Let's suppose you receive a pdf document that you need to further work on in Illustrator, but when you open it all fonts get replaced by the default font, because you don't have those fonts used in the pdf. The font information is there in the pdf, so theoretically if you could convert all the text to outlines you would be able to work with the document.

To do that you have to open a new Illustrator document. Place the the pdf. Select the menu Object / Flatten transparency. Make sure to check the Convert all text to outlines option and go. You got the whole pdf in curves.

Have you ever had a problem like the the picture above in InDesign?

All those red zones are above 300% inkt percentage.

So you need to change those percentages, there are a lot of ways of doing it, with profiles and so on...

I found an interesting way in Photoshop. Here it is...

I was looking for a good way to implement a simple theme switcher for creativebits' light theme and found this competition on smashing magazine. The winner has a very sexy OS X style box that moves around and allows switching between several themes. I think it's an overkill for our purposes, but it is certainly inspiring.

Looks very exciting. More info here.

Finally Google released Analytics' most requested feature. It's still in beta, but works pretty well already. Now, you can view your long term data in weekly and monthly breakdown besides the default daily view. This was a very important step to be able to judge your site's growth over a longer period of time.

Daily breakdown. Hard to see the trends.

Weekly view. Easier to judge.

Monthly view. You can clearly see the trend here.

Also, you have the option to view many other aspects of your site besides number of visitors such as page views and Pages/Visit. Now, Google Analytics is truly the best free solution out there to measure and analyze your site's traffic.

There are millions of ways to generate ideas to come up with new concepts for your projects. You can use your subconscious to come up with an idea or you can consult the Idea Generator for random associations. This tool is great because it gives you combinations of terms that are usually unrelated, but your mind will still try and connect them. This exercise will create lines of thoughts that can be completely novel.

Add to the three generated words some keywords from your own project and you get an endless list of inspirational sentences. Most of them will be non-sense, but they may still give you a seed for an idea. Of course you can simply use a dictionary for this purpose, but this tool is more convenient.

Now it’s possible. Now it’s easy and fun. In this simple tutorial you will learn how to use improved bullets and numbering InDesign’s feature to get numbers on your tickets. Our goal will be to create 1000 tickets, numbered from number 1 to 1000.

Stock Image from stockxpert

Many asked for help naming their companies in the creativebits forums, so I though to write a post about this subject. While naming is not part of graphic design, it is certainly a sister profession and I'm sure you've been asked to do such an exercise during your career.

If you're not a designer or branding specialist and you're about to open a business or launch a product/service I would not recommend you to try naming it at the kitchen table for real. Ideally you would need to hire a naming company or a branding agency who also does naming to do it professionally for you. You can try it for fun though.

If you are a designer with strong language skills and a good understanding of marketing you can try naming a company yourself. It is a whole science and can not be covered in one blog post, but I will try to give a few pointers on how to approach this problem.

Most of us come up with ideas for designs, logos or advertising concepts in the most unexpected places. In the shower or during jogging.

The reason for this is simple. While research and strategic planning should be done with full concentration, ideation is best done subconsciously. If you try to concentrate to come up with an idea sitting over a white piece of paper most of the time you will sweat blood and come up with nothing good. You need to put your mind to a state where you do think about the problem at hand in the background, but the primary focus is on something else.

Here is a list of many things you can do to help you take your mind away. Besides distracting you the exercises described below also activate your brain in different unexpected ways. This helps your brain to create new combinations of thoughts that may result in an idea.

During a project for the American Institute Of Graphic Artists the creative team, John Neerland and Nina Orezzoli, discovered that many graphic design terms have an inherent dark side to them. They then quickly decided that this could become a fun ad, poster and interactive tool online to test the knowledge of students and young designers across the world. Oh yeah, you can buy some cool t-shirts, too.