When you work with Illustrator documents your document's background is mostly white. The interface of the application, such as the panes and the toolbox are also white by default. This puts some strain on your eyes and brain when you're trying to identify each area. To relieve this extra effort you may want to experiment changing the background of the user interface to a shade of grey instead of white.

You can change this setting in Preferences/ User Interface. Don't set it too dark as it decreases the contrast between the background and graphics of the buttons making it more difficult to see the individual functions. A good balance is a color in the middle of the slider which is a light grey.

A secondary advantage of such a setting is that you will have an easy way to tell which application is running in the foreground as InDesign and Photoshop toolbars are quite similar to Illustrator.

I know there are many who prefer complete consistency of interfaces among applications. I personally prefer a small difference between them as it helps to identify instantly what I'm dealing with. That's why it was a good idea to have Safari, iTunes, Garageband and other Apple apps all have slightly different looks. It's a better parallel to the real world and it's easier for our mammalian brains to grasp.

If you work with files that have a common base and several custom layers for languages or other mutations, you should always remember to switch on the Paste Remember Layers option in Illustrator. You will find this option by clicking the little contextual menu icon in the top right corner of the layers pane.

This way when you select objects across several layers in your document and copy/paste it you will retain the layer separation and naming from the source document.

If you use Gmail regularly the 6+GB space Google offers may not be enough and you may be running out of space, which will make your account stop working. To avoid this problem you may want to free up some space with these tips.

If you're still struggling to make enough space, you can use this ultimate and simple solution:

1. Set-up you Gmail as an IMAP account in your Mail.app using these instructions.
2. Allow it a lot of time to download all your emails. Be careful not to download too much data at any 24 hour interval, as Google has a tendency to block the accounts with excessive traffic. Do it over a few days.



3. Then select the All Mail folder under your account.
4. Switch on the Size column in the list of your mails by CTRL-clicking the column titles.
5. Sort the messages by Size. Now you can see individual messages that have the largest attachments within your account.
6. Select and delete those emails that are unneeded. Check for those duplicates where you forwarded a large attachment and therefore it occupies your mailbox twice in your inbox and sent folders

Besides freeing up space on your Gmail account, by setting up an IMAP account you've also set-up a backup of your Gmail in case something happens to your internet connection or your Gmail account.

Have you noticed that screenshoots you make with the key command Apple-Shift-3 or Apple-Shift-4 are somewhat blurry and not pixel perfect? That is because by default the screen-shoot format is a made as a jpeg set to resolution 60. That's pretty low and therefore it produces small file sizes which is good for most uses, but not if you want to see every pixel in detail.

To fix this issue you have to set the deafult screenshoot format to png, pdf or tiff. You can do that with Terminal. Type these commands:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer

Press return after each line and replace png with pdf or tiff as you wish. Notice how sharp is the screenshoot above. ;)

Check out these free stencils for your design work. Very useful if you are designing an application.

First of all don't be fooled by SEO professionals. 95% of the offers are scam. The rest are serious professionals, but unless you are running a million dollar business you don't need them. Just follow these 5 suggestions and you can be sure you've done everything you can to rank high in Google.

1. Include the keywords in your domain name, page title and h1 article title. So for example if you want to sell squirrel food, register the domain squirrelfoodforsale.com. Include the keywords Squirrel Food in the page title and h1 article title. Include the same keywords in the body copy as well, but don't overdo it. Just make it natural.
2. Make sure as many related sites link you as possible. Not only the link has to include your keywords but the title of the article linking you should include it too. So if petfood.com links your site from the article Feeding your squirrel then you've got a valuable link.
3. Use Analytics and AdSense on your page, so Google can monitor the traffic of your site and make sure many people visit your page.
4. Update your site and page often. Google gives priority to content that has been updated within a week for obvious reasons.
5. Avoid links from spam and fake sites. You can get blacklisted easily and you will do more harm with such links than good.

Don't spend too much time on SEO, working on your product is time better spent, because there is nothing better than being linked organically.

I've discussed how to change the desktop for the login screen earlier — almost 3 years ago :O, but now with OS X 10.5 things have changed slightly.

If you want to change the desktop picture behind the login screen you should replace this file: System/ Library/ CoreServices/ DefaultDesktop.jpg with your new image. You will have to enter your admin password to be able to do that.

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.

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.

Building and managing websites can seem like a daunting task for the uninitiated. Even if you've been designing sites for a while, managing links, uploading, even working with a design team can still be challenging stuff. Throw in some heavy CSS-driven page layouts, and web design is suddenly down-right freaky!

Deep soothing breath, grasshopper. I have some great resources to help you with these web design issues. First, a 3-part video series called Creatin' CSS Layouts In Dreamweaver, which will demystify CSS-driven page layout. It'll take you from the basics, through to code and layout refinement, right up to building a full-on centered layout. Check it out!

Next, how about managing that site once it's up and running? Things like finding and fixing broken links, file management--that sort of thing? Here's an article called 10 Dreamweaver Site Management Tools. Give it a read here.

So, whether you're just getting into building sites, or if you've been at it a while, I hope these resources will help you out! Enjoy!