*** From the Archives ***

This article is from April 11, 2014, and is no longer current.

The CreativePro Weekly Top 10, vol. 10

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1. Ever struggle to recolor artwork in Illustrator? Designer Keri Labuski did, so she reached out to the members of the Illustrator LinkedIn group for help. And Mordy Golding replied with a fantastic video showing how to use the Recolor Artwork feature to achieve the desired results. Check it out below or at Mordy’s Real World Illustrator blog post.

2. Not to be outdone, Deke McClelland offered up the funniest Photoshop video ever. Unless you’re still using Photoshop 1.7. In that case, it’s probably serious cutting-edge material. Nah, it’s still the funniest video.

3. Meanwhile, folks at Adobe are hard at work on the next version of Photoshop, which will mark the end of some tools and features. Better get some use out of the Oil Paint filter soon (hint: make some tree bark with it). It’s not long for this world. Read the Spring Cleaning post at the Photoshop.com blog to learn what else is getting cut.

4. Back in my Photoshopping days, I was once asked to add an extra section to the White House to make it look “better.” I refused on the grounds that a) someone would notice, and b) it was an insane thing to do. But apparently the digital artists at Rolling Stone have no such a slavish devotion to authenticity, as they put John Hancock’s signature under text from the U.S. Constitution on the naked back of Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Clearly, the artist needs a lesson in using the History Brush.

5. Lightcase is a nifty pop-up photo studio that allows you to photograph small objects quickly & professionally with a smartphone. Or it will be, once the successful Kickstarter campaign wraps up. Currently, you can get in on one for $41 (£25).

6. Got a great idea for a t-shirt design? Check out this classic post, How to Break into T-shirt Design and grab some of the 15 Free PSD t-shirt templates rounded up by Spoongraphics.

7. Somewhere in the list of graphic design crimes and misdemeanors, there is a special place for that time-honored technique of cheating text spacing. Specifically, I’m talking about using paragraph returns, word spaces, tabs, thin spaces, etc. to move text into the desired position. It might be a temporary fix, but it’s a time bomb waiting to blow up in the face of the poor chump who inherits your files. Read David Kudler’s Plea to Book Designers: InDesign is Not a Linotype Machine for the gory details. And don’t space out.

8. In this week’s Hoefler & Frere-Jones item, Tobias Frere-Jones started a blog and wrote an enjoyable post called My Kind of Neighborhood on his accidental discovery of a “typography neighborhood” that once existed in 1800’s New York.

9. It’s hard to imagine how much time and effort went into the amazing stop motion film A Girl Named Elastika. Fortunately, you don’t have to. Just sit back and be amazed.

A GIRL NAMED ELASTIKA from Guillaume Blanchet I Filmmaker on Vimeo.

10. Working with type is both and art and a science. I can’t help you with the art, but for the science, check out Thomas Phinney’s article Know if a Font Sucks, and learn how spacing, kerning, shapes, intersections, and more can make a font suck (or not).

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • somadream says:

    nice.. tuto..

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