August, 2000 | CreativePro Network

dot-font: Trilateral Typography

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 […]

Enhance a Layout By Changing its Perspective

Version: 4, 4.1 Operating systems: Macintosh, Windows You’ve probably heard the phrase “think outside of the box,” but what about “turn the box on its side”? You don’t necessarily have to go to great lengths to create an interesting layout; sometimes you just need to see things from a slightly different perspective. QuarkXPress makes it […]

For Position Only: Is Quark the Underdog?

Epic battles always have an underdog. And the longer the war goes on, the more the underdog learns that wile and persistence may lead to victory. In the battle that is Adobe Systems and Quark Inc., it’s not clear which company is David to the other’s Goliath. And the secret weapon in this battle may […]

LiveMotion vs. Flash: Different Strokes

If you’re even a casual Web surfer, you’ve probably run into sites that use Macromedia Flash. When released, Flash sent something of a shockwave (Ouch! Sorry.) through the Web community by providing a high-quality, low-bandwidth method for delivering animations with sound and interactivity. A vector-based streaming format that also provides limited support for bitmapped graphics, […]

The Creative Toolbox: Tweaking Photoshop Type for the Web

One of the more trying tasks when designing for the Web can be creating great-looking, legible type as a graphic element, particularly when that element must fit within the restrictive confines of a navigation menu or banner. Adobe Photoshop 5.5 brought us new additions in type control specific to interactive and Web applications. Learning how, […]

Calculate Your Way to Better Images

Versions: 5, 5.5 Operating systems: Macintosh, Windows Photoshop’s Calculations command hasn’t been a real attention-getter. Nonetheless, it still holds interesting possibilities for enhancing images both technically and creatively. On the more technical side, there are many different image problems related to correction for print. One that isn’t commonly addressed is color depth. At some point, […]

Eye on the Web: So Many Web Geeks, So Little Space

The 1980s, as I understand it, were a boom time in this fair country. Young masters of the universe crowded New York City fern bars to swap business cards and stock-market tales. Kids just out of college were making millions as investment bankers. The housing market heated up as a moneyed younger class sought the […]

dot-font: Movable Type

The Creative Toolbox: Open-Standard Upstart SVG Takes on Macromedia’s SWF

Until relatively recently, graphics found their way to the Web using file formats developed years ago: GIF and JPEG. Using these formats assured at least fairly wide compatibility, but the image files are relatively large, and “interactivity” is limited to creating rudimentary animated GIFs. Vector-based graphics — such as Flash and now SVG — offer […]