Do you feel a chill?
I'm not going to go on and on with this, but I have a confession to make.
Today I had my first chance to run InDesignCS2. I'm a long time XPress user -- on a Mac -- and using InDesign on the PC was a daunting thought. At work today I had to use it, so no more procrastinating. It is totally and completely awesome. It has to be the single best application on the Windows platform.
It was an amazing experience. The first thing I noticed was how cool the palettes are. They slide out of the side of the window, and it's really slick. The second thing I noticed is that type is anti-aliased. On Windows. Anti-aliased type. That right there is enough for me. But lo, many of keyboard shortcuts were the same too! It was intuitive! Text editing was intuitive! That's a welcome thing on a Windows box where you never know what different keys are going to do while editing text. (Really. Don't believe me? You'd be surprised to learn that the Page Down key doesn't always work on Windows. nor Home, nor End, but I digress). Images are handled a little differently, but it didn't take long to figure it out (sort of). Transparency, drop shadows, feathering, and powerful gradient support were all simply amazing. I'd like to see more of Illustrator's Effects built into InDesign, but who cares. Everything it does it does right. I love it.
Continue reading Do you feel a chill?
- Posted on
- 2005-11-17
- under:
- Art and Design
- Comments:
- 2
Expensive printing
I recently designed a business card for my brother because he's starting out on his own as a general contractor. He came up and did a lot of plumbing in my house, and I figured I'd design and have his cards printed as a show of appreciation. So I started designing and he chose this card as the one he wanted. It's pretty upscale for a contractor, but he's after high-end work, so it ought to work well.
I know that printing can be expensive because I work in print, and I realize that anyone with a print background is going to instantly notice that it's three ink colors. That's not the end of the world. I know the yellow is a tiny detail, and it'd be cheaper without that one yellow line, but it really helps the look so I figured I'd leave it. Extra colors like that add to the cost, but it's seldom prohibitive enough to modify a design that the client loves.
Continue reading Expensive printing
- Posted on
- 2005-03-01
- under:
- Art and Design
- Comments:
- 10
Fuzzy Coconut: Birth of an icon
What better way to test the blog's ability to handle images than to do a quick little write up on Fuzzy Coconut and the creation of a new logo for it. Shawn whipped this little guy up out of the ether, and we all bashed heads on it and tweaked him this way and that to finally settle in on this final look for him. I suppose I could go into a long bit about concepts and composition and impact, but I think I'm just going to let him stand for himself.
Continue reading Fuzzy Coconut: Birth of an icon
- Posted on
- 2005-02-09
- under:
- Art and Design
- Comments:
- 7