creativebits - Apple oriented design community

Portrayal of George W. Bush in international advertisements

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:47:28 -0700

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."

Trackpad gestures in Photoshop

Fri, 09 May 2008 16:06:34 -0700

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:

Hold the Alt (Option) key and double finger track to zoom within the document in and out.
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.
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.
Tap with two fingers results in a CTRL-click or right mouse button click.
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.

Five+1 Common CSS Hang-ups In Dreamweaver

Wed, 07 May 2008 04:56:20 -0700

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.

iGoogle theme, great promotional tool for designers

Sat, 03 May 2008 12:46:14 -0700

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.

Del.icio.us bookmarks plugin finally comes to Firefox 3

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:28:35 -0700

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.

Strategy for versioning jobs

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:14:10 -0700

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!

Illustrator collect for output

Thu, 01 May 2008 03:22:06 -0700

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:

You open Art Files and drop all the Illustrator files you want to send in the drop zone.
Click files that are marked with a question mark and locate them. You can easily do that by using the built-in file search
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.

marry caribbean

Thu, 01 May 2008 04:33:02 -0700

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

Is your browser compatible?

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:07:06 -0700

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

Get notified when your email has been read

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:46:19 -0700

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.

msn live image search

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:46:03 -0700

I'm not a big fan of MS products usually. I use Apple and Google software mostly. But I have to admit msn's image search blows the competition away. It has so many cool features, such as:

Lightbox (called Scratchpad by MS)
Dynamic resizing of thumbnails
Details of thumbnail on hover
Easy refinement of search terms (size, orientation, color, style, face)
Endlessly scrolling page (like Google Reader)
You can give msn feedback on the images (not sure how useful this is)

I think all these make image search much faster and easier than doing the same with Google or Yahoo! Congrats MS! :)

Also, check out their video search, the videos start playing in a thumbnail on hover! WOW!

Phantasm CS rocks Adobe Illustrator

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:46:56 -0700

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.

My Unexpected Apple Customer Service Hell!!!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:13:44 -0700

I'm not one to complain, but when something breaks and is in warranty it should be replaced or fixed, either will do.

In this case it was my Apple Airport Extreme, something went wrong, so as I always do I called Apple Care and was immediately offered a swap.
I was shipped a new unit it became apparent it that it wasn't the base station, but a power adaptor issue.
First I was shipped an incorrect power cord (one for Europe as opposed to the UK), another call to Apple Care and the correct ones were shipped and arrived.

What input device do you use?

Mon, 05 May 2008 14:45:26 -0700

Mouse

65% (730 votes)

Trackball

5% (55 votes)

Tablet

24% (276 votes)

Trackpad

6% (67 votes)

Total votes: 1128

Get Goin' With These Dreamweaver Tutorials!

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:34:06 -0700

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!