George W. Bush is undoubtedly one of the most popular figures of current times. He's infamous for many things he misspoke and his views on how to handle national security. His ideology affected not only the United States, but the whole world in a major way. No wonder he's been on top of mind for many creatives and became the hero of numerous advertisements in the last few years.

Here is a collection of some of the most interesting ads that dissect his character in order to sell an idea or a product. You be the judge whether they are successful in achieving this objective.

Let me start the showcase with this ad made for Milenio, a Mexican newspaper who claims they solved the inner workings of Bush's personality. Simpson + Texas cowboy = GWB. The tagline reads: "Such a complex world needs a good explanation."

In this highly diplomatic ad (what else would you expect from Britain) Marmite Squeezy claims Bush's just like the funny tasting sirup: "You either love it or hate it."

I noticed so many of us use the trackpad as the primary input device.

I though it would be interesting to check out what trackpad gestures can you use in Photoshop. Here is what I found out:

1. Hold the Alt (Option) key and double finger track to zoom within the document in and out.
2. Hold the Apple (Cmd) key and zoom in and out your entire screen. Useful when you want to show something to a friend across the room.
3. Double tap and hold to start making a selection. Once you're happy with the size just release the trackpad and your selection becomes active after a second.
4. Tap with two fingers results in a CTRL-click or right mouse button click.
5. Double finger tracking allows you to scroll and pan within your document.

Unfortunately none of the cool stuff that works in OSX standard apps, such as the rotation with two finders, switching between active pages with three finger swipe or zooming by pinching works in Photoshop.

Ideally Apple should allow us to customize what we want each gesture to mean and we should be able to add new custom gestures too.

For example we could add a lot of Photoshop menu shortcuts as three finger gestures. Each new gesture would be drawn with three fingers and the shape would remind the first letter of the menu item. For example:

• Down and right: Levels
• Up, circle and bottom right: Refine edges
• S shape: Save
• Circle: Open, etc.
• Three finger horizontal swipe: Change between document
• Three finger double tap: Exposé application windows
• Three finger triple tap: Exposé all windows
• Finally when you would tap repeatedly on the trackpad with three fingers it would bring up a random stimulating screensaver that will help generate new ideas.

Hey, what’s up? Sensei Zap here (cheers for the moniker, 3dogmama!) Okay now, on the issue of CSS and Dreamweaver, there seems to be some common hang-ups that really mess people up. So I and decided to get to work and explain some of these issues. So, here’s my list of five hang-ups with CSS and Dreamweaver, plus a bonus one thrown in for good measure. Enjoy!

Hang-Up #1: What’s Up With The Format And Style Menus On The Properties Inspector?

So what’s the diff between these two menus, and when should you use ‘em? Truth is, they do completely different things; lemme explain.

Pop open the Format menu on the Properties inspector, and you’ll see None, Paragraph, Heading1, etc. These are HTML block elements—they’re built into HTML. Now, as for the Style menu just to the right, this guy’ll list out any class rules that you’ve created via CSS. In other words, stuff that appears in this list is stuff you’ve created—they aren’t built into HTML.

Is this making sense? So items that appear under the Format menu are built into HTML, whereas formats that appear in the Style menu are rules that you’ve created. Okay, keep on reading to check out Hang-Up #2.

Google launched iGoogle themes, which allows users to customize their Google start page.

Designers can create new themes and submit them to Google for publication. I think this is a great way to get some publicity if you are willing to share your designs for free.

Go ahead, create your iGoogle theme and submit it to Google.

Don't forget to comment here if they accept your design. I would love to see it. I'm planning to create one myself.

If you use the Del.ici.us Bookmark service and you're a fan of Firefox, you'll be happy to know that they have finally updated the plugin for Firefox 3 beta 5.

Along with Firefox 3 compatibility, they've added a few new features:

• Jump to Tag feature (press F2) allows you to quickly access tags and bookmarks using the keyboard
• New layout for saving bookmarks
• Preferences now in a separate dialog under Tools (which also can be invoked via the prefs button on the FF Add-ons pane)
• Status bar indicators for network activity, new links for you, and the del.icio.us website
• Classic mode for users who just want simple buttons without the overhead of sync

You can read more and download the plugin from the Delicious blog post here.

Smiley emoticon courtesy of Tony Gines.

I personally like to open a new folder for each project and within that another folder for every version of the project. This way I can easily follow the progression, do not overwrite old files accidentally and can dump old versions easily once the project is complete.

Every time I create a new version of the project in Finder I simply press and hold the Alt (Option) button and drag the folder. OS X will create a duplicate of the folder and renames it with a successive version number automatically. Quite convenient.

A small drawback is that I duplicate all files every time, which is not really an issue in this day and age with 200GB+ hard disk space. It's only a problem if the image files are hundreds of megabytes large and do not change from version to version. In this case I usually create a separate folder for items that do not change, such as images or fonts.

I know the Adobe package contains Version Cue, but I never really managed to grasp how it works. Every time I try to learn about it, all I find is marketing mumbo-jumbo instead of a simple tutorial on how to use it, and I get discouraged. If you know a place to learn about it, please share!

Also, I would be interested to learn about your versioning strategy!

The application Art Files has been around for quite some time, but I noticed so many of my friends who use Illustrator a lot didn't know about it, so I thought it's worth sharing as it's a huge time saver.

Art Files is a stand-alone application that helps you with your work-flow. It prepares a folder that includes your Illustrator files and all other associated files, such as images and fonts to be sent to clients or colleagues. It only takes three steps to create such a complete and organized collection:

1. You open Art Files and drop all the Illustrator files you want to send in the drop zone.
2. Click files that are marked with a question mark and locate them. You can easily do that by using the built-in file search
3. Click Collect and see how Art Files collects all the necessary images and Fonts neatly organized into folders.

Art Files is not free, but it's well worth the cost if you can replace a lot of manual work.

I'm trying to do a logo for my moms new website which should cater to affluent American women who want to go on a destination wedding/honeymoon in the Caribbean.

Your opinions are greatly appreciated.

-T

For those of us whose work revolves within the realm of browser compatibility, we always want to make sure that our CSS styling works perfectly as planned out. However, different browsers have different ways of implementing CSS properties and worse case, some of them are not supported by some of the most widely and commonly used browsers. CSS3.info provides a useful tool that will quickly test your browser which CSS selectors are supported or not by your browser(s).

http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html

Have you ever wondered if a client received your important email already? Don't you wish you had a way to tell?

It can be done, although it's a bit more complicated than just clicking a switch. Visit Spypig and follow the instructions for a one off tracking image that will be used to check the delivery of your email.

You could do this with your own web host, by checking when that particular unique image has been accessed by your recipients email application, but it would be complicated to set-up a new image every time and then keep checking when the stats show access.

The good thing Spypig works with most email systems, whether you use Apple Mail.app or Gmail.