Should you find yourself designing projects in Adobe Illustrator that use a rotated axis, you can make your life easier using Illustrator’s Constrain Angle option. The Constrain Angle option is nothing new (it was introduced back in Illustrator 7), but it comes in handy when modifying our letter-folding templates from a recent tip. Once you […]

This week’s creative tip is a quick reminder about a handy Photoshop feature that sits ignored by most designers every day. While often taken for granted or overlooked entirely, Photoshop’s status bar can be a valuable tool.

At first glance, this week’s creative tip may seem a little frivolous. One of our clients recently called for some coaching in how to create word-search puzzles for a monthly magazine she designs.

Yet as we dig a little below the surface this fun project demonstrates InDesign’s ability to place Excel spreadsheets as a table — which can be pretty handy for many types of information-heavy design projects.

Here is another one of those simple, universal time savers for Adobe Photoshop CS and CS2. It may be easier to show than it is to describe. In almost any Photoshop dialog box you can quickly adjust values by clicking on the name of a value and dragging the cursor side-to-side to “scrub” to a […]

InDesign’s Nested Styles feature can be a powerful discovery for designers of long documents. This single feature could save untold hours in formatting of books or annual report layouts. Consider our example layout above for a special Scrabble dictionary. Rather than repeatedly applying individual colors, bolds and italics by hand, we add a couple nested […]

Move faster in Photoshop using keyboard shortcuts. Download this handy PDF cheatsheet, print it out and keep it near your computer (you can choose between a Mac or Windows version): Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts (Macintosh) Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows) These PDF’s include 4 pages. The first two pages are organized by function in Photoshop, […]

This is another handy Adobe tip from Brian Wood, Director of Training at eVolve Computer Graphics Training in Seattle. This tip works in both Adobe InDesign and Illustrator CS/CS2. If you want to quickly saturate or desaturate a color in the color palette, hold down Shift while dragging a color slider. Both InDesign and Illustrator […]

Here is a great resource when you need icons for your website, blog or other design projects. There are many great collections of icons available on the web. We’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite sources. Enjoy…

You’ve designed a new logo, identity, and business papers for a good client. It looks great. They are happy. Then a simple request derails everything:

“Can I get a copy of my new letterhead to use in Microsoft Word?”

That seemingly innocent question has driven more than one designer to distraction. While this week’s creative tip won’t win people over to designing in Microsoft Word full-time, we can help make this client request a little easier to accomplish.