If you're looking for something a little different for a background in Adobe Illustrator, try holding down the Tilde (~) key while dragging out a shape using one of Illustrator's shape drawing tools such as line, circle, square, etc. Holding the Tilde key forces Illustrator to repeat the shapes in rapid fashion as you drag your mouse around the artboard.

For fun, I set all the shapes to the same color, then went back and randomly chose a few dozen shapes and made them a different color, then set all shapes to Multiply in the Transparency panel. Try it and you may find yourself busy for an hour or so.

Thanks to BittBox for the tip.

In this tutorial at Mákeeda, we are going to talk about how to break apart a font into vector bits that we can manipulate to create our own logo font. This is a great way to add your style to a font or to make your own!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save the world. This message will self destruct in 10 seconds... (queue Mission Impossible theme song!)

Sometimes you want to send a private email to someone, the type of email that contains sensitive information. Perhaps you're plotting to overthrow the board of directors at your company, or maybe just the latest gossip about your boss and his rather disgusting eating habits. Obviously, you don't want ANYONE but the recipient to see that email. In fact, you're not even sure you want to risk them saving that email.

Enter Privnote. Privnote allows you to send an email that will self-destruct (sans messy explosions, and evidentiary ashes) after reading it, leaving no trace of its existence at all.

What makes Privnote cool and different from regular email:

• You get a link to the note, and once that link is clicked the note is destroyed so it can only be seen once. If someone intercepts the link and sees the note before the person who's intended to read it, that person will know that the note has been eavesdropped, and can tell you about it.
• If you want to be notified when your note gets read you can do it by checking the notify box located below the note. Neither email nor instant messaging provides a reliable way to know if, let alone when, your messages are read.
• If you send a note and suddenly regret having done so, you can click the link yourself which will destroy the note and prevent the receiver from reading it.

The never-ending, no right-or-wrong answer, how do I figure this out question that every new freelancer has. Design: Talkboard has an article that covers some of the things you should consider when trying to come up with your hourly rate.

In addition, you may wish to take a look at some links I wrote about in the past that may help you figure out your hourly design rates. You can read them here, and here.

With the past year featuring heavily-hyped Mac software bundle sales from MacHeist and MacUpdate, it's refreshing to find Make Your Own Mac Mix is offering a build-it-yourself bundle which features heavy discounts the more apps you purchase.

With 28 applications available to add to the Mix, you simply add the ones you want to your bundle and watch the discount grow and grow as you add more apps. Parallels Desktop for Mac is the premier app available, but the rest of the apps are pretty cool too. And I don't believe any of the others were available in any previous promotions.

The first app gets you a 10% discount. Three apps equals a 30% discount, five apps garners you 40% off, seven apps 50% off, 9 apps 60% off and 12 apps 75% off.

The site itself is quite nice, too. It's worth checking out the site design, even if you don't intend on buying anything. By the way, the promotion only has less than 10 days left

TUAW reports on an easy way to remove system preference panes. Simply right-clicking on a system preference pane in the Others section (which are the custom preferences installed by user applications) will present you with the option of removing them, which moves them to the OSX trash.

While this is a simple OSX tip, it's great for those who don't want to go digging through their various Library folders looking for the actual preference pane manually.

According to this page on the Quark XPress 8 Web site, the ability to place native Adobe Illustrator files will finally come to Quark users. As you may recall, Quark added the ability to bring native layered Photoshop files into XPress a few years back. This news could finally mean the end of the .eps file format - at least in the design world. Also coming to XPress 8 is Adobe Bridge integration.

With Quark's track record, it remains to be seen how well the feature will actually work, but the fact that it's there at all is a good sign that Quark is FINALLY listening to their customers.

Russell Brown has a great video tutorial showing you how to create a life-like mirror image using Photoshop's built-in clone source tools that goes a bit beyond just flipping the image and adjusting opacity.

If you're a Photoshop user running Mac OSX 10.4 or 10.5, you should be taking advantage of Apple's Automator. Automator allows you to string a series of "actions" together to create a workflow. Think of them as shortcuts.

The Photoshop Action Pack 3.7 provides 90 Actions which allow you to control a huge amount of Photoshop functions, and execute complex batch operations you just can't do with Photoshop's built-in Actions.

The following actions are provided in the new Action Pack:

While most people know you can adjust the transparency of layers and brushes in Adobe Photoshop manually by using the sliders in the appropriate tool panels, many don't know you can do it easily with just the keyboard.

To adjust the transparency of a layer using the keyboard, simply click the layer you wish to adjust and type the percentage of transparency you wish to use. If you want the layer to be 54% transparent, just type 54.

The same tip works for adjusting the flow (transparency) of brushes. Just select the brush tool (hit the "b" key) and type a number. If you want the brush to have a flow of 35%, just type 35.

I love this tip for making small adjustments, rather than using the picky sliders which always seem to be a pain to make accurate adjustments easily.

I've listed a ton of places to get Photoshop Brushes in the past. Today I have yet another to add to your bookmarks.

PSBrushes has categorized thousands of Photoshop brushes along with convenient preview images for your download enjoyment. Categories like Grunge, Space, Plants, Oriental, and Fractals make it extremely easy to find exactly what you're looking for. Some of the sets are quite large, containing over 80 brushes each. Others are smaller and very specific, with only 8 to 10 per set. All are quality sets.

I just wanted to post a quick note to introduce you to The Graphic Mac's newest Partner, Markzware.

You may have read a previous post regarding one of their products (Q2ID), which converts Quark documents to InDesign, a while back. I'm a huge fan of this valuable plugin for Adobe InDesign. The time you can save more than pays for the plugin after a single use.

Check out Markzware's other offerings for Quark and InDesign when you visit their site, they may just have what you're looking for!

Long, long ago, Adobe gave us transparency in InDesign version 2. In each subsequent version of InDesign, Adobe has added ways to enhance documents with transparency, making it even more enticing. There’s one thing that hasn’t changed, however, and that’s the need to flatten transparency for output to a PostScript device.

In the article InDesign Transparency: No Longer the Forbidden Fruit over at CreativePro, you'll learn everything you need to know to produce a successful printed layout when you download the PDF excerpt from InDesign Magazine.

If you place a PSD file with a transparent background into Adobe InDesign and export it as a high-res PDF, you may notice that the edges of your placed image look horrible. There's usually a black & white halo around the edges of the transparent PSD (see the image above for example). You won't see them on a placed TIF file, and they generally don't print anyway, but they're annoying nonetheless.

Fortunately, Bob Levine at InDesignSecrets has finally spilled the beans on what the problem is, and how to fix it. In most all cases, it's as simple as turning off the Smooth Images feature in Acrobat.

Read Screen Artifacts on Transparent PSDs in Exported PDFs Can Be Deceiving…Most of the Time for more information.