Category Archives: Design

August 4: Talking Fonts at IDUG

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The Denver InDesign User Group asked me to come talk about fonts at their August meetings, so of course I agreed. Let’s just call this little presentation “The Secret Lives of Fonts.”

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If that’s not enough to pique your interest, how about if I mention that I’ll be talking about font management, the differences between font formats, ways to help avoid font-related headaches, why a puppy dies every time someone designs a document with Comic Sans, and more.

The Denver InDesign User Group meeting starts at 6PM mountain time on Tuesday, August 4 in the Snowy Peaks Room at Front Range Community College. If you don’t know how to get there, directions to the event are available at the InDesign User Group Web site.

The kicker? The group meets up after their user group event at a local pub. Socializing, design talk, and Guinness. What more could you ask for?

Layers Magazine: CopyFlow Gold Review

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It’s not like I ever leave my desk, so I might as well make your life easier by reviewing products every now and then. That’s exactly why I reviewed CopyFlow Gold for the May/June 2009 issue of Layers Magazine. Well, that and it looked like a really slick product.

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CopyFlow Gold is a cool add-on for Adobe InDesign that makes it super easy to suck the text out of an InDesign document, hand it off to someone else for editing, and then flow it back into your layout. For the rest of the nitty gritty, and my full review, you’ll need to hop on over to your favorite newsstand and pick up a copy of Layers Magazine.

Adobe, Now in Sweet Pillowy Goodness

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After spending a long day with your face buried deep in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, what do you want to rest your talented little head on? How about Adobe application icon pillows. Yeah, me too.

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The clever gang at mysuitestuff whipped up a collection of hand-made pillows that let you bring Adobe’s app icons off your Desktop and onto your couch so you never have to worry about letting the Creative Suite get too far away. They have pillows for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver and After Effects. Each costs $15, and you can get the whole set for $80.

I’m thinking Photoshop will feel nice and comfy behind my head, but Dreamweaver will definitely go under my butt.

Worthy Podcast: From Design Into Print

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My good friend Sandee Cohen is wrapping up work on her new book, From Design Into Print (Peachpit Press), which is wonderfully exciting. Equally exciting — and available right now — is her new companion podcast. By no small coincidence, it’s also called From Design Into Print, and is totally worth checking out.

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Sandee tackles a single print or design concept in each concise podcast, and she does it with her own unmistakable flair. Whether you’re new to design, prepress or production, or an experienced pro, Sandee’s bound to have something cool to share with you.

You’ll also get a little instant gratification since the podcast is available now, and the book doesn’t come out until some time in May. Everyone deserves a little instant gratification, so head over to Sandee’s Web site or the iTunes Store and check out what she has going on.

Adobe Flex on the Cheap

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Turns out Adobe hates to see The Man bringing you down — where “The Man” means the economy, and “you” means developers that are down on their luck — so the company is giving away Flex Builder 3 Professional for free to any developer willing to show they are unemployed. That’s $699 worth of software for free. Holy crap.

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Sure, this is a really nice thing to do for software developers that need to expand their skill base so they have a better chance at landing a job, but it’s also a win for Adobe because there’ll be more Flex developers out in the wild, and potentially ultimately more companies that can develop Flex-based applications with all of those freshly trained coders.

The catch? You can’t use your free copy of Flex Builder for production or commercial purposes. Still, you’ll be able to hone your Flex skills without having to shell out any cash.

You can score your copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional at the Adobe Web site.