Happy Easter! (Yes, I know it’s June.)

Did you know that many of your favorite programs contain “Easter eggs”? Easter eggs are secret images, messages, or other cool features that you can find, usually with a simple key command. In addition to computer applications, many video games, DVDs, and other media have Easter eggs that their authors included for fun.

Adobe programs sport some great Easter eggs:

My favorite Easter egg is in Illustrator. Hold down Alt (on Windows) or Option (on a Mac) and click on the menu in the lower-left of your screen. In addition to the usual Show options, you’ll get to view eyes that follow your mouse around, the current phase of the moon, a count of your mouse clicks, and other fun features. And if you’re wondering, “Mordy’s Home Number” is really just the number to Adobe customer service.

Another nice one is in Dreamweaver CS3. When you’re ready for a break from Web design, go to Commands > Create Web Photo Album. Type “play a game” in the title field and click OK and an old fashioned game of Mastermind will appear.

Easter eggs are often found in the About screen of a program, found under Help > About on Windows and (program name) > About on a Mac. In Flash CS3, go to the About screen and click the registered trademark icon next to the word Flash to see a slideshow of photos that I can only imagine are of Flash’s development team. Check About screens in some of your other favorite programs (and try some different key commands) to see what you can find!

Photoshop’s got a more somber Easter egg in CS3—a really nice tribute to late author/designer Bruce Fraser. It takes a bit of work to see it, but it’s worth it. First, hold down Ctrl-Alt (Windows) or Command-Option while navigating to the About screen (it may take you a few tries to get the timing right). Here you’ll see the alternate About screen with a red pill on it (”Red Pill” was the code name given to Photoshop CS3 while it was in development). Take a screenshot of this screen, open it in Photoshop, and go to Levels (Image > Adjustments > Levels). Move the black slider all the way to the right and an image of Bruce will be revealed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Design Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.