Where’s my Swatch gone? How to stop your Swatches disappearing when you quit Illustrator Have you ever wondered why all the lovely Gradients, Colours and Brushes you had loaded the night before have all disappeared when you relaunch Illustrator in the morning? You’ve been hard at work all day loading in custom libraries as you […]
Get Faster with Graphic Styles Graphic Styles in Illustrator are great way to store Appearance settings so they can be re-used within a single document, across several documents or even shared with others when working on collaborative projects. Today’s post is a Quick-Tip aimed at those already familiar with the process of using Graphic Styles […]
Some time back I was training an advanced InDesign course, and one of trainees had come across a problem and asked me for advice. The problem she had come across was, whenever she imported Excel documents into InDesign, the dates switched formats. What was happening was that the date was formatted within Excel as an […]
I come across some entertaining stuff while I am browsing various photography and design related sites, and one that I always find quite amusing is forced perspective photography.If you haven’t come across this before it is a photography technique that involves using optical illusions to make objects appear nearer or farther away than they actually […]
If you’re the kind of person who can’t stand unbalanced text, you might recall the days when it took a fair bit of manual adjustment to make text columns line up evenly. Fortunately InDesign CC 2014 (actually it’s been in here since CS5) has a nice balance columns checkbox which is found in the Text […]
Many people do the same task again and again in InDesign, but are wary of using InDesign’s automated scripting functions to make the job easier. Some may be simply unaware of the scripting capabilities within InDesign, while for others scripts are daunting and technical. In reality scripting can be very easy, especially if you don’t […]
Using Photoshop generally means using a brush at some point, and not just for painting. Several tools within Photoshop also use a brush – Eraser, Dodge, Burn, etc. Here are some useful shortcuts when using a tool that uses brushes… CONSTRAINING BRUSHES Click, let go and shift – click elsewhere in your document and you […]
Adobe have introduced a brand new feature within Photoshop Creative Cloud, called the Perspective Warp tool. When looking at your images, you will notice that some things look out of proportion, or different to how it does in real life. This is due to perspective distortion, depending on the lens used, camera, and from which […]
There are a lot of InDesign tips that can save you time, make you more performant and improve the quality of the content you produce. It’s hard to pick out just five, but I think these are probably a good starting point for most people: TIP 1: SET DEFAULT COLOUR SWATCHES AND PARAGRAPH STYLES IN […]