March, 2003 | CreativePro Network

The Art of Business: New Design Books Hit and Miss

For serious writers, there is still only one bible of good writing. It’s “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr., a 78-page ode to clear and succinct writing that has many imitators but no rivals. So when an author comes along with a book called “The Elements of Graphic Design,” he immediately sets a […]

Digital Photography How-To: Building a Light Tent

Perhaps you need to shoot a watch for an online auction. Or photograph your wedding ring for insurance purposes. Or get an image of an antique coin. In any of these cases, you’re going to need to take pictures of something that’s small, shiny, and hard to photograph. Often people resort to professionals to capture […]

Under the Desktop: Planning for Scanning

When considering the scanning process, my guess is that most creative professionals think first of software rather than the scanner itself: either the scanner’s software interface or the image-editing application, usually Adobe Photoshop. Sometimes that’s the same thing, thanks to a scanner acquisition plug-in. Still, your scanner is a complex device, covering the technological bases […]

Photoshop How-To: Making a Painting from a Photo

Adapted from "Inside Photoshop 7" (New Riders Publishing). Purchase this book here. This trick is at the top of my bag, because it just dawned on me a week or so ago that the new Photoshop 7 brushes could indeed be used with the Lighting Effects filter to produce painting-like compositions from photos, models, or […]

The Raw Truth: Work with Raw Digital Camera Files in Photoshop

Digital cameras store their images as JPEG files. As anyone who’s ever prepared an image for the Web knows, JPEG offers an excellent balance of quality and compression. However, because JPEG is a “lossy” compression scheme, your images can be visibly degraded by the compression process. As such, many cameras also include the ability to […]

dot-font: The Next Sabon

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here. Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking […]

Illustrator How-To: Create Surreal Flowers

With the help of Adobe Illustrator, creating colorful, magical flowers has never been easier. Why waste time and money searching for and buying floral clip art when you can make it yourself? In this article, we’ll go over how to create basic floral shapes, leaves, and vines, so let’s get started. Step 1: Set up […]

Heavy Metal Madness: Content Management by the Pound

Some people choose hobbies that serve as antidotes to their work selves — high-risk extreme sports on Saturday, mild-mannered, cautious office worker Monday through Friday. And then there are those of us who pick hobbies that only magnify our work selves — instead of extreme sports we go for extreme compulsion. So if you constantly […]

Plug-Ins and XTensions: Illustrator Packagers, Photoshop Enlargers, InDesign Converters, QuarkXPress Saviours

Each month Design Tools Monthly reviews some of the best plug-ins and XTensions on the market. Most of the mentioned products can be purchased through The PowerXChange. Illustrator Package Mockups in Illustrator Comnet’s FoldUP-3D ($380) is a plug-in for Illustrator that lets you preview package designs. You create die-lines or import them from a CAD […]