Tip of the Week

If you’re stuck in a rut, it can feel as though mastering your Wii was your last big accomplishment, so here are some suggestions to get you off the video games and back in the designing mood.

Choose your soundtrack and slap on your headphones. Queue up some trash metal, rock, hippie rap, or operatic arias. Whatever floats your boat, so long as it gets your Wacom pen flying or your Photoshop fingers flying.

Let your friends inspire you. Take a gander at your one of your Web 2.0 networks and see what your pals from around the world are up to. While you’re at it, rate their work and don’t be afraid to lavish them with praiseon their blogs, in an e-mail or the forums. Speaking of forums, we’ve got a bounty of helpful members standing by to help you.

There’s some killer designs in, my favourite, iStockPhoto’s Designer Spotlight too. We’re a planet full of top talent who continually contribute their award-winning creations to the web, so poke around and see if that sparks your plugs.

Lastly, get out and take it all in. We’re not built to sit in front of monitors for hours on end so get up and move around, and jump start your ideas. Go for a walk and get inspiration from the kids in the street or that guy down the hall in your office with that grey cardigan. Whatever it takes.

Before & After Magazine

The other week I stumbled across another wonderful online resource: Before & After magazine. This magazine has been sharing its practical approach to graphic design since 1990. Because our modern world has made designers of us all (ready or not), Before & After has dedicated itself to making graphic design understandable, useful and even fun for everyone.

Before & After is an online magazine you have to subscribe for but so far I’ve found it to be well worth it’s while. You can get 32 articles in individual downloads for $24 or you can get 4 issues (8 articles in each issue) printed for $42 with the downloadable PDF version included free. I think the printed subscription may only be available in the USA but I’m not to sure.

There was one article I found that I thought was particularly relevant to the types of things I have been discussing on this here blog. It’s titled “Small site, great format.” If you’re a solo professional or part of a small group this article is made for you. The site shown in the artical is ideal for short text as well as portfolio or product images. It’s designed to be beautifully smalll; it’s not a half-empty big site. It’s easy to make, easy to maintain and compelling to read.

If you like to read the article for yourself I believe you can check it out at http://www.bamag.com/email/0-he3i084iei-email/thoAn9/BA0648SmallSite.pdf
If not and you’re interested in having a look subscribe at >http://www.bamagazine.com/Subscribe.asp. It’s well worth it.

Tip of the Week: Colour Your World

Many artists will, at some point, want to print their work. Be it their own digital images, a photography piece or a photo of their sculpture/painting but there’s nothing worse than printing your photos or designs and looking at a murky mess that bears no resemblance to what you had on screen. Once you’re done kicking yourself, your bean bag chair, and jumping up and down, you’ll want to take a look at some simple, but effective ways to avoid this unfortunate and frustrating situation.

With the multitude of monitors and printers on the market right now, it’s increasingly difficult to know for sure if what you see on screen will accurately translate to print. The good news is whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, most modern hardware can be calibrated to produce optimum, accurate colours.

There’s no substitute for using software and sensors that measure the color output on your monitor and printer to create a custom colour profile that’ll save you oodles of time and money tweaking prints. The Colorvision Spyder is as simple as attaching the reader to your monitor, which sends the colours it sees in the monitor to the software. This is the handy part, the software takes the difference between what it sees and what it should see and makes adjustments. Hey-presto, your monitor is calibrated. It’s also a good idea to work in a reasonably well lit environment with a mix of natural and overheard light that doesn’t bounce of your monitor.

Now you’re looking at colors in their truest state and not some weird, muddy version of the magenta you thought you were going to print.

Storyboards, Inc.

Browsing the web today I stumbled across this really interesting website, www.storyboardsinc.com. For over 30 years, Storyboards, Inc. has been representing the best storyboard artists in the industry. Their commercial, advertising, and film artists bring a modern, dynamic, and cinematic energy to every project. With the talent and diversity of more than 60 of the industry’s top illustrators, they nail every frame’s angle, look, and vibe. Lastly, a careful screening process and extensive knowledge of the business allowing them to confidently meet all of your storyboarding needs. With Storyboards, Inc. in your corner your advertising, commercial, and film boards will capture the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but a perfect visual representation of your ideas.

