The Graphic Mac

CreativeNerds has put together 14 very cool spiral brushes for Photoshop geeks free for download. I’m a big fan of Photoshop brushes, and this set could be extremely useful to add depth to background images and techy artwork.

ThinkDesign has 15 red vinyl textures in high-resolution available free for download. They make great backgrounds for ads, brochures or multi-media presentations. The single download is approximately 54MB.

Vectips has a quick tutorial showing you how to create gradient strokes on your type in Adobe Illustrator. This super simple technique use the Appearance panel and effects to create editable gradient strokes in Illustrator. As a bonus, you can add transparency for a very cool effect as seen above.

Being a designer requires more knowledge, experience and dedication than ever. Gone are the days of “specializing” in one area of design or the other; you have to work in print, Web and multi-media – all demanding more of your valuable time. Freelancers in particular generally have enough work to fill their day without figuring in time for distractions. I spent the last nine months freelancing, and was lucky enough to have enough work to fill my day. I was also spending some of my time each day searching for a full-time gig, so my time had to be managed well. It took a while, but I found a decent balance after about a month of trying different things. Below are a few of those things that gave me more time to focus on my design and writing, job searching, and even a bit of time for me to sit back and relax a little each day, go for a bike ride, or leisurely surf the Web. Read on to see what worked for me. READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.

If you find yourself taking screenshots a lot, you no doubt dumped Mac OSX’s built-in screen capture utility long ago. My preferred screen capture app is Snapz Pro. But the one area that few apps do well is capture an entire Web page (including the portion not currently on screen). There are a few stand-alone apps that can do this, but most require you to manually type the URL into the app for it to work.

Since I use Firefox, I have a few options available that are fully integrated into the browser to accomplish the task. My favorite is Pearl Crescent Page Saver (PCPS). PCPS adds a little camera icon to your toolbar that allows you to save an entire Web page, the visible portion of the page, or a single frame on the page as a .jpg or .png file. If you don’t care for a button in the toolbar, you can also assign a keyboard shortcut, or use the contextual menu it adds to the browser. PCPS works perfectly capturing a page, including a page containing Flash content, an area that many screen capture utilities seem to have great difficulty with. PCPS offers several more configuration options that make working with it a productive experience, particularly for bloggers with a fixed-width site. PCPS not only allows you to set the file format, including the JPG quality, but you can customize the output size of the image by percentage or pixel-width dimensions. Your image is ready to upload immediately. You can even have a custom naming convention set up via the preferences. There are several add-ons that offer screen-capture capability to Firefox, but I’ve found Pearl Crescent Page Saver to be stable, reliable, and offering just enough in the way of customization to satisfy my needs.

There’s no valid reason to bother with this – heck, it’s not even Halloween yet. But I came across this site and it’s fun as heck to mess around with. Upload a photo of yourself and go to work turning yourself into Frankenstein, a vampire, and more. Just visit the Buffalo Wild Wings Night Hunger site to get started monsterizing yourself. A tightly cropped head shot with a simple background work best. This is the second time I’ve referred you to a Buffalo Wild Wings site because it was über-cool! The main Buffalo Wild Wings site I recently wrote about is awesome as well.

Robin Ryan shares some fantastic tips over at Digital Photography School for digital photography enthusiasts who want to try their hand at night shooting. The same composition rules that apply to day apply to night, except with night we have our long exposures to take advantage of, but in this article, Robin shares some great advice to help you get started.

Apple’s Time Capsule can make an excellent media drive to house your movies, photos and music. David Appleyard over at TheAppleBlog provides an excellent guide that will take you step-by-step through the process of turning your Time Capsule into a media drive and explain what works well and what simply won’t. As someone who recently purchased a Time Capsule for this very reason, I found the article to be quite helpful.