April, 2004 | CreativePro Network

PDF and Panther: The Hidden Role of PDF in Mac OS X 10.3

For more information about The Seybold Report click here. For the world’s publishers, Mac OS X is a blessing — no question about that. Publishers have never had an operating system that is this fast and this publishing-oriented. OS 9 users may not want to hear it (in some cases, they may have to be […]

QuarkXPress 6 Tips: Communicating in a Workgroup

This story is taken from “QuarkXPress 6 Bible.” To buy this book click here. Although page design may seem like a solitary activity, it’s rare that you work in a vacuum. Illustrators and photographers create their own files and you must slide them into your workflow. Alternatively you may have to send your layout to […]

Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T1: Digital Camera with Big Resolution, Small Dimensions

Buying a digital camera always requires trade-offs, but increasingly, there are fewer and fewer compromises that you have to make when selecting a camera that’s right for you. The new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T1 5-megapixel camera is one of the best examples of this phenomenon. Until recently, if you wanted a very small camera that could […]

dot-font: Material Type

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 […]

Heavy Metal Madness: Put on a Happy Face!

When I met my wife Patty back in the very early ’80s, it made perfect sense to me that she was fond of classic yellow happy-face buttons. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, so for a leather-jacketed, Ramones-loving, intelligent woman, irony was about the only course of action. She wore a happy face button […]

Acrobat How-To: PDF Printing, Preflighting, and Prepress

This story is taken from “Acrobat 6 PDF Bible.” To buy this book click here. Printing files at a service bureau used to be a tussle of proprietary formats, with QuarkXPress usually winning. Then more and more publishers began to produce PDF files for their final output. But Acrobat’s original mission as a compact vehicle […]

Bit by Bit: Learning to Love Letters — and Leading

One of the courses I teach at California Polytechnic State University (also known as Cal Poly) is Advanced Typography, an upper-division course for students in our Graphic Communication program. The class consists of a two-hour lecture and a three-hour lab each week. This past quarter was my second time teaching the class, a course that […]

The Art of Business: Welcome to the Concierge Economy

Business books tend to fall into two categories; those that do a great job of restating the fundamentals (or the obvious, depending on your level of experience) and those that tend toward the theoretical, so much so that they make it difficult to put their prescriptions into practice. “The Next Economy” by Elliott Ettenberg is […]

Creative Fuel: Nathan Shedroff on Good Ideas and Bad Designs

Last month I talked about the Webby Awards and shared my conversation with two of the principals involved in the awards. For this column I talked with Nathan Shedroff, a designer based in San Francisco who has been a Webby judge for several years. Shedroff, an articulate and thoughtful man, has some interesting observations about […]