Pariah Burke Consulting & Training with Creative & Publishing Workflow Expert Pariah S. Burke | Informing & Empowering Creative Professionals™

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 27 February 2010 through 04 March 2010:

• Use short­cuts with Illustrator’s Gradient Mesh | Macworld — Successfully work­ing with a gra­di­ent mesh is much more involved than just using the Gradient Mesh tool. It involves the Direct Selection tool, the Eyedropper tool, the Lasso tool, and oth­ers. Depending on where you click and when, each of these tools can exhibit mul­ti­ple, some­times con­flict­ing behav­iors. The fol­low­ing short guide gives you a quick ref­er­ence to com­mon tools and their key­board shortcuts.
• Paint with Illustrator’s Gradient Mesh | Macworld — Gradient Mesh is a grid-based paint­ing tech­nique in Illustrator that enables advanced col­or­ing of vec­tor objects with smooth and mal­leable color tran­si­tions. If you’re rea­son­ably famil­iar with Illustrator’s Pen tool and other path-drawing, selec­tion, and color tools, you can use the Gradient Mesh fea­ture to add real­is­tic col­or­ing, light­ing, and 3D char­ac­ter­is­tics to a flat vec­tor object. Ultimately, gra­di­ent mesh can give you the effect of photo-realistic paint­ing with all the ben­e­fits and free­dom of resolution-independent vec­tor artwork.
• Internet Explorer 9 To Be HTML5 Compatible – Microsoft Joining The Anti-Flash Movement? — Rumors are fly­ing that the forth­com­ing ver­sion of Internet Explorer, the ninth incar­na­tion, will include strong sup­port of HTML5.

  This would be a dra­matic change from Internet Explorer 8, which is not known for its HTML5 com­pli­ance for a rea­son. Thar rea­son? It has nearly none. This is hardly sur­pris­ing, Microsoft browsers have for time immemo­r­ial lagged behind the mar­ket on adop­tion of the cur­rent stan­dards of the internet.

• Make your­self an Amazing Typographic Portrait — The tuto­r­ial is made after receiv­ing a reader’s request. As we know, typo­graphic por­trait art takes a huge amount of work. Here is a much sim­pler ver­sion I made, which hopes to give begin­ners an idea on how to start. This tuto­r­ial will show how to cre­ate cus­tom brushes and fill pat­terns. Also you will learn more about selec­tion and pos­ter­ize tool.
• How to Kill the Design Community | Webdesigner Depot — I hope this arti­cle has pro­vided plenty of use­ful tips that will help all of us to pre­vent the com­mu­nity from mov­ing for­ward and being saved.
• The Digital Asset Management Market — For those Replacing Version Cue — Digital asset man­age­ment (DAM) sys­tems allow orga­ni­za­tions to cen­trally orga­nize and quickly locate their dig­i­tal assets such as images, doc­u­ments, videos, pre­sen­ta­tions, and other cre­ative files. Added ben­e­fits of DAM include: sim­ple work­flow enhance­ments, easy dis­tri­b­u­tion and secure pro­tec­tion of large amounts of dig­i­tal assets.
• Adobe Stops Development on Version Cue, No CS5 Version — CreativePro​.com: Will cur­rent Version Cue users have to buy another asset man­age­ment sys­tem to replace Version Cue?

  Adobe: Current Version Cue users will either have to buy a com­mer­cial asset man­age­ment sys­tem or choose to use an open source or ‘com­mu­nity’ edi­tion prod­uct depend­ing on spe­cific require­ments. The tim­ing of this pur­chase and migra­tion to this sys­tem is up to the cus­tomer, though Adobe would rec­om­mend com­plet­ing this tran­si­tion before it dis­con­tin­ues sup­port for Version Cue Server CS4.

• Free For All: Web Design Resources — These free­bies are for all stages of Web site cre­ation, from sketches through wire­frames to check­ing for cross-browser compatibility.
• New $20 Font of Ampersands Benefits Victims of Haiti Earthquake — The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) is proud to announce the release of “Coming Together”, a font cre­ated exclu­sively for Font Aid IV to ben­e­fit the vic­tims of the recent earth­quake in Haiti. The font con­sists entirely of amper­sands, to rep­re­sent the idea of peo­ple com­ing together to help one another. Type design­ers, graphic design­ers, and other artists from around the world con­tributed art­work to the font.
• Some words whose mean­ings have changed with­out con­tro­versy — As soon as you have the per­cep­tion that a new mean­ing is edg­ing the old one out, pre­scrip­tivists see it as a bat­tle­ground for the lan­guage, and lift their skinny fists like anten­nas to heaven, cry­ing out for some­one to aid them in their quest to return the word to its orig­i­nal, unsul­lied state.