June, 2013 | CreativePro Network

How to Draw a 3D Ribbon in Adobe Illustrator, part 2

Make sure you check out Part 1 of this tutorial before reading on. When last we saw our Illustrator project, we had created a customized ribbon or lanyard effect from a simple rectangle, by adding text, texture (via the Scribble effect), and twists (using Envelope Mesh). So it looked something like this: Next, we’ll see […]

20 Years of PDF

When it comes to publishing, PDF technology is so integral and so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. It replaced film in the prepress systems of commercial print publishing. It underlies publications made with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, like National Geographic and Rolling Stone. And of course, it is the […]

Lightroom 5 Round-up

Adobe’s Lightroom 5 was released this week with a number of new features including an advanced Healing Brush for removing unwanted objects (or people) from your photos, Upright corrections for fixing skewed images, Radial Gradients for creating off-center effects, plus Behance integration, and improvements to preview, slideshow, and photo book creation features. Lightroom 5 is […]

Quark Offers a Special Upgrade Deal

Seeing an opportunity in the number of folks upset by Adobe’s subscription-only policies for the former Creative Suite apps, Quark is offering a special deal to win back customers who switched to InDesign at some point. Now through June 30th, owners of any previous version of QuarkXPress can upgrade to version 9 and be eligible […]

Drop Cap Tips: Kerning and Sizing

InDesign can make decent-looking drop caps at the push of a button, but I always seem to find myself battling to make them look better. After spending much time in the trenches, I have a few insights and undocumented techniques. You can control the basic aspects of drop caps—how many characters to enlarge and how […]

How to Export a Selection to a Precise Size

Export a PNG or JPEG of your artwork to an exact pixel dimension, and let InDesign do the work for you.

Apple’s Design Manifesto

At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple revealed a host of new products, including completely redesigned versions of iOS and Mac Pro computers. iOS7 The new Mac Pro But in addition to the new hardware and software, Apple also released a design manifesto in two videos shown around the keynote address. “Designed by Apple – […]

10 Essential Tips for PDF Comments

When you have to communicate with colleagues about the content in a PDF, it’s much more efficient to put comments in the PDF itself rather than in an email or elsewhere. So here are ten essential tips for working with PDF comments in Adobe Acrobat or Reader. 1. To indicate text edits, you can use […]

Import a Folder Full of Pictures, One Per Page

In an earlier article, I wrote about how to import lots of images into InDesign at the same time. Later someone asked me how to import a folder of images so that each image shows up on a different page — much like the PDFplacer script (or PlaceMultiPagePDF.jsx script) splits up pages of a PDF […]