I’m seeing much less full on flash sites than I used too, but I seem to be seeing more flash portfolios. If your only goal is to be a Flash developer than that’s fine, but if you want to be seen as a web designer / developer and your site is 100% Flash, you’re probably not going to impress anyone.
Why Flash sucks — most of the time
Flash usually sucks because it is used in places where it’s not needed, breaks usability basics, or tries to deliver a rich media experience to people who don’t care. Lets face it, most of us are not coming to a site to see Flash animations, flashy enter pages and load dialogues; sure this was impressive 5 to 8 years ago, but most of us are over it now. I remember animating menus, playing with collision and elastic algorithms I found on the web and drooling at the newest Flash in the Can awards which are still pretty impressive. It was really cool and fun, and there are a lot of places where this will still fly if done right, your website may not be one of them.
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Adobe Creative Suite 4 is set for a September 23 release date (Update: the 23rd was the announcement date, release date should be mid October). Adobe has a registration form up for a September 23 web broadcast of CS4. I always look forward to the Adobe products, especially Photoshop. This is a program I have grown to really know and I’ve used it since version 3. Even though I love this program, their are some little issues that bother me, so I thought with the release coming up I would create my personal wish list for CS4.
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Sometimes it’s fun to goof around with Photoshop and have fun. Photoshop is well known for it’s image manipulation tools. You can do all sorts of interesting things from colour correction to merging different photos together. Some examples can be found on my old deviantArt account.
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Adobe launched acrobat.com the other day. It’s completely flash based which is a bit of a bummer. I would have liked to see a standards compliant AJAX solution like so many of Google’s applications. The site is still pretty slick, and it will allow people to create documents and collaborate online. There is chat and web cam support too. I can’t see myself using this, I’ll stick with Google Docs for now, but I signed up anyway just to check it out.
The interface is really slick, something that a lot of Google apps are not. You can find more details about it on the official blog post Welcome to Acrobat.com.
Acrobat.com is a suite of online services hosted by Adobe that you can use to create documents together and share them with others. It helps people get document work done faster, without email attachments or version confusion, and it makes your documents look great so that you and your work look great, too.
Some of the comments mention the pressure coming down on Microsoft right now, both from Google and Adobe. There really are alternatives to MS Office now, and that’s always a good thing.
A co-worker asked me this a few weeks ago. It’s not something you often need in Photoshop, and the way it is done has changed over time. These directions apply to Photoshop CS 3, but they may work in other versions as well.
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It’s time for another quick Photoshop tip. The other day I was working on an HTML mockup in Photoshop and said, “Hey wouldn’t it be great if there were bullets”. My co-worker turns around and says you can make them, and it’s super easy. It’s not really like ordered or unordered lists in HTML; you still have to type in the numbers or bullets manually, but it’s as close as you’ll get.
Once you have your list created in a text box, go to the Paragraph window. Go to the Indent first line field and type in a negative value. For this example I have 11 pixel Verdana text with a -15px first indent.
From the screenshot above you can see we now have perfect bullets in our mockup.
Abobe launched there new Photopshop Express web application the other day. This is a completely online version of Photoshop power by Adobe’s Flash.
“Crop, rotate, tweak, and show off your photos here on Photoshop Express, on your blog or Facebook page. Give your friend a tragically oversized head or get rid of the mole on his cheek that’s the size of a small asteroid. It’s totally up to you.”
With an account you also get 2 GB of storage space for your photos. There is also an online test drive, I only tried out the gallery, but it is nicely animated and very slick looking. I don’t think I’ll be dumping the full version of Photoshop anytime soon, but I’m sure an app like this will be great for a lot of people out there just looking to touch up and show off their photos.
Okay, this may be super obvious for some people, but in case it’s not, here’s a neat tip. When I do borders or keylines, I usually like to make the layer on the very top.
The easy way to make a keyline is to draw a box with the rectangle tool, make sure it’s a shape layer, this makes editing it later easy. Right click the layer you just created, select Blending Options, then select Stroke. This should be pretty easy. I usually stroke on the inside; the default is outside but this will not give you sharp corners.
Okay, now you have your keyline; go back to the Layers window go to the Fill slider and bring it down to 0%. Opacity and Fill are very similar with one important difference. Opacity affects the entire layer, while Fill only affects the fill of the layer. This means our Blending Options will remain unaffected.
So why not just create a box with stroke and put it on the bottom layer? Well this works for some layouts, but what if you want patterns or shapes that overlap the box, but do not overlap the keyline as shown in the image below. This is where this technique comes in handy. The only real downside is when you use the Direct Selection Tool you end up selecting your top layer, so you may need to turn this layer on and off.
I posted the original five “You Suck at Photoshop” YouTube videos because I really wanted to spread the word, these videos are fantastically hilarious. Anyway, the guy known as Donnie Hoyle is up to it again with three new videos.
I really can’t get enough of these, if you haven’t heard of them yet, check out my original post on “You Suck at Photoshop“. You can also keep an eye out for more on the MyDamnChannel YouTube page.
I run into a lot of little obstacles in Photoshop from week to week and I thought I would share some of my Photoshop tips and workarounds from time to time.
Layer masks are a really important part of Photoshop. If you are an avid Photoshop user you probably use them all the time. There is however one pesky little problem with layer masks and that is how they work with Smart Objects. Unlike every other kind of layer in Photoshop, you cannot link a mask to a smart object. This means that when you nudge or move a smart object layer, the mask does not move with it.
Now there are cases where this is the desired behaviour, and that’s what link/unlink is for, but for some strange reason there are is no linking capability for Smart Objects. Not very smart, try having 10 masked Smart Objects in a web layout and moving everything around. You have to nudge the Smart Object, and then nudge each mask.
How do you get around this? Very simple, put your smart object into a layer group, and add the mask to the group. Yes it does add more complexity to your layers pallet, but now you can easily move around your Smart Objects and layer masks at the same time making your life much easier.
