The Animation palette feels right at home in Photoshop.

With Adobe’s release of the CS3 lineup came the abrupt loss of ImageReady, possibly leaving you feeling a bit jilted. Prior to CS3, ImageReady came bundled with Photoshop, and contained loads of Web-focused graphics tools for creating animated GIFs, rollovers, image maps, and more.

Photoshop CS3 has taken on some of the duties of ImageReady, but Adobe hopes you’ll pick up Fireworks to handle major Web graphics creation. Fireworks is truly the best program out there for the job, but if you just shelled out a lot of cash for Photoshop you may be better off finding some workarounds for now.

Let’s take a look at where to find some of the main ImageReady tasks in Photoshop, and which ones you should stop looking for because they’re just not there. Read the rest of this entry »

Clear short spurts of time everyday for marketing

There’s no “good” time to do marketing. So if you’re really busy and you’re waiting for a slow period, you can stop waiting right now. By the time things get slow, it will be too late: that’s the essence of feast or famine.

The cruel truth is that fitting in marketing when you’re busy is essential because it’s not something you do only when you’re slow. You will eventually have to figure out how to fit it into a very busy life, so why not start when it’s busy?

This is an issue I’ve been addressing with many Marketing Mentor clients recently, so here are a few of the solutions we’ve come up with: Read the rest of this entry »

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the head of the Graduate Program in Graphic Design at Yale since 1990, is also a practicing designer, public artist and Feminist.

In 1971, de Bretteville founded the Woman’s Design program at Cal Arts, and later co-founded the historic public space ‘The Woman’s Building’ with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven 1973, and the Communication Design program at the Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design in LA in 1981. Her many public works reflect a deep commitment to social activism through the engagement of community voices and respect for collected local memories. In 2004, she was awarded an AIGA medal for outstanding contribution to the field of design. Read the rest of this entry »

Most professional designers aren’t all that familiar with Corel’s line of imaging software since Adobe products tend to be industry standard. But when it comes to replicating natural painting techniques digitally, Corel has always had a leg up with its Painter application. 2007’s release of Painter X is extremely powerful, simulating the look and feel of real painting with tons of digital brushes and textures. Granted, this isn’t something that you need to do often in design projects, but it can add new dimension to your work or broaden your repertoire. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is a utopic, sun dappled wonderland for nerds—the kind of place abundant with old circuit boards and sympathy for anachronistic societies—it would probably feature lots of free copies of Make magazine.

Make: technology on your time, published quarterly by O’Reilly Media (of Tim O’Reilly, champion of the open source movement and all forms of tech related publishing), offers instructions, tips, and inspiration for DIY hard and software projects. The most recent edition (Vol. 10, ‘Home Electronics’) features such compelling projects as: a Solar-Powered Bike GPS made of fully recycled parts, Mini High-Powered Laser made from an old DVD burner, a Tabletop Biosphere (sorry- ‘Shrimp Support Module’), and, phenomenally, a Brain Wave Machine (pp. 134,140, 110 and 88, respectively). Read the rest of this entry »

“I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to write the check…”
“I was out of town and nowhere near my checkbook…”

Whether the excuses are legit or not, delayed client payments affect your bottom line. So why not offer credit card payment to your clients so you can get your money faster? It’s easier than you think. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you cringe whenever you see a billboard covered in Comic Sans? Or a logo designed with Arial? Do you notice every kerning misstep or poor leading choice? Sounds like you might be a type snob.

Don’t worry, there are many like you out there, and it’s not necessarily a bad quality for a designer to have. Take, for instance, the folks at Ban Comic Sans, who have made it their mission to get people to stop using this casual font in inappropriate places. Read the rest of this entry »

Interactive development process Guide

In my experience as an interactive art director at a strategic marketing firm, I’ve found that the best client relationships are open and collaborative, enabling a productive exchange of ideas and fostering a common pursuit of a singular goal. I have also found that creating visualization charts of my interactive development process has been a good exercise. For all the organizational benefits of having a well-defined process, it can also be viewed as a flexible framework. While I use it as the foundation of all my projects, I realize that it can always be adjusted to fit the situation.

To help my clients understand the steps I take in developing a website or Flash presentation, I have designed a communication tool to help them visualize each phase of a project. I created the “Interactive Development Process” diagram to help distill the complex projects into their essential and optional components. Below is a detailed description of each phase of the process… Read the rest of this entry »

Our ongoing look at Adobe Creative Suite 3 continues with a peek at Device Central. This application, bundled with most CS3 products like Dreamweaver and Photoshop, is used to test designs for cell phones and other mobile devices.

The program contains a variety of “skins” for popular cell phones – just load in an HTML page, Flash movie, wallpaper image, or other content piece and choose a device to see how it looks and works. Or, start from scratch in Device Central, checking out the specifications of phones you wish to design for. A few clicks and you’ll know what screen size, color profile, Flash Player version, and other specs to plan for. Read the rest of this entry »

I just got back from attending the HOW design conference in Atlanta, GA and I’m excited to report back on what it was all about. Many designers consider conferences indispensable opportunities to network, get inspired, recharged and invigorated with new ideas. The HOW conference is one of the largest of its kind, drawing over 3,000 designers from all over the country. It costs a pretty penny: about a thousand bucks for the conference itself, plus the cost of airfare and hotel. But if you can swing it (or get your employer to send you), there is much to be gained. I went down with Scott Chappell and Anjula Duggal to drink in the action. There’s so much to cover from the conference, so get ready for an epic post.

Gazing up at speaker Chip Kidd

The first morning at HOW felt like we were back at the start of a college semester: a sea of colorfully-clad designers making their way to the registration lines and pouring into the opening events. Though staged in massive hotel ballrooms, attendance at some sessions was so high that there were still several of us sitting on the floor, heightening the sense of college nostalgia. The first session we attended was a witty walk through the work process of famed book designer Chip Kidd, who is known for churning out almost one book cover a week in his post at Knopf publishing house. He shared some hilarious stories and visuals of designing everything from comic book treatments to a Paul Simon CD cover, letting all the characters from his life inform his designs.

The design for Paul Simon’s album made Kidd’s young pal Jet a star

Bookended by the conceit of a crossword puzzle clue that has to be viewed in an unexpected way in order to be solved, Kidd’s session showed us how to approach and solve design problems in ways that make the familiar feel new. Kidd’s session set the tone for the highlights of the conference: entertaining visuals with threads that tied the whole presentation together, whether the focus was on artwork, studio management, portfolio building, or creative inspiration. The only problem was that there were so many tempting sessions happening in the same timeslots, it was painful to choose which to attend. Read the rest of this entry »