This whole creativity thing is pretty amazing

There’s something absolutely incredible about being able to sit down and type out your thoughts. To have some nearly unexplainable chemical reactions in your brain turn into the movement of a pencil, or pen, or fingers on a keyboard, and see words begin to form from seemingly nothing.

That’s magic.

Actually, it’s not magic: it’s creation, and you do it every day. Even if you’re not a writer.

Have you ever considered this idea fully before? Whenever you sit down to draw, or sing, or get up to dance, or seek to solve a problem, or when you simply converse with someone, you’re creating something very real from almost nothing. You, and everyone around you, are in a constant state of transforming microscopic chemical processes into art, and poetry, and emails, and conversations, and music, and products, and everything between.

Today, as you work or write or create – whatever it is you do today – take some time to realize exactly what it is you’re doing. That you’re taking intangible, nearly indescribable reactions between chemicals in your brain and making something you (and the world) can see or touch or hear or taste or experience.

Whether the results are big or small, the process is amazing.

The Movable Magnifier in InDesign

While working on a layout...
1. Press Cmd-Spacebar to invoke the temporary Loupe tool
2. Drag to draw an area
3. While keeping the mouse button down, release CMD-Spacebar
4. Drag to slightly change the size of the drawn area
5. Press again Cmd-Spacebar and then move the mouse

The result is you can move the selection that you drew to another area while keeping the size of the drawn area!

It seems that you only need step 4 the first time you do the trick. If you want to continue to move the zooming selection area, steps 3 and 5 are enough and you can skip step 4.

Punch out holes in your extrusions! in Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended

In the Repoussé dialog you can manipulate the constraint (sub-path) using any of the Internal Constraints tools to either punch it out to make a hole or add separate extrusion parameters. You can also add constraints to an existing Repoussé object by drawing a selection or path and choosing either 3D>Repoussé>Create Constraints From Selection(s) or Selected Path(s). You can also use the Add(Selection) or Add(Path) buttons in the Internal Constraints section of the Repoussé dialog.

Prevent a B&W document from separating to CMYK

If your B&W document separates to CMYK, then there must be color in there somewhere. Perhaps you're using a "rich" black (with CMYK values) or the Registration swatch instead of the Black swatch. Or maybe there are phantom (hidden) color objects.


Text layout in Adobe Fireworks CS5

Text is part of nearly every design, and for Fireworks CS5, lots of refinements have been added to the already impressive text layout features. A favorite is the new noncontiguous selection feature-after selecting some text characters in a text object using the Text tool (T), press-and-hold the Shift key and click-and-drag to select additional noncontiguous characters.

Fill and Stroke Shortcuts in InDesign CS6


Use keyboard shortcuts to quickly change the attributes of your object's fill or stroke.

D = Default (no fill, black stroke)

X = Exchange (activates fill or stroke, whichever was not selected)

Shift+X = Exchange (swaps the fill/stroke values)

/ = None (sets fill/stroke to none)

, (comma) = Applies last used color

. (period) = Applies last used gradient

Down to the wire in Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

Flash Catalyst contains numerous wireframe drawing tools and pre-built components that you can use to create interactive wireframes. Pre-built components are fully functioning buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, and other user interface items that let you quickly mock up the layout of your finished project. You can find these in the Wireframe Components panel.

Create Stop Motion Animation in Photoshop

Stop Motion Animation is often regarded as one of the easiest and simplest type of animation that we can ever create. Since it makes use of home environment, digital cameras and easy to use locomotive objects, Stop Motion Animation (SMA) can be probably created by anyone.

Principle
A Stop Motion Animation is based on the principle that serial frames of pictures and photographs will give the viewer an illusion of motion. In simple words, Stop Motion Animation is nothing but a series of individual photographs of a movable object. And, today we will see a tutorial about how to create a Stop Motion Animation clip using objects of your choice using Photoshop.