Get Creative VIDEO: News for the Week of February 18, 2008

InDesignSecrets Shellie Hall

This week’s videocast is sponsored by iStockphoto.
Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s videocast:
News
PaperSpecs will hold a one-hour free webinar entitled “Impressed with Letterpress” on Tuesday, February 26, at 2:00 PM EST/11:00 AM PST. Its aim is to re-introduce letterpress printing to a new generation of designers and print buyers. Register at www.paperspecs.com/webinar/letterpress.htm
OS X Leopard has been out for a few month now, so it no longer has that “news” factor, but I need to say “Thanks” to Apple for its Time Machine. That’s the automatic backup built into Mac OS X 10.5. It
keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac, so you can easily go back in time if you need to recover anything. Which is exactly what happened to me last night. I went into panic mode when I realized I’d deleted something important. In less than 5 minutes all of my accidentally deleted files were back on my desktop and the day way saved. Lesson learned… back up early and back up often.
Media Lab makes some interesting products, such as SiteGrinder, a Photoshop plug-in that claims to convert PSD designs into fully functional Web sites. Media Labs also has products for videographers, Flash designers, and Dreamweavers users.
Top 5 Web Sites of the Week
1. At W3Schools you’ll find a wealth of the Web-building tutorials, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia, and WAP. I like the CSS tutorials, which are completely interactive and let you see how drastically the look of a Web site can change with just a little bit “styling” added.
2. Extensis has created a very fun site that’s part “what font are you” quiz and part showing what would happen if fonts were people and tried to date. Want to see “typefaces” like Papyrus and Comic Sans pouring out their hearts in a video confrontation? You can!
3. Softpedia is an excellent place to download the latest software updates for just about any current application, plug-in, or XTension you can imagine. Software is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, Handheld, and Mobile.
4. Are you looking for fun free tools for iChat and Photobooth? Check out MacPoupou Factory,
the blog of a French Mac user. The free effects are all bundled into one download and come with a simple installer.
5. Congratulations to Adobe on 25 years of building the tools that we use every day. To commemorate the company’s achievements, Adobe has created an interactive timeline that charts its milestones.

To see a library of all the Get Creative video, go to https://creativepro.com/blog/get-creative-video-library.