February, 2001 | CreativePro Network

Bit by Bit: Picture Frames Get Smart

My mother-in-law is non-technical. She enjoys the benefits of technology, but she’s the first to step out of line if the attraction is computer-related or requires the use of any tool more complex than a screwdriver. Granted, she uses my father-in-law’s computer to play an occasional round of Solitaire, and she has been known to […]

Inside QuarkXPress: The Building Blocks Behind Effective Business Card Design

Application: QuarkXPress 4.x Operating systems: Macintosh, Windows There are two important aspects to desktop publishing: design and production. You can design until the cows come home, but if you don’t produce a printable document, what good is it? Similarly, you can follow print guidelines to the letter, but without a good design, who’ll care? That’s […]

The Creative Toolbox: Getting up to Speed with Photoshop 6

Every time the folks at Adobe announce a new version of Photoshop, I wonder what could they possibly do to an application so near to perfection other than ruin it. And every time I start using the new update, I can’t imagine how I survived without it. Photoshop 6 follows in the same vein by […]

Synthetik Studio Artist 1.5

It occurs to me that with all the squawking I’ve done about the virtues of Synthetik Studio Artist, I haven’t yet done a review of version 1.5 or explained its broad range of features all in one place. I’ll rectify this now.

The Digital Dish: The Most Useful Program You Don’t Have

What was the first Bézier drawing program for Macintosh computers? No, it wasn’t Illustrator. Nor was it FreeHand. The answer is Fontographer, created by Altsys (now part of Macromedia) in 1985. That’s two years before Adobe Illustrator and three years before FreeHand, and Fontographer likely played a role in inspiring at least the latter. As […]

Notes from the Epicenter: Is the Great Internet Career a Listing Away?

So everyone and their cousin has a mind-bogglingly horrific dot-com layoff story. So Amazon.com, the paragon of new economy excess, laid-off 1,300 people week before last. So foul-mouthed Web sites that track the current downturn are getting way more attention than they deserve. So it’s hard to throw a cell phone on a busy San […]

The Mac Authority: Make Mac OS X Your Own with Just a Few Changes

Operating system: Mac OS X Mac users are a peculiar breed. We claim how great our user interface is but then the very first thing we do is learn how to change its appearance. Sometimes Apple helps by letting us create themes, but usually the major changes, the customization that screams “This is my Mac […]

dot-font: An American Typeface Comes of Age

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 […]

For Position Only: Investing in Online Content Benefits All

While the crashing and burning of the dot-conomy has been deafening in recent months, another disaster has been rumbling a bit more quietly: Traditional media publishers are pulling rugs out from under their Web sites and laying off content creators by the hundreds, because providing original content online is apparently just too expensive. Among the […]