Archive
Monthly Archives: May 2004

The Art of Business: Care and Feeding of Freelancers

Few industries rely on the contribution of freelancers as much as the unwieldy universe known as marketing communications/graphic arts. Agencies use freelancers, small shops use freelancers, even freelancers use freelancers. It’s a virtual world. Why hire a freelancer? Hiring freelance means your firm gets the finished product it needs without incurring the costs of hiring […]

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Photoshop How-To: Compositing Images with Color and Shadow

This story is taken from “Adobe Master Class: Photoshop Compositing with John Lund”, published by Peachpit Press One of the most fun — and challenging — tasks in Photoshop is combining multiple photographs into a single image. Called a composite, the resulting image can either look fanciful to deliberately distort reality or authentic to convincingly […]

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Acrobat How-to: Enhancing Tutorials With Interactive Elements

Nobody has 100-percent retention, which is why in 1121 A.D. the Cistercian monk Erroneus invented Since then, other than replacing quill pens with laser printers, and sheepskins with paper, not much has changed. Every year, teachers and trainers pile paper on students, hoping to reinforce classroom presentations. Trees are slaughtered, backpacks are crammed full, but […]

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XML Can Go to H***: One Designer's Experience with the "Future of Publishing"

“As for the future of publishing, XML is really important. I can’t tell you how or why, but I know it’s the future.” — My Editor Pam Pfiffner If ever there were two philosophically incompatible genres, surely programming and graphic design would outrank organized religion. Asking a graphic designer to program is generally about as […]

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dot-font: A New Face for Small Text

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 […]

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Plug-Ins and XTensions: Photoshop Frames, Illustrator Mockups, QuarkXPress Audits, Acrobat Images

Each month Design Tools Monthly reviews some of the best plug-ins and XTensions on the market. Most of the mentioned products can be purchased through The PowerXChange. Acrobat PDF Image Tool Acronnect Software’s ImageEngine Export 1.0 ($80) is a plug-in for Acrobat 5 and 6 that exports images from a PDF document in Photoshop format, […]

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