The CreativePro Weekly Top 10, vol. 4
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More marvelous miscellanea for you to contemplate and click.
1. Need a place to create a slick online portfolio? Behance is included with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, but it isn’t the only game in town. 4ormat offers the ability to drag and drop your content into customizable dynamic themes, integration with social media and blogging platforms, and it looks pretty awesome on mobile devices too.
A basic plan, which includes domain mapping and 50 pages, is $6.99 per month. Pro and Agency plans are also available. Check out the Spotlight for examples of what you can create with 4ormat.
2. Whether you call them vintage, retro, classic, or just plain old, the designs of the past are always a source of inspiration. And Design Shack has a good guide to Making Vintage Design Work for You. It includes tips on selecting vintage color palettes, textures, type, and more.
3. Sometimes I think Buzzfeed is the internet equivalent of getting breakfast at a Taco Bell drive-thru (waffle taco, anyone?), but The Creative Process Explained By Comics is great, if only for reminding us to re-read Calvin and Hobbes.
4. In this age where many of us stare at screens throught the day and night, it can be tough to get (yawn…) some decent sleep. We’re not supposed to be looking at all that blue light once the sun goes down. That’s why f.lux was invented. It automatically changes the colors on your screen at certain times of the day to help you sleep better. You can customize or disable it at any time when you need to see more accurate colors. It’s free, and available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS.
5. When you see a notification that an app or OS needs to be updated, do you think “Whee! New features!” or do you think, “Sigh, wonder what they screwed up.” If you lean towards the latter, take heart, you’re not alone, and there’s an increasing awareness that this is an entirely reasonable response. Exhibit A: Users Don’t Hate Change, They Hate You
6. Bookry offers HTML 5 widgets and services for people who work with iBooks Author, including an automated tool for converting InDesign files and PDFs to iBooks Author files. For projects that require more than just a push button conversion, they also offer tiered conversion services that include custom design and branding, plus enhanced interactivity.
7. Some folks love working with code, some hate it. If you’re the kind of person who bleeds 8A0707, you might want to pick up a deck of playing cards from Varianto:25. They come in Javascript, CSS, HTML, and several other types of code. The decks go for $10 plus $5 shipping.
8. Freelancers need solid information to help them decide how much to charge for their services. So do the folks on the buying end of those transactions. But how exactly does one decide on a fair price for a piece of work? One way would be to consult the Graphic Artist’s Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. The 14th edition contains over 300 pages of information to help you set the prices you charge (or pay).
9. When you need to choose the right font, Pinterest can be a treasure trove of typographic inspiration. But the folks at Extensis want to make it even easier for you to access great inspirational type with the new Fontspiration feature in Suitcase Fusion 5. It puts a scrolling sideshow of gorgeous glyphs right in the same window where you manage your own fonts.
When you see something you like, you can just click it to jump to the image on Pinterest for a closer look.
10. “Selfie” was declared the Word of the Year for 2013. Apparently even cats and dogs are now taking selfies.
I’m not sure what that means for us as humans a species, but maybe checking out selfiecity.net will yield some answers. The site offers analysis of the demographics of people taking selfies, patterns, poses and expressions, and some
essays about selfies in the history of photography, and more.
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