A couple of weeks ago, the lights went out on millions of people in the Northeast, and perhaps only a slightly smaller number of computers and servers. Certainly, many content creators were caught in the widespread electrical blackout. Hopefully, your work survived the experience without a scratch as was the lucky experience of my colleague […]
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This story is taken from “Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites.” New Riders is offering this book to creativepro.com readers at a special discount. Click here to learn more. It’s one thing to slap togther some HTML and a few GIFS and call it a Web page. But creating a Web site that invites interaction […]
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Editor’s Note: The following article was written with Acrobat 5 in mind and does not specifically discuss the recently released Acrobat 6, although it has been reviewed for accuracy and relevance to the new software. A prime reason for using PDF as a format has to do with its ability to retain graphic appearance and […]
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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 […]
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The Character Palette in Mac OS X is a very cool font viewer and character selector — sort of like KeyCaps on steroids (see Figure 1). Unfortunately, for some reason Apple made it very hard to get to initially. After you “install” it, it shows up in the menu bar of every non-Classic application (see […]
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Mac OS X is designed to be a multi-user system; each individual user can have his or her very own settings, preferences, and even fonts. That’s one reason there are multiple font locations. Another reason is that the system is very particular about having its own, never-changing set of fonts. Still another reason is that, […]
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The Wall Street Journal recently reported that advertising-style matchbooks are on their way out, victims of state smoking bans and a market flooded with cheap disposable lighters. Apparently many restaurants and bars are switching to logo-adorned moist towlettes, fountain pens, and tiny notebooks as souvenir tchotchkes. Annual sales of matchbooks have dropped from $200 million […]
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Transparency is one of those features that designers love and printers hate. That’s because while transparency gives you the ability to create very cool-looking graphics, older PostScript RIPs are unable to process the files, which makes the people who try to output them very grumpy. So while forward-looking designers embraced InDesign for its transparency support, […]
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A Surreal-world example for the uninitiated, or as Rod Serling might say, “Submitted for your approval”: Jim runs a print shop that specializes in newsletters. A variety of client page layout files (from QuarkXPress, InDesign, even Microsoft Word) come in every day. One day a client file arrives that uses Times and Helvetica. Pretty standard […]
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