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Photoshop Time-Savers

Photoshop Time-Savers: Leveraging Smart Objects

Helen Bradley demonstrates how to leverage smart objects to dramatically increase design efficiency.

5 Steps to Improve Your Design Process

Five Steps to Improve Your Design Process

Alex White guides you through five principles that you can apply to your design practice to ensure legible, memorable results.

Boosting Sales Through Effective Web Design

Designer and author Aliyah Marr answers the question, "How do you design a website that sells?"

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1. Leveraging Smart Objects 2. Improve Your Design Process 3. Boosting Sales

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software tips

Need a crash course on InDesign or Photoshop? View all our software tip tutorials.

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Saving Time with Enhanced Illustrator CS4 Features

The latest version of Illustrator takes it up a notch, making key features much simpler and more intuitive. Claudia McCue shows you some of the coolest CS4 upgrades: the ability to use multiple drawing areas in the same Illustrator file, an enhanced appearance panel, a handy gradient controller, and more. You'll also see how these enhancements in Illustrator can help you streamline your workflow.

Related Tags: Adobe Creative Suite 4, Acrobat, PDFs, Printing Tips, Illustrator

What Drives Interactive Design?

Aliyah Marr presents an overview of the various ways in which a website can engage the user. She likens web design to driving a stick shift, with the five gears corresponding to levels of intricacy and depth in a website's visual environment. Examining each "gear" individually, Aliyah finds fun examples at all levels that are sure to surprise and inspire.

Related Tags: Creativity, Web Design, Branding, Marketing

Photoshop to InDesign

This tutorial from Adobe-certified trainer Alison Cattelona contains numerous tips, tricks, and features that you can employ for smooth integration of Photoshop and InDesign. Alison explores syncing color profiles, changing preferences for easy sizing in an InDesign layout, creating alternate compositions with layer comps, using the links panel to manage images, and sharing color swatches between the two programs, among other helpful time-saving techniques.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Layout, Software Tips, Adobe Creative Suite 4, Color, InDesign

Non-Destructive Color Correcting Using Adjustment Layers

Mara Sachs illustrates how to adjust the brightness, contrast, and color of an image without affecting original pixels. Beginning with an introduction to adjustment layers and the new-to-CS4 adjustments panel, this tutorial explores the benefits of using the Levels and Curves layers, how to color-correct a portion of an image, and how to organize multiple adjustment layers.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Adobe Creative Suite 4, Color

Practical & Creative Uses for Photoshop's Pen Tool

Photoshop's pen tool is an often-neglected feature, but multitasking designers will find it very useful, as instructor Helen Bradley demonstrates in this tutorial. She explains how to use the pen tool to create and use a custom shape, edit shapes from Photoshop's shape collection, customize typefaces, and create smooth, sophisticated selection lines around an object.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Creative Suite 3, Creativity

Copywriting for Designers

Designers can become more competitive by adding copywriting to their skill set. Nancy Hoffmann, a designer who has worked as a professional copywriter, understands how effective writing and professional design can combine to deliver successful work for clients. She breaks copywriting down to its essentials: how to come up with a concept that works, how to craft an approach in collaboration with your client, and how to structure your final copy. Nancy also provides a separate set of rules for online copywriting, and looks at some websites with exemplary copy.

All About Actions in Photoshop

Photoshop actions allow you to run a set of automated tasks on a file or group of files. By incorporating actions intelligently into your workflow, you can spend much less time on tedious, repetitive tasks in Photoshop, and more time on design. This comprehensive, step-by-step tutorial by Helen Bradley examines the components and uses of the actions that come with Photoshop CS3, then shows how to create, run, pause, and save customized actions.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Creative Suite 3

Common Type Mistakes... & How to Avoid Them

Design professor Joseph Caserto surveys the most common typography errors made by today's designers... and the simple steps you can take to ensure that they don't show up in your work. Typographer's quotes, kerning, text justification, and an array of errors left over from the typewriter era are all covered here, and Joseph shows how to address each one in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress. This tutorial removes the guesswork from evaluating type.

Editing PDFs with Photoshop & Acrobat

Geoff Blake shows off some great ways to streamline your workflow by using Photoshop to edit and enhance PDFs. He demonstrates easy, fast methods of replacing, resizing, altering, and repositioning images in Acrobat files, among other valuable design solutions (some of which are unique to CS4). Geoff's tips will help you achieve maximum flexibility and the best possible results with your PDFs in the shortest possible timeframe.

