Posts Tagged ‘trick’
Pen Tool [p] and Fignütts : no#3 : Symbols of Power! (ghugga ghugga ghhaaaaan)
Posted on: January 29, 2010
Pen Tool [p] and Fignütts : no#2 : Illustrator Revolve Tool To Evolve You
Posted on: November 24, 2009
Introducing a new form of education tool. This will be a series of helpful tips for software / design etc that I’ll continue until I get the correct legal documents or bribe needed to stop it…
I am starting off with an easy one…
Pen Tool [p] and Fignütts : no#1 : DYI Illustrator Patterns Rated R (for Really mature designers over the age of 18 will hate this)
Hard drives are cheaper than a 3 pack of socks these days…
There is no excuse not to buy a bucket of them… buying them is the easy part, actually installing them and using them is a little harder (not hard like getting a driver for your Audigy 2 sound card tho…)
SATA, ATA, WTF?
Like everything hard drives get faster and cheaper… new techy parts are added blah blah blah. What you need to know is “will this new neato hard drive work in my computer?!”
If you have an older motherboard you should check if its SATA or ATA… (they don’t plug n play nicely with each other… like USB and Firewire) SATA is the newer kid on the block shes faster and has less messy cabling… your power supply and motherboard need to have SATA for it to work as the power supply for SATA is also different…
Space / Installation
Another consideration: Does your computer case have any room for another drive?
First of all check were your original hard drive is? Most of the time there is another bay there to slot in another drive… make sure its got a few cm of breathing space for air flow purposes (heat is a big thing to be aware of when modding and adding to a computer ;D ). If there doesn’t seem to be much space a good trick is to have a look at the other drive bays (eg. where the disk drive is /was or if you have a second DVD/CD bay). Then its just a job of screwing them in place… you want them to be moderately tight (stop vibrations or movement damage). Some drives bays (eg. some Dell or good gaming cases etc) have other means of installing which can be dead easy requiring no screws / finger wounds…
Also you will need for each new drive:
A power cable and a data cable (going to one of the sockets on the motherboard)
Also something to consider is types / length of cables…
You will obviously need to install them somewhere where both cables can reach the hard drive (duh)
Often power supplies have more than one power connection per cable so if you have two drives close by they can daisy chain off one cable…
You can also get right angled plugs etc for SATA if its in a tight spot right up against the case lid etc…
50% Less Electrocution Sale!
Ok something to think about is static electricity in regards to your shiny new drive and computer components… try scuffing your socks on your carpet and randomly touch all your computer components… see how now they are all dead? Yes the lesson here is static electricity is a computer component killer.
You can go out and purchase a star trek looking anti static wrist band and be the coolest geek on the block or failing that just be sensible and when ever you touch computer components do the following:
Make sure you turn everything off, don’t do any modding or installations on carpet in socks (i am guilty of this), touch the case or ground yourself on something before you touch anything… sweet…
Turning Your Turtle of a Computer into a Ninja Turtle on Crack
Hey here is an idea if you have a little bit of money… buy a large cheap 500 – 1000 gig drive for all your files and an expensive nice smaller drive maybe a solid state one for your operating system. Check out reviews online for a good one (they can be rather expensive)… this can speed up your start up time by a crazy amount and boost your overall performance by an uber amount… having no moving parts makes them quiet and quick…
WTF IS RAID?
Yes i could go on to explain RAID etc but there are much better resources on this side of things out there…. go explore monkey…
EXTERNAL ORGANS
A lot of the info i have given really is more relevant for people with larger cases and most likely PC computers, i-macs etc may not have the space inside for an extra internal hard drive.. But what about an external drive? These are great.. you can tote them around swap/steal data of other people etc.
There are many kinds, some are powered by usb etc others have there own power supplies you have to plug in… some use USB, some use ESATA or Firewire etc… There are two sizes for the drives 2.5 or 3.5 (internally 2.5 is for laptop and 3.5 is for desktops… Shop around.. you may find it cheaper to buy a the case and the drive separately.
Things to think about:
- Do you have a spare USB, ESATA or Firewire port?
- Is having a drive with its own power supply a problem? is the case the same type as the drive? (a mistake that is common is that people buy an external enclosure that is ATA and then buy a nice new SATA drive that wont fit in the external enclosure)
- Is noise a problem? Cheap external drives are often more noisy, prone to vibrations and even may cause interference (plays buggery with the TV reception)
Now go fill up that new hard drive with: Crap pop music and porn…
Rant over Coffee with Guest speaker: Austin Alder Altbutton
Creative Projects, saving Graphic Designers bacon since a while back:
Building a portfolio, having evidence of mad skills, standing out, can and is a hard thing to accomplish. Especially if you are cramming that baby full of your regular 9-5 work. Going to a job interview equipped with your terribly exciting 10cm x 4 column newspaper advert for “Mens Clinic Discount Bonanza” ? Trying to woo a company with that lovely branding you did for that colour-blind accountant who wanted his pet dog incorporated into the logo? Yeah it can be hard proving you have creativity as well as showing work that reflects your style and areas of interest…
Thats where I find personal projects come to the party, be it:
- Learning a new program through making a project – A great way to learn programs like flash is to jump into the deep end and make a little game, movie whatever (Use tuts off the interweb to help…)
- Entering a competition – shoes – t-shirts can be a really good selling point in a portfolio (you don’t have to win, they just look sweet and legit on them contest templates)
- Making a sweet poster or art piece etc (go nuts creatively, get out all that junked up imagination)
- Keep all your doodles / tattoo designs / shopping lists / Haiku / Just not those angst poems you wrote at 15…
Adding in this kind of work to your portfolio, that reflects your skills, style and personality will hopefully help you land that sweet job! Just you remember me when you are up there in your sweet new studio looking down on us peons (not pions thats a type of pine tree, with edible seeds, native to Mexico)…
Mmmm time for another cup of crank….
