John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts (free) is a comprehensive PDF that shows how to access almost any special character in any font. The 16-page PDF includes cheatsheets for accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency, legal symbols, math, and greek symbols. Print out the pages for the characters you forget most often, and post them near your computer.

Link: Special Character Shortcuts PDF

Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, as well as HTML codes for web pages. There is also a special section on special nonprinting characters in QuarkXPress 7 and 8, and a handy typographer’s glossary.

Even with a well calibrated monitor, it is more precise to color correct using numerical values. This is especially useful when correcting color casts in images with neutral gray areas, or when matching specific colors between multiple images. Shift-click up to 4 areas of your image with Photoshop’s eyedropper tool to identify color sample points […]

Wordle is a fun website that generates word clouds from any text you provide. Word clouds are a visual way of looking at the words used on a website. The image above is a visualization of the words on the front page of the Creativetechs website. The size and color of each word reflects how frequently it appears in the overall page.

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

If you design websites for a living Wordle is more than a toy. The words you use on your client’s sites form the online brand as far as Google is concerned. So you really have to pay attention to the words you use. Do they reflect the brand that you’re working to create?

You’ve been provided an image file with your client’s logo sitting on top of a flat background color. You want to quickly remove the background so the logo is isolated on a transparent layer in Photoshop. This is a classic production challenge, and we’ve seen production artists tackle this issue dozens of different ways. In […]

There is something immensely satisfying about discovering a Photoshop feature that’s been sitting in front of you for years. The Copy Merged command has been waiting patiently in Photoshop’s edit menu for well over a decade. Yet I’ve missed it all that time. A quick poll of savvy Seattle Photoshop production artists tells me I’m not […]

Are you working on a product packaging job? Here’s a way to combine digital product photography with Adobe Photoshop Smart Objects in CS2 or CS3 to create quick virtual prototypes. The process is fairly easy once you understand the technique, and can be used for some pretty remarkable results.

Adobe Acrobat has many built in features to view, fix, and control prepress issues — including spot and process colors, printer marks, preflighting, and fonts. These various tools can take much of the guesswork out of files when preparing PDFs for commercial printing. The Output Preview dialog box for example is a terrific tool that […]

Continuing with our screen capture theme: If you’ve used this window grab technique over time, you may have noticed a significant change in Leopard. Apple now includes the window’s shadow in your resulting screen capture (in previous versions of Mac OS X, only the window itself was captured). Including the shadow isn’t necessarily a bad […]