Related Tags: Adobe Creative Suite 4, Acrobat, PDFs, Photoshop, Software Tips

Make Your Design Work... No Matter What

Designers have to work with the tools and materials available, and those are not always ideal. Making assets out of familiar design liabilities is the subject of this tutorial by noted art director Angela Riechers. In Angela's accomplished career, she's triumphed over obstacles such as bad stock art, total lack of art, total lack of a budget, super-demanding deadlines, dry subject matter, and more. Armed with a vivid array of examples, Angela offers practical advice and creative strategies that will help you make great design out of a not-so-great situation.

Coding Marketing E-mails Using Adobe Dreamweaver

To conclude her three part-series on designing effective marketing e-mails, Paulina Tracz (aka "Simple Pea") looks at how to translate an e-mail design accurately into HTML code. She deals with formatting the basic structure of an e-mail, replacing images with HTML content, placing and formatting HTML copy, fixing image code, and creating footers in accordance with anti-spam laws. To wrap up, Paulina shows how to test your e-mail design as well as what to do if there are any discrepancies between your design and how it displays in a browser. This completes the process she began in her first tutorial, on designing e-mails in Photoshop, and developed in her second, on preparing e-mails for coding in ImageReady.

Related Tags: Software Tips, Web Design, Dreamweaver, Layout, Marketing, Promotion

Preparing an E-mail Design for Coding Using Adobe ImageReady

In her first tutorial, Paulina Tracz (aka "Simple Pea") covered Designing an Effective Marketing E-mail Using Adobe Photoshop. The next phase of her e-mail protocol involves using Adobe ImageReady to break down the design into digestible coding components. This crucial intermediate step ensures a smooth, simple transition from finished design to effective e-mail. Paulina provides design do's and don'ts to keep in mind, an in-depth look at the slicing process, a demonstration of the best way to save a file in order to prepare it for coding, and more.

Related Tags: Software Tips, ImageReady, Slicing, Guides, Layout, Marketing, Promotion

InDesign Time-Savers: Variables & Data Merge

Adobe-certified trainer Alison Cattelona explores two features—variables and data merge—that can help you customize data instantly in InDesign. Variables allow you to create running headers and footers, quickly update document information, and perform a number of other fast feats not achievable otherwise. Using data merge, you can make mini-layouts with information from an external data source at the touch of a button. After viewing this tutorial, you'll know not only how to use these features, but also how to apply them to any project you might be working on.

Color-Managed Workflows

Picking up where her previous tutorial, Color Management Essentials for Creative Professionals, left off, Rita Amladi provides a comprehensive set of core practices to make your color-managed design workflow successful and efficient. After presenting separate workflows for print, web, and digital photography projects, she gives expert advice on softproofing, matching what appears on your monitor to how it will appear in print, sharing and creating color palettes, creating custom profiles, and optimizing PDFs. This tutorial will show you how to achieve total control over the appearance of your work across print and digital media.

Designing Your Own Magazine

Angela Riechers, design lecturer and former art director of Harper's Magazine as well as other major publications, guides you through the process of creating the "design voice" of a brand-new publication from start to finish. Working within Adobe InDesign, she demonstrates how typeface, layout, color palette, photographs/illustrations, and other visual elements can be fused into a multilayered yet organic sensibility. She also reveals her personal post-design protocol, including spot-checking as well as preparing files for printing and/or uploading.

Related Tags: Magazine Design, PDFs, Logo Design, Color, InDesign, Layout, Image Selection

Self-Promotion for Designers

Self-promotion is a necessity for designers contending with today's challenging economic climate. Unfortunately, designers often view self-promotion as an impossibly complex, expensive, and competitive endeavor. To Aliyah Marr, however, the process of self-branding is as simple and natural as falling in love. She offers strategies that will help you develop your own personal design brand and communicate it to potential clients and employers. Aliyah also showcases unconventional websites, digital movies, and business cards that make a powerful impression, often with a very small budget.

Related Tags: Promotion, Client Relations, Flash, Creativity, Marketing

Designing an Effective Marketing E-mail Using Adobe Photoshop

Paulina Tracz (aka "Simple Pea") brings her years of experience creating great marketing e-mails to this highly informative tutorial. She addresses how to design e-mails with the coding process in mind; document, grid, and basic layout setup; importing images into a document (plus modifying image dimensions using layer masks); settings for graphic vs. HTML type; and adding dimension to make designs really pop. Whether you're making marketing e-mails for your client/employer or creating a promotional piece for your own design practice, this tutorial will decrease your turnaround time and get your work noticed.

