After almost 3 weeks away from the blog, it feels good to be back and refreshed. Time flies when you've got work coming out your ears. I'm a daily user of the Adobe Creative Cloud. On any given day I generally have Dreamweaver, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator open at the same time. Along with every other designer I impatiently weather the slight changes in toolbars or functionality that comes with [...]
An oft-repeated mantra throughout social media is to constantly focus on 'maximizing engagement'. Engage with your community on Twitter, set up alerts to ensure you don't miss an opportunity to engage, always respond to comments on your blog...you get the picture. The problem is these same articles don't delve too deeply into 'how' to actually increase your engagement levels. It does take work to maximize engagement; it's not something that [...]
Swipe files. They've been around for awhile, but I'm starting to see them more and more across various websites because they're perfect for use as lead magnets in exchange for an email addresses which will help build your email list. They're enticing because they offer a behind-the-scenes glance at another company's 'aresenal'. The larger the company the more enticing their swipe file will become in the eyes of the general consumer. Here are some [...]
It's as easy as 1, 2, 3... Converting PDFs to Word in just three clicks isn't an exaggeration. Using Adobe Acrobat allows you to handle the conversion, but it's not without its caveats. If the PDF file you want to convert features either transparency effects or lots of detailed graphics then there's a 50/50 chance the images won't make it through the conversion unscathed. Regular photos and text, however, should come through [...]
Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace is a simple, yet powerful feature that can help you get clean and scalable vector graphics from all sorts of original source files (jpeg, png, gif). Say goodbye to all those pixelated logos! As I mention in the video, the Image Trace (formerly Live Trace) feature has come through for me when all others have failed to improve upon a lo-res file. Have you ever been [...]