That's right, DON'T upgrade to Adobe Illustrator CS4 when it's released later this month. Oh, that is UNLESS you want the two most requested features in Illustrator's long and storied history.

Multiple Artboard documents and transparency in gradients have finally found their way into Adobe's latest upgrade. A whole host of other feature enhancements to smart guides, text on path, the user interface, and more, complement the two big new features in this latest upgrade.

If you're a heavy Illustrator user, this Illustrator CS4 review is definitely something you'll want to check out.

When I launched InDesign CS4 for the first time, it took all of about ten seconds to see that I was going to like what I found. After a few hours of using it, my suspicions were confirmed. Every release of InDesign has brought new and improved features and speed bumps, but none have brought more than Adobe’s latest offering of its flagship page layout application.

While InDesign CS4 offers a host of small improvements and additions, such as inline notes, an improved Story Editor, contact-sheet placement, and a new zoom method, and numerous other small additions, I’m going to focus on some of the major additions that will interest virtually every graphic designer and production artist.

These new features include a new graphical user interface, rotatation of page views, smart layout features, Kuler integration, Flash export, and more.

Read Adobe InDesign CS4 first look.

With the utter failure of Microsoft's recent "day in the life" ads starring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft has launched phase 2 of their campaign to combat Apple's "Hello, I'm a Mac" ad campaign.

As with the previous Seinfeld ads, this latest round is well done as far as cinematography goes, but once again there doesn't appear to be a point. Ok, so I "get" that they're trying to say that everyday people use a PC. But who doesn't already know that? And more importantly, who cares? What does that say about Microsoft and its products? The fact that some goofball who steam-cleans my shirts for a living uses a PC doesn't exactly make me want to run out and buy Windows, nor would it make me feel better about MS if I already did use Windows.

So how are the new ads? Judge for yourself. In my opinion, I could only come up with one word to describe the campaign: FAIL!

The Graphic Mac: For all your design and OSX tips, tricks, and discussion.

I recently wrote about a nifty little application/contextual menu item for OSX that makes attaching files to a new email easy as pie. Ego-systems also offers a System Preference Pane which takes an often asked-for hack, changing the screenshot file format, and puts it right where it should have been to begin with.

There are plenty of 3rd party applications and utilities which can change your screenshot file format. You could also do it manually with the terminal. But Ego-systems' Screenshots Preferance Pane makes it easy to select from nearly a dozen different graphic file formats. The preference pane also allows you to select a specific folder to which all screenshots will be stored in.

As I stated earlier, there are plenty of ways to adjust your screenshot file format, but this preference pane makes it simple - and free!

If you're reading a Web page and want to go back to the last site you visited without leaving the current site you're on, there's a simple trick to allow you to do so.

Hold down the Command (Apple) key and click the Back button in Firefox or Safari. The site you're currently visiting remains open and the previous site you visited will open in a new tab.

Tip courtesy of The Graphic Mac.

In honor of Father's Day, XtraLean Software is offering a special deal for Mac enthusiasts. Buy Shutterbug at the discounted rate of $29.95 (normally $39.95) and receive ImageWell (normally $19.95) absolutely FREE!

Just use the coupon code MACDAD08 when you make your purchase before June 15th through the XtraLean Father's Day store.

ImageWell allows you to Edit and Send your pictures, screenshots and other files to anyone, anywhere with one simple click of a button! Batch process your images, layer multiple images, label your screenshots, add drop shadows, shapes and borders, save your favorite styles, and much more. Download a demo here.

Shutterbug allows you to get a site up in a hurry. Satisfy the hunger and do more with your website - photo albums, movies, journals, image rollovers, contact forms and a selection of more than 80 fully customizable free themes. Create a simple online gallery or go all the way with a full featured website. Try ShutterBug and experience the control and freedom everyone is talking about. Shutterbug is a template-based Web editor that also allows you FULL WYSIWYG control. Download a demo here.

I can personally vouch for both products. I know the developers quite well and they're very responsive to questions & suggestions. I have used both of these great products for years and they couldn't be easier.

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.

When we talk about plugins, you generally assume we're talking about Photoshop add-ons. Most people don't even realize that you can add features to Adobe Illustrator using plugins, let alone name a good one. I recently found a real gem and reviewed it at The Graphic Mac, and thought it would fit in nicely here at CreativeBits as well.

Phantasm CS Studio 1.0 by Astute Graphics is not only one of those good ones, but it's a whole suite of good ones. Where most plugins have the goal of creating artwork for you, Phantasm CS is more of a production tool in that it's main set of tools involves the ability to adjust colors by Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Curves, Levels and more. But Phantasm CS doesn't completely leave you out in the cold when it comes to cool "design" features. The Halftone tools is uber-cool if you ask me, but I'll get into that later.