Tim Burgard is one of the artists featured on Storyboards, Inc. and after doing a little further searching on the site along with a bit of googling I began to find storyboarding more and more interesting. I mean I’ve had to make my own storyboards before, for all my animations in fact, but I’ve always hated it. Tim Burgard has a list a mile long of amazing films that he has worked on. For example:

• The Incredible Hulk…Louis Leterrier
• Evan Almighty…Tom Shadyac
• X-Men: The Last Stand…Brett Ratner
• Fun with Dick and Jane…Dean Parisot
• Bewitched…Robert Stadd
• Son Of The Mask… Larry Guterman
• Me Again… Dean Parisot
• Cursed… Wes Craven
• The Day After Tomorrow… Roland Emmerich
• Domestic Disturbance… Harold Becker

The list goes on and on. You can even view some of his storyboards on his website, www.timburgardart.com, or at www.storyboardsinc.com.

Here is an example:

I think that one of the reasons I first stopped to look at storyboards is that one of my friend’s dream is to become a storyboard artist. I made a website for her about a month ago. Check it out, I’d love feed back on her work and on your thoughts on the website

www.rhimcg.com

Cheers.

Dreamweaver CS3

What’s new

Dreamweaver CS3 offers new features in three key areas: integration with other Adobe products; new features for creating, managing, and fixing Cascading Style Sheets; and a new set of JavaScript-driven tools for building pop-up navigation menus, advanced form validation, and displaying data in an interactive table.

If you use Photoshop and Dreamweaver now, you probably have gotten tired of the number of steps required to get an image from Photoshop to Dreamweaver (and all of the steps you have to repeat whenever you edit a Photoshop file). Dreamweaver CS3 now supports direct copy and paste from Photoshop. In Photoshop CS3, you can select a single layer, “slice,” or even draw a marquee around one area of a document and copy all layers in that section; then you can copy that selection, switch to a Dreamweaver document and paste. (You can even skip all of this and just drag a PSD file directly onto a Dreamweaver page.) The new image optimization window lets you apply compression settings directly in Dreamweaver (no more, “Save for Web” from Photoshop), save the file into your Web site, and place the new optimized image into a Web page.

Even better, you can launch Photoshop and open the original image file for editing directly within Dreamweaver. After making any changes you want in Photoshop, copy the layer, slice, or portion of the Photoshop file you want, then paste the new, edited image back into Dreamweaver and replace the older image. All of the optimization settings applied previously are remembered (including the optimized file’s name) and re-applied, making edits fast and painless. Unfortunately, Dreamweaver isn’t completely integrated into the suite so you won’t find support for smart-objects or a similarly simple workflow for getting Illustrator files into your Web pages.

The most glamorous new addition to the program is a set of tools for adding dynamic layout elements and visual effects to your Web pages. Based on the “Spry Framework” (a collection of JavaScript programs developed by Adobe), these new features make it easy to add pop-up navigational menus, validate HTML forms, include complex, animated, visual effects, and add interactive data tables.

Spry features come in three flavors: effects, widgets, and data sets. Effects are fancy visual effects—such as fade out, shrink, grow, shake—that let you draw attention to images, or other page content. Widgets add interactive layout elements. The Spry Menu Bar, for example, is a navigation bar that supports two levels of pop-up menus—the perfect way to cram a lot of links in a compact space; form validation widgets let you verify entries in a Web form before the form is submitted, so you can make sure that a properly formatted date is entered by the end user. (This widget provides a much more powerful solution than the tired, old “Validate Form” behavior that’s shipped with Dreamweaver for years.) Several other page widgets provide an easy way to present a lot of content in a small space; for example, the tabbed panels widget lets you place content into separate “tabbed” areas. Clicking a tab reveals additional content.

The Spry Data set feature lets you take data from an XML file, and display it in a table. People viewing the Web page can sort the table by clicking column headers and even see detailed information about one item inside a table cell—all without every requesting a fresh page from the Web server.

What’s improved

Dreamweaver has always had powerful tools for creating and editing Cascading Style Sheets. CSS lets Web designers create beautiful and complex Web pages out of ordinary HTML. Unfortunately it’s also a complex and confusing technology. Dreamweaver CS3 adds new CSS tools to make working with Cascading Style Sheets easier.

New CSS management features make it easy to rearrange style sheets by reordering styles in a style sheet, quickly renaming styles, and moving styles between style sheets. New CSS Templates provide ready-made page layouts with basic HTML and CSS to create the most common page layouts (2 column, 3 column, liquid and fixed width, for example). The designs work well in all current Web browsers, and since the templates are merely “skeletons” you can modify and add to the supplied CSS files to create your own look and feel.

The new “Check Browser compatibility” tool might save you hours of testing and tweaking to make sure your pages work in all common Web browsers. This tool scans a Web page and identifies any CSS or HTML code that might not work in a particular browser. Potential errors are flagged and a single click takes you to information on Adobe.com that explains the problem and possible solutions in depth.