Creative Community Bulletin 17 July 2010 Through 22 July 2010

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 17 July 2010 through 22 July 2010:

• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy –

  A com­mon occur­rence: you or some­one you know wants to cre­ate con­tent and have it pub­lished online. A slight­ly less com­mon occur­rence? Having that same some­one artic­u­late high aspi­ra­tions for their con­tent. For those select few, instead of cre­at­ing con­tent des­tined for some dig­i­tal land­fill, their con­tent is spe­cial; it’s going places and it’s tak­ing them, their brand, and their expe­ri­ence with it.

• Google Analytics and RegEX Guide –
• Sell all unsold logo inven­to­ry — Design Jobs Live! –

  has launched its deputy pro­gram where free­lance design­ers or design stu­dios can apply to become a part­ner. This allows you to upload as many logos as you have that are unsold. We are look­ing for world class pre­mi­um logo tem­plates and your com­mis­sion per logo sold is a mas­sive $250!

  We already have a num­ber of part­ners signed up, and spots are lim­it­ed. Do not waste any time, apply today!

• When 13 peo­ple on a press is a good thing –

  I spent almost three hours yes­ter­day clam­ber­ing over the Heidelberg Speedmaster CD74 press at Cal Poly with my cam­era. The press is used for instruc­tion in the Graphic Communication pro­gram at Cal Poly, and this sum­mer there are 12 stu­dents* enrolled in the Sheet-Fed Printing course. All of them will learn how to oper­ate the press as a part of that course.

• Indent-to-here and using GREP to insert it –

  A seldom-used, but extra­or­di­nar­i­ly use­ful com­mand in InDesign is the Indent-to-here com­mand, which is gen­er­at­ed by typ­ing Command- (Control- on Windows) at the point where you want an indent to occur.

  You can accom­plish the same thing by using a Paragraph Style with indents, the first of which is a neg­a­tive, fol­lowed by one or more tab char­ac­ters to estab­lish the sub­se­quent inden­ta­tions, bit that method is slight­ly less flexible

• Create Sticky Notes in InDesign with style –

  I found myself mus­ing over seldom-used tools in Adobe InDesign, and I real­ized that many peo­ple don’t know how to use Object Styles, or don’t know that they exist. So, here is a quick les­son in object styles.

  I use these often because it’s nice to styl­ize pho­to rec­tan­gles in InDesign. The ben­e­fit is that all the rec­tan­gles can be mod­i­fied simul­ta­ne­ous­ly using the style def­i­n­i­tion, rather than going through the doc­u­ment one image at a time and chang­ing some­thing. I do this when I com­pos­ing books. When I put a pho­to on a page, I apply a style to the pho­to rec­tan­gle, and then move on. It doesn’t mat­ter if the style is to do noth­ing – it’s impor­tant to assign the style.

• Weird and Funny Toilets Around the World –

  Weird and Funny Toilets around the world…

• The Assertive Palette –

  BY CHUCK GREEN A design palette is a mix of basic ingre­di­ents— type­faces, pho­tographs, illus­tra­tions, and col­or schemes—that, in one design­er’s opin­ion (mine), rep­re­sents a dis­tinc­tive mood or style

• Redeem your­self in City of Heroes: Going Rogue –

  In comics, every­thing is a shade of grey. “It’s always been a com­ic book sta­ple,” says Matt Miller, Going Rogue’s senior design lead. “The hero falls from grace or a vil­lain sees the light and redeems him­self.” Finally, play­ers will be able to scrib­ble goa­tees on their heroes and stuff hearts of gold in their villains.

• Local Layering – the Future of Photoshop, After Effects, Flash? –

  Jim McCann is a graph­ics researcher (you might remem­ber his inter­est­ing work with gradient-domain paint­ing), and I’m hap­py to say he’s join­ing the Adobe advanced tech­nol­o­gy staff. He has some ideas about deal­ing with the lim­i­ta­tions of tra­di­tion­al graph­i­cal lay­er­ing mod­els (as seen in Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, etc.):

• Design free­bies that address your busi­ness side and your cre­ative side, whether you work in print or on the Web –

  free­bies that address your busi­ness side and your cre­ative side, whether you work in print or on the Web

• New Photo of Thor and Odin –

  r image fea­tur­ing Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Anthony Hopkins as Odin in Marvel Studios’ Thor, com­ing to 3D and 2D the­aters on May 6, 2011. This is fol­low­ing the pho­to that was released yes­ter­day of Thor, Odin and Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

• The Crow Reboot Moving Forward –

  The screen­play for a new The Crow film is fin­ished and pro­duc­tion will begin this year, Producer Edward Pressman told MTV today.

• What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain –

  Johann Sebastian Bach loved him some cof­fee. So did Voltaire, Balzac, and many oth­er great minds. But the type of work they did did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly get a boost from their prodi­gious cof­fee consumption—unless their work was so second-nature to them that it felt like data entry.