Design Something Every Day 23/365

I read Ben Gremillion’s great arti­cle “Explor­ing PhotoShop’s Angle Gra­di­ent Tool” on webdesignerdepot.com. It inspired this lit­tle design, with a lit­tle help from a stock Jelly Fish from photoxpress.com.

Adobe PhotoShop (really) Quick Tips

Adobe Pho­to­Shop Really Quick Tip Here’s a handy lit­tle key­board short­cut I learned from Deke McClel­land, mas­ter of all things dig­i­tal imag­ing. This lit­tle tip is pretty handy when you want to exper­i­ment with layer blend­ing modes on the fly.

As long as you have don’t have the brush, heal­ing, gra­di­ent, blur­ring or dodge/burn tools active you can use a key­board short cut to cycle for­wards and back­wards through the layer blend modes. The short cut is (for both Mac & PC):

shift + + (plus key) or shift + — (minus key)

If you had any of the other tools active, the same key­board short­cut cycles through the active tool’s blend­ing mode, which can be pretty handy too.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

• Get a healthy dose of nos­tal­gia: Telling Sto­ries: Nor­man Rock­well from the Col­lec­tions of Lucas and Spiel­berg http://goo.gl/0unz #
• A nice col­lec­tion to get your #retro juices flow­ing | Pho­tographs of Gen­eral Motors Cars and Trucks, 1902–1938 http://goo.gl/souQ #
• First a death now a Dis­ney World mono­rail pilot suf­fers elec­tric shock, the mono­rail is the most dan­ger­ous ride in Dis­ney http://goo.gl/wX5y # Read more »

Even More InDesign (really) Quick Tips

Fol­low­ing up on my last quick tip, I thought I’d share how to increase or decrease the size of text within a text box by select­ing the box and using a key­board short­cut to do the heavy lifting.

The recipe to accom­plish this lit­tle key­board trick­ery is sim­ple. First select the box con­tain­ing the text with the either the selec­tion tool or direct selec­tion tool, it doesn’t mat­ter for this short-cut. Then decrease the size of the text in the box down by 1 point in by hitting:

CMD + OPT + comma (MAC)
CTRL + ALT + comma (PC)

To increase the size of the text by 1 point hit:

CMD + OPT + period (MAC)
CTRL + ALT + period (PC)

If that’s not enough you can also add shift to the mix and speed things up. To decrease the size of the text in 5 points incre­ments, select the box using either selec­tion tool and then hit:

CMD + OPT + shift + comma (MAC)
CTRL + ALT + Shift + comma (PC)

To increase the size of the text in 5 points incre­ments, select the box using either selec­tion tool and then hit:

CMD + OPT + shift + period (MAC)
CTRL + ALT + Shift + period (PC)

Bonus Tip 2:The amount of increase or decrease in font size is deter­mined in the pref­er­ences, and what’s great about that is that you can change this to bet­ter suit your work flow.

The way it works is what ever value is set in the Size/Leading field is how much the size increases or decreases when you use the key­board short cut, when you add shift to the mix it increases or decreases it five times what the value is. For exam­ple, the default is 1 point, so every time you use the key­board short cut the text increases or decreases 1 point, when you add shift then it goes up or down 5 points. I per­son­ally set mine to .5 points, so when I add shift to the short cut the fonts increases at 2.5 points per click. Sim­i­larly, if you would have had 2 points then adding shift would make the increase 10 points and so on. But, I feel hav­ing a lower default key­board incre­ment gives me greater con­trol and nuance over my work and is espe­cially help­ful when work­ing with text in fly­ers and brochures.

To change the default go to Edit>Preferences>Units & Incre­ments or sim­ply use the short cut CMD + K (MAC) or CTRL + K (PC) and select Units & Incre­ments. Please note this will also become your default for lead­ing as well.

Bonus Tip 3: This short cut also works when you have some text high­lighted. This short cut will increase what ever text you have selected, leav­ing the other text at the same size.

Updated Survivor Swatches for the Adobe Creative Suite

It is almost August and I real­ize that I haven’t updated my Free Sur­vivor Tribal Swatch Palettes since the con­clu­sion of last sea­son! Yikes I’ll prob­a­bly get voted off the island for that omission.

The past sea­son was fan­tas­tic! Full of drama, dou­ble crosses, schem­ing and titanic strug­gles between the forces of good and evil. That may be lay­ing it on a bit thick, though Rus­sell might just be evil. Obvi­ously the show is con­trived, but what nar­ra­tive isn’t? Sur­vivor, like most works of, dare I say it, art are really vehi­cles to explore larger themes. Even if shows like this  aren’t intended to be rev­e­la­tory, we can still find some mean­ing or food for thought in every prod­uct of cul­ture, well maybe not Car­rot Top.

After all, the pro­duc­ers of the show have com­mented that Sur­vivor is meant to strip peo­ple from their com­fort­able and famil­iar life and force them through stress (hunger, dis­com­fort and para­noia) to reveal their inner nature. So it is not much of a stretch to add greater mean­ing to Sur­vivor. True, the shows first and fore­most role is to be enter­tain­ment and it is easy to over ana­lyze these things, but if one watches as much Sur­vivor as I have, you will  (besides becom­ing slightly brain dam­aged) dis­cover that the show is a micro­cosm of human emo­tions set on a smaller stage. An emo­tional petri dish where the 7 deadly sins are revealed one at a time in the micro­scope of tele­vi­sion and the angels of our bet­ter nature stoop under the blaz­ing trop­i­cal sun.

