Quantcast

a mediabistro site

Ivan's picture

Working with clipping paths in Adobe InDesign

Adapted from Adobe InDesign CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing)
By Galen Gruman

A clipping path is essentially a shape that acts like a cutout mask—anything inside the shape displays and anything outside does not. It’s a very handy way of displaying just the pieces of a graphic that you want to display, such as masking out extraneous background or focusing on a specific portion of a larger image. Clipping paths are also frequently used to control text wrap around graphics.

InDesign can work with clipping paths that are already part of an imported TIFF, JPEG, Photoshop EPS or Photoshop image, or with clipping paths you create in InDesign. And no matter the source of the clipping path, InDesign lets you modify it.

Ivan's picture

Creative use of typography in advertising

Typography can be a powerful tool to convey a message. Check out hundreds of great examples from around the world below.

Ivan's picture

Add tabs to Finder

When tabs finally found their way into Web browsers some years ago, people immediately fell in love with them. In fact, most people wonder how someone could live without them. With Apple’s love for a minimalist interface, you have to wonder why we still don’t have them on the desktop. Whatever the reason, we’ve been left to wait for a third-party solution.

Check out Total Finder: http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/

Ivan's picture

Logorama

Logorama is an Oscar winning movie about a police chasing an armed criminal in a version of Los Angeles comprised entirely of corporate logos.

You can watch the full movie here or on YouTube here (broken into 2 parts).

Ivan's picture

HTML Ipsum

We all use lorem ipsum copy for our print layouts. What about webdesign? HTML Ipsum is a simple site offering similar lorem ipsum texts with html markup which will help you create pages to test css styling.

Ivan's picture

Use copy & paste in Calculator

In OS X there is no cursor in the calculator.app and the calculator dashboard widget, therefore it is not possible to select the numbers appearing on their screens. Yet this doesn't mean you can't paste in a number from your clipboard or copy the results of your calculation to the clipboard.

Just use the Apple(Command)-C or Apple-V keyboard shortcuts as if the screen was selected. Not very intuitive but it works.

For quick calculations you can also use Spotlight or if you're in an Adobe app you can do math right within some of the input fields.

Ivan's picture

Rule 1: Thou Shalt Make a Logo That is Instantly Readable

Adapted from No Rules Logos: Radical design solutions that break the rules (RotoVision)
By John Stones

Rule 1

Convention has it that one of a logo's first tasks is to be immediately accessible and readable; it shouldn't daunt the viewer at first sight. The logos that follow, however, make demands on their viewers and require deciphering.

Ivan's picture

Change the horrid blue Exposé outer-glow

If you don't the default blue outer-glow in Exposé you can easily hack to make it look more appealing.

Go to the folder System/Libary/CoreServices. Locate the Dock application. Ctrl-Click it and select Show Package Contents. Within that navigate to the Contents/Resources folder. Here you will find two png files: expose-window-selection-small.png and expose-window-selection-big.png You can overwrite these to create a new look.

See attached files for a neat white outline.

Thanks for the tip propono!

Latest critique

  • Illustration
  • Bullet Films  2

On Demand Videos

Photoshop: From Ho-hum to Wow!
You can use Photoshop to bring out the magic of photos that are muddy, soft, or blandly composed.
watch a preview

On Demand Videos: Video tutorials for advertising pros and designers providing tools and information you can trust — and use — on your very next project. Subscribe today!

Creativebits recommends

stocklogos.com logoawards.mediabistro.com

Marketplace