Seattle graphic designer Pat Hansen (the founding president of Seattle’s AIGA) has created a special line of personalized gifts. The deadline is closing fast for Christmas. Personalized Gift Jars from Noteable You Each individual gift includes dozens of your personal messages from you about your loved one. You choose the gift container, the design, the […]

A classic designer’s lament updated for the holiday season. Every time a bell rings, that’s an agency’s account executive caving in to this client demand… Source: Thanks to Very Big Blog for the tip to this fun holiday video. Original video and song from World Wide Wadio. Of course don’t forget the original hard-rock edition. […]

Each Wednesday morning, Creativetechs hosts a new 90-minute mini-workshop in our training room in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.

Join us Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day. The cost is $50 per workshop.

On October 3, we have a particularly fun topic. Our master retoucher, Jason Hoppe, will be leading a special workshop on retouching skin in Photoshop. This workshop demonstrates a wide range of techniques for dealing with the unique challenges involved in retouching faces and bodies.

This week in Seattle watch for Metro busses carrying a new “Northwest Profiles” campaign for PEMCO Insurance. We mention this for three reasons:

#1: PEMCO Insurance is our client. We’ve supported their Mac-based in-house design department for years.

#2: The Seattle ad agency DNA Brand Mechanics, who helped create this new campaign, is also one of our long-standing clients.

#3: That’s our own hardware-guru Jasson Lewellen, proudly portrayed in Northwest Profile 12, as the “Ponytailed Software Geek

You can see more of Jasson by visiting PEMCO’s We’re A Lot Like You website and clicking on his profile.

We ran this same tip last year — and I haven’t found a fireworks screensaver I like better. So, in honor of America’s summer Independence Day celebrations, here are links to Skyrocket, a free, fun, 4th of July screen saver you can download for your Mac or PC: Mac Version of Skyrocket Windows Version of […]

Finally, for the graphic designers among us. Enjoy a two minute and thirty-six second rock rendition of that client request you’ve heard time and again:

Check this out. Photographer Chase Jarvis stiched together every photo he shot over a 5-day period into a tight little self-promotion video. The collection includes hundreds of lighting tests, outtakes, blown angles, and odd experiments (anyone catch the chicken that wandered into one of the shots?). Check out the full backstory at the Chase Jarvis […]

Last Wednesday morning, a Seattle construction crew cut through a water main one block from the Creativetechs office. About the same time our office phone lines and DSL went dead, killing our main Internet access.

Yet, throughout this day’s drama, our office email kept flowing and we had full access to the Internet. Why? Because we had taken our own advice and already had a second, inexpensive backup Internet connection in place. Read that tip here: Keep your Internet up using two providers.

As a service for Seattle-area creative teams, we are offering a complimentary strategy session with Creativetechs’ lead consultant Craig Swanson. Take this opportunity to map out your creative team’s upgrade strategy for this complex series of upgrades.