A deadly sin that that per­me­ates the show is wrath, notably in the form of revenge. The struc­ture of the show forces a group of strangers to bond together for secu­rity and com­fort, all the while real­iz­ing that they will even­tu­ally have to betray one another at some level to win. Betrayal is a suck­ing wound that is dif­fi­cult to close, it is no acci­dent that Dante placed betray­ers at the low­est level of his inferno. Betrayal leads to feel­ings of revenge, the form this usu­ally takes in Sur­vivor is a wince-inducing harangu­ing at the final Tribal Coun­cil, where the betrayed con­front their betray­ers and a win­ner is decided. Watch­ing these speeches makes me think of some­thing that Homer said in the Iliad:

It (revenge) is sweeter far than flow­ing honey.”
– Homer, the Iliad Book 18.

The best exam­ple of the sweet flow­ing schaden­freude in Sur­vivor is most elo­quently exem­pli­fied by the famous “Rats and Snakes” speech from Sue Hawk. She was betrayed by one time ally Kelly and she lets both of the final­ists have it. It is an amaz­ing piece of ora­tory, maybe not up to Per­i­cles’ stan­dards, but a pretty impres­sive bit of invec­tive nonethe­less. Watch it for your self and see.

More InDesign (really) Quick Tips

When I used to use Quark on a reg­u­lar basis I loved the key­board com­mand that allowed you to scale art placed inside a bound­ing box while keep­ing the bound­ing box the same size, it was very handy for pro­duc­tion work. It took a while but I finally found the key­board short cut in InDe­sign and thought I’d share.

Increase the size of a graphic with­out chang­ing the size of the bound­ing box.

Click on the box con­tain­ing an image that you want to scale with the direct selec­tion tool (the arrow with the white head), then fol­low these steps.

Scale the image size down in 1% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + comma (MAC) or CTRL + comma (PC)
Scale the image up in 1% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + period (MAC) or CTRL + period (PC)

If you want to scale at a larger per­cent­age click on the box con­tain­ing an image that you want to scale with the direct selec­tion tool (the arrow with the white head), then:

Scale the image size down in 5% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + OPT + comma (MAC) or CTRL + ALT + comma (PC)
Scale the image size up in 5% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + OPT + period (MAC) or CTRL + ALT + period (PC)
Note this doesn’t work on text only graphics.

Increase the size of a box or frame but not the content

Sim­i­larly, if you want to increase the size of the bound­ing box or frame (this works with any kind of frame, text or graphic) but NOT the con­tent fol­low these steps.

Click on the box you want to scale with the selec­tion tool (the arrow with the black head), then:

Scale the box size down in 1% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + comma (MAC) or CTRL + comma (PC)
Scale the box size up in 1% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + period (MAC) or CTRL + period (PC)

If you want to scale at a larger per­cent­age, click on the box you want to scale with the selec­tion tool (the arrow with the black head), then:

Scale the box size down in 5% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + OPT + comma (MAC) or CTRL + ALT + comma (PC)
Scale the box size up in 5% incre­ments by hit­ting:
CMD + OPT + period (MAC) or CTRL + ALT + period (PC)

Hope­fully that was help­ful, do you have any good InDe­sign tips to share?

Design Somethign Every Day 22/365

A silly doo­dle of mine com­bined with an even sil­lier show in Las Vegas! Donny & Marie, again? $255 per ticket… seriously?

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

• Vec­tips Weekly Vec­tor Inspi­ra­tion #78 | Vec­tips http://goo.gl/N4PD #
• 40 Clean, Fresh and Amaz­ing Free Word­Press Themes | Graphic Design Bay http://goo.gl/xVPh #
• Fun lit­tle tuto­r­ial. RT @vec­tor­tuts: How to Cre­ate a Still Life in the Style of Prim­i­tive Art http://enva.to/91zasP # Read more »

Design Something Every Day 21/365

It has been a while since I’ve posted some­thing from my Design Some­thing Every Day project, so I thought I’d bring it back. This is a fake CD cover using the Ran­dom CD Cover Game pro­to­col. For this one the ran­dom band title turned out to be “War­ren High School”, the ran­dom album title was “be is the pur­pose in life.” I like that it’s very beat­nik. The photo is High School Girl from the superb pho­tog­ra­pher Ru Kazu.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

• 52 Beau­ti­ful Typog­ra­phy Designs for Inspi­ra­tion — Web Design Blog – DesignM.ag http://goo.gl/OEbH #
• Yummy! 40 Tasty Restau­rant Web­sites to Inspire You | Inspi­ra­tion http://goo.gl/1uKg #
• If you like retro art and cold-war ephemera check out The Atomic Test­ing Museum in Las Vegas http://www.atomictestingmuseum.org/ #
• Read more »