This week’s creative tip is one of those handy shortcuts you can use all the time. As basic as it is, a lot of us missed this feature along the way. In many Adobe application (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop), hold down the Shift key while dragging a guide to snap to the nearest ruler mark. The […]

Back in January 2007, we published a tip showing how to use PDF watermarks to add studio-branded “proof” stickers to the PDFs you send clients (Add proofing messages with PDF watermarks). That’s been a popular tip over the last year. This week we’d like to provide an updated tutorial showing how you can do the […]

Last year we published a tip about Adobe dropping development and support for Macromedia FreeHand (Goodbye FreeHand. But is Illustrator Enough?). In that tip, we argued that most die-hard FreeHand users are happier and more productive switching to Adobe InDesign rather than Illustrator. Since then, we’ve been looking for a method to help designers migrate […]

Saturday was Groundhog Day. In a national media event, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, leading the groundhog to forecast six more weeks of winter. And speaking of shadows… Have you ever found yourself with a Photoshop image that has an object’s shadow on an opaque white background, when what you need is that same shadow […]

Most in-house creative teams face the issue of corporate images scattered throughout their department. Each designer ends up with a different assortment of photos they’ve compiled over the years. Collections of photos end up stored in individual project folders — even if those same images end up linked later to a dozen other projects.

Over the last several years at Creativetechs, we’ve helped a lot of in-house creative teams develop image management and keywording strategies get control over their unwieldily image collections. In the end, they create something like their own private in-house stock image library.

Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has developed an online autotrace tool that is dramatically more accurate than the LiveTrace tool available in Adobe Illustrator, or the old Adobe Streamline utility that some designers still have lurking around their hard drive. Even better it’s free! VectorMagic is available as an online tool on their website:

vectormagic.stanford.edu

You upload your bitmap image, answer a couple questions about the original image, and the system creates a vector EPS version that you can download and edit. Their example results are stunning, and from our own experiments at Creativetechs with a few real-world projects, the results are impressive.

The interface is fairly straight-forward. But if you get lost they also have a quick 3-minute video tutorial showing the system in action. Give it a shot.

A tips reader wrote us this week: “I have an issue with drop shadows and spot colors in Adobe InDesign. When I use a drop shadow in front of a spot color background it looks fine in InDesign, and prints properly as spot color separations. But a white box shows up around the image in […]

Here is one of those great small details that makes Adobe’s InDesign CS3 upgrade such a pleasure to work with. Eventually, most designers want a shortcut to switch to the Selection tool while you’re working inside a text frame. You can’t tap the V shortcut because you’ll just end up adding the letter “v” to […]

Photographer and designer Trevor Morris has updated his terrific Photoshop keyboard shortcut cheatsheets for Adobe Photoshop CS3. Download this handy PDF cheatsheet, print it out, and keep it near your computer: Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac) Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts (PC) The PDF’s include 4 pages. The first two pages are organized by function in […]

This week we’re taking a slight break from our normal tips format. If you are looking for the right gift to bring a smile to the graphic designer on your holiday list, here are ideas in the $20-$80 range. Plus one extravagant gift idea you might want to reserve for yourself.

Creative Gift #1— Helvetica The Film. On DVD.

Helvetica The Film (DVD)

Helvetica, a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture, is finally out on DVD. An essential addition to any graphic designer’s movie collection.

Update: Seattle-area designers can pick up a copy of Helvetica at Scarecrow Video in the U-District. Or you can order Helvetica from Scarecrow’s online store.