent Gradients in Illustrator.
Update: Illustrator CS4 now adds easy transparent gradients! We have a video showing the new Illustrator CS4 Gradient Annotator in action. If you are using an older version of Illustrator, read on for the tip below.
Here is a great question we recently fielded from an in-house designer at Pixar in California: “How do I fill an object in Adobe Illustrator with a gradient that goes from an opaque solid color at one end to transparent at the other end?”
Creating a gradient with transparency is so easy in Photoshop, you might assume the same would be true for Illustrator. However the process is somewhat more involved.
The answer involves using a special Opacity Mask to add a transparent gradient to your object. Once you understand how to use Opacity Masks in Illustrator CS and CS2, the effect is easy to reproduce.
Halloween Papercraft Toys
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:
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.
Two Type Specimen Book Utilities.
In any given month three or four designers ask us for a good way to print type specimen books. While several tools offer this ability, here are our current favorites:
Vennix’s Font Tools 6.0 (screenshot shown here) prints meaningful font specimen pages, not only from active fonts, but from inactive
fonts as well. It sports an attractive interface including a special type book creator which allows you to easily select and print font samples in a variety of layouts. Font Tools can also scan Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign documents for used fonts, and collect the results to help aid archiving. [Cost: $50]
Lemke’s FontBook 4.4 has a much wider selection of layouts available for printing books. However it offers few options to select which fonts you wish to print, which can waste a lot of time (or paper) when printing larger type collections. The software itself feels less polished than Font Tools, however the choice of layouts and lower price may appeal to some designers. [Shareware: $10]
Compare document revisions in Acrobat Pro.
PopChar X 3.0 helps find special characters.
Hanging punctuation in various applications.
About once a month, a client will ask how to hang punctuation in Adobe InDesign CS. We’ve answered this same question dozens of times — yet I still find myself hunting around through menus to remember which dialog box contains the needed checkbox!
This tip covers hanging punctuation techniques in Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand MX, and QuarkXPress.
Sort InDesign menus alphabetically.
Visual Thesaurus.
Stumped for just that right phrase? Type in a term and watch as an interactive word map blossoms with meanings and branches to related words. Drag words around and play with them visually to engage a different part of your brain. Great for naming and branding projects.
Enough talk. Copywriter want link now: Visual Thesaurus.