Related Tags: Software Tips, Photoshop, Layout, Marketing, Promotion

How to Send a Message with Color

Color is one of the most important tools a designer has in conveying a message, but how can you be sure that your color choices are telling the story that you and your client want told? In this eye-opening tutorial, designer/blogger Nancy Hoffmann takes you for a spin through the color wheel... from a designer's perspective. Using movie posters, costumes, and famous paintings as examples, she points out how colors communicate with the eye and with each other.

Related Tags: Color, Image Selection, Web Design, Creativity, Branding

Laying the Groundwork for Web Layouts in CS4

Designer/presenter Geoff Blake takes you inside his CS4 workflow in this practical tutorial on bringing a web layout design from Illustrator into Dreamweaver. You'll learn how to build a <div> layout from scratch in Dreamweaver, how to use class styles to control layout, how to create background images for use in a web layout, and a lot more. If you're unfamiliar with <div> elements, this tutorial is a must-see.

Repeat & Align: Spacing Tips & Techniques in Photoshop

In this tutorial, Helen Bradley supplies tips for using the Repeat & Align tools in Photoshop. You'll discover quick ways of aligning images relative both to a grid and to one another as well as using the rotate and transform tools to make perfect patterns such as starbursts and spirals. In addition, Helen guides you through the creation of 3D patterns with the vanishing point tool.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Creative Suite 3, Logo Design

Fundamentals of Retouching in Photoshop

Adobe specialist Mara Sachs provides a handy overview of basic retouching techniques in Photoshop. Even if you are familiar with the clone stamp, healing brush, spot healing brush, patch tool, and other methods of reshaping and finessing an image, you may still find Mara's refresher course quite helpful. In addition to introducing each of these features and showing how to use them, this tutorial offers many practical hints to help you employ retouching tools most effectively and efficiently.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Image Selection, Software Tips, Stock Photography

Five Famous Logos Deconstructed

Designer/artist Lauren Kangas takes a fun approach to a software tutorial: demonstrating cool features and techniques in Adobe Illustrator by recreating five ubiquitous logos. Lauren shows how to turn back the clock on Courier, how to use Illustrator's pathfinder palette, how to create reflections, and a lot more cool tricks using the logos for Chase Manhattan, Target, Aveda, and Animal Planet as well as Milton Glaser's legendary I Heart NY.

Related Tags: Illustrator, Logo Design, Branding, Software Tips

Color Management Essentials for Creative Professionals

Adobe-certified technical trainer Rita Amladi provides a clear, helpful guide to the essentials of color management. The methods and software features she covers in this comprehensive tutorial will allow you to make sure colors are represented accurately across all output spaces. Converting to CMYK, managing colors for output to the web and e-mail, and dealing with those pesky "color profile needed" messages are just a few of the topics included.

Putting It Together: Achieving a Unified Design

In this tutorial, design professor and author Alex White explores a major aspect of what distinguishes great all-around design from something merely "attractive." Unity, he claims, is what happens when the three major elements of design — image, text, and space — are forced into strong, compelling relationships. Using examples from his actual university classes, Alex presents various methods designers can adopt to create relationships among the elements in their own work.

Related Tags: Creativity, Case Studies, Image Selection

Boosting Sales Through Effective Web Design

Designer and author Aliyah Marr answers the question, "How do you design a website that sells?" As Aliyah points out, it's all about how web design attracts, maintains, and directs the attention of the user. Pure aesthetics are less important than the effective anticipation of a potential consumer's questions and needs. Aliyah demonstrates that there's more than one path to successful retail website design with a broad range of surprising, engaging examples drawn from the web.

Related Tags: Web Design, Flash, Marketing, Client Relations

Photoshop Time-Savers: Leveraging Smart Objects

The use of smart objects in Photoshop allows the designer special freedoms such as the ability to edit filters at any stage of your workflow and the ability to resize multiple times without a significant loss of image quality. Helen Bradley demonstrates how to leverage smart objects to dramatically increase design efficiency. She also provides a real-world example of how this feature in CS3 can be applied to a design project.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Creative Suite 3

Photoshop Time-Savers

5 Steps to Improve Your Design Process

Boosting Sales Through Effective Web Design

NOW SHOWING:

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