All the color control tools you come to expect of a professional design package are in Phantasm CS. In the past, when you wanted to take your carefully crafted vector art from full color to a spot-color duotone, you had one choice - waste time and hard drive space bringing it into Photoshop to do the conversion, save the file, then re-import back into Illustrator. It was a tedious process at best.

I say "was" because with Phantasm CS, you can adjust the levels, curves, brightness & contrast, hue/saturation and more of your vector objects right in Illustrator as though they were bitmaps in Photoshop. And best of all, the vector objects remain editable. And if you happen to have presets already saved in Photoshop for things like duotones levels, curves, etc., you'll be happy to know that Phantasm CS can import them just as you can in Photoshop - very handy!

Phantasm CS doesn't stop with vector objects though, you can also apply the filters to text and embedded images, allowing even more time savings and creativity. And if you're looking to customize only portions of your objects, you can select to apply the filters only to the fill, stroke or both.

Now for the uber-cool part. Whereas standard color-adjustment tools such Curves and Levels don't fundamentally alter the artwork, the Halftone filters and effects reconstruct the artwork to produce some really cool results.

The Halftone filter takes your vector objects and gives you the ability to apply halftone effects such as dots, squares, lines, radials and even letters to your image in a highly customizable fashion. You not only have control over the shape/style of the halftone, but you can set it to be monochrome or full color. You can adjust the size, shape and density of the dots, as well as the angle, scale and blend of the dots. This is one of those filters that you could spend a lot of time just playing around with, and get different results every time.

When you're finished creating your masterpiece, Phantasm CS Studio provides a great color-checking toolset for anyone who prepares artwork for publishing in print. An Output Preview group of tools, comprised of Quick Separations, Overprint Preview and Ink Coverage give immediate feedback on the technical construction of the color in a CMYK document in much more detail than Illustrator does natively.

Once you preview your document and are satisfied with the results, Phantasm CS allows you to separate color plates onto different layers in your Illustrator document and include crop marks, color bars and more - with the ability to choose which color plates you wish to separate. This tool is a god-send for anyone in the screen-printing or textile industry.

Phantasm CS comes in three flavors with a tiered pricing system; Phantasm CS - $45, Phantasm CS Designer - $95, and Phantasm CS Studio - $175. Which version you buy depends on what you want included in the package. The entry-level set includes the basic color-adjustment tools. Designer includes everything in the basic set, plus the duotone, halftone, temperature/tint effect and swap channels filters. The Studio version includes all of the above, plus the output preview, separations and in-line image editing capabilities.

If your design environment is primarily Adobe Illustrator, the full Studio version is a bargain. If you mostly import your artwork into Adobe InDesign before outputting, then the Designer version is most likely adequate for your needs.

If you're uncertain about what you need, a free trial of the Studio version is available from Astute Graphics. All three versions of Phantasm CS work with Illustrator CS, CS2 and CS3 for Windows and Mac.

Overall, Phantasm CS is probably the most useful plugin set I've ever come across for any version of Adobe Illustrator. It's tools are immediately useful for any designer who works in Illustrator and the pricing is quite reasonable.

I had posted this tip over at The Graphic Mac last week and it was quite popular, so I thought I would share this Safari tip with the readers of CB as well.

One of the things that has kept me using Firefox over the last few years is Safari's insistence on opening links in new windows, rather than a new tab in the current window. It drives me nuts. I hate having multiple windows open.

Thankfully, the latest version of Safari (3.1) has a hidden feature that forces all links to open in a new tab, rather than a new window — even the stubborn sites like Google and Gmail finally stay in a single window.

All you have to do is open Terminal from your Applications/Utilities folder and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Hit the enter key and you're all set. To reverse this, simply retype the code into the Terminal and substitute false at the end where you previously typed true.

When I look at a lot of Web sites these days, two things jumps out at me. First, many sites look absolutely stunning. Beautiful mastheads, delicious AJAX everywhere, blinky, swooshing Flash and Web 2.0-style graphics adorn tons of Web sites. Competing with these gorgeous Web sites requires not only great graphic design skills, but you’ve got to be a coding genius as well.

The second thing that I notice right away is that many of these sites contain little if any useful, informative content.

In my article Don't design a dead-end Web site – it's all about the content, I discuss why I think you need to make your design skills take a back seat to the content.

Sites such as CreativeBits, Ads of the World, and Google are perfect examples of "the right idea." Please give it a read and feel free to leave your comments - I'm very interested to hear YOUR opinion on the subject.