Custom brushes in Illustrator in the time it takes you to leave the toilet seat up
Posted on: September 24, 2009
Bam! You have got exactly point three of a second to make a custom brush in illustrator!
Make a splotch, a scribble even scan in your favourite pet and vectorize it… then just select it and throw it onto the bushes palette… it’ll ask you what kinda brush choose New Art Brush on a whim and then bam! (thats two bams in one post) you have your own brush…
You can use this in many many ways… go explore.. scan in some scribbles, ink splotches, spray paint, crayons, whateva… Trace them in illustrator…Enjoy…
Hello boys and girls, today we are going to rap / rant about Photoshop Droplets…
What are they? … what aren’t they?! Imagine a photoshop action that;
instead of loading up the files in photoshop and then clicking on the action…
You set up the droplet (and have it maybe on your desktop or in a folder) and you just drag and drop files onto it and then it opens photoshop and does it all for you… very cool…
The Droplet function has got some pretty complex commands you can play with from saving files names, to doing your personal taxes… I won’t go into too much detail as that would take all day (and i have a day job….still)
How to set up a Droplet:
Make up a action (for instance: adjusting light levels, resizing and making a sad looking photo frame on a bunch of woefully lame family photos)
Go peruse File\Automate\Create Droplet
This will bring up a dialog box where you can select your action to execute when you drop stuff onto your droplet…
You can suppress all the opening questions etc too which can be handy…
Play around with all the features… just make sure you don’t save over your original files or photos…
Now go and drag entire folders of yawn fodder onto the droplet icon and enjoy super automatic lazy action!
- Note: this is a handy thing to set up for family members who are technophobic etc but want to set up stuff for there Facebook (etc) page… It’s easier to tell them to drop files onto a icon than tell them to open Photoshop and then do ‘this’ and then ‘that’ and then “re-save” it etc blah blah…
Enjoy…
Teaching Photoshop to Purge (sorry can’t think of a good dieting teen joke) – Performance Tip
Posted on: September 23, 2009
Photoshop can be a like a weight lifting freak on Asterix potion… this program can crunch amazingly big files it can bench presses 600mb files without popping a blood vessel…
But sometimes when you swap / close / copy / paste / create new files etc it forgets to clean up all the old junk laying around and can get a bit slow. Thats where the Purge menu rocks… When you feel photoshop getting slow and cranky (especially if you need to alternate between photoshop and say illustrator or indesign etc)… maybe you have just copy pasted a huge file?… Go click the Edit menu with your meaty digits and select Purge. You can choose between clearing just the stuff in the clipboard (your copy / cut memory), histories, undos or completely erase all junk (including undos BTW)… This is great at keeping your system stable after a few hours of work… Just remember that it will remove your undos on your file so far created (no really focus on this…don’t blame me!)
So you have a lot of photos or images that need to be a different resolution?
Maybe you have photos from a camera and you need to set them for print? The photos will probably be at 72 dpi (great for screen viewing) but maybe you need them for print and you need to change them to say 300 DPI and make them a specific size… here is an easy way to do this, without having to go into the image size menu:
Click on the crop tool or shortcut “c” if you are afraid of using your mouse (Technorodentia-hysteria or Musowarephobia for you purists)
At the top of the screen below the FILE menu etc should be a a few fields you can enter data into … so if you need to res up them photos and need them at a specific size… enter the number of cm or pixels or whatever arcane imperial measurement you use… enter the resolution you want and then click drag the photo (you can choose the whole photo or just grab the bit you want (get rid of that boyfirend etc).
You can leave out any of the measurements or dpi and photoshop will work its math out for you… you could use this just to scale down large images (keeping at 72dpi) for say uploading to Facebook etc…
Just a little trick that helps you use less brain cells in the morning… if you want to be a little more techy set up an specific Action with a short cut key and then you can impress your friends by looking like CSI or if your lucky NCIS…
Got Indesign?
Got frequent work with clients with a lot of fiddly adverts that chop and change a lot meaning you have to open multiple versions (I’m sure we used that star burst in last weeks ad?) and cut and paste etc?
Well here is a little tip that if used creatively could help you out and make you look like some kinda Graphic Design Ninja…
Now focus on this… I can feel your mind wandering… (It’s been like more than four lines and this freak hasn’t even got to the point… GET TO FREAKIN’ THE POINT MAN….)
In Indesign you can make libraries of objects text, whole ads etc even random groups of crap… using a well hidden libraries file…
Goto FILE > NEW > LIBRARY
This will open a panel (just like a library in flash etc) which lets you grab groups of content and throw it into it like a digital cork board…
You can name this content, give it a description, even search for it etc…
Then when it’s needed you can just drag and drop it onto the page..woo!
You can make multiple libraries and open multiple libraries at once, these can be saved like a normal file and saved to any place.
The libraries can be viewed as thumbnails or as descriptive lists… Libraries will probably remove the necessity of having huge layered files with alternatives and different graphics etc. They may even bring a new dawn to humanity and remove the need for places like Starbucks…
Possible uses:
- Ads with content that change weekly etc eg. Car adverts that chop and change cars and deal graphics
- Keeping an Illustration library - if you are odd and use indesign for illustration etc keep a library of facials or backdrops etc…
- Alternative ideas for ads
- If you have a need for a huge library of graphics…
There are a thousand time saving reasons to use this neat little feature… it may take you a while for it to sink into your beer soaked mind but you will get there and pump your hammy fist in the air and praise the mighty Library feature…
That is all… back to whatever it was you were doing with that paper clip…
