Illustrator | The Graphic Mac

Hitler is pissed about Adobe Creative Cloud

Ok, that’s funny!

Adobe Creative Cloud: The prices and the facts

You’ve probably heard, Adobe announced yesterday that the company will focus all of its creative software development efforts on its Creative Cloud offering moving forward, thus killing off the boxed tools previously known as Creative Suite. It’s a move everyone saw coming, though I had guessed it wouldn’t happen until after CS 7.

There’s a lot of misinformation and assumption going around, so before you get frustrated and fly-off the handle, here are the prices and some facts.

Increase/decrease transparency with this Adobe Illustrator keyboard shortcut

For some odd reason Adobe removed the slider for the Transparency panel some time ago, and replaced it with a mostly useless drop-down menu of 10% increments. While many users certainly aren’t happy about this, they probably don’t know that you can adjust transparency more precisely than the drop-down menu allows using keyboard shortcuts.

Common myths about Adobe Creative Cloud

I get a lot of emails about Adobe Creative Cloud and whether it’s right for people. A lot of the questions have been answered by Adobe, but they’re hard to find. Here’s some info to shed some light on Creative Cloud.

Fixing the grid alignment bug in Adobe Illustrator

Have you come across this little gem of a bug when using Adobe Illustrator? You draw a box and apply a stroke to the inside of the frame, and the stroke appears to “float” off of the frame itself. As you can see in the image above, the actual frame object is the blue line, and my 1-pixel black stroke is way off. The bug has been around for a few years, and I’m not sure why Adobe hasn’t fixed it yet. Fortunately, the solution below fixes the problem.

The iMac 27″ for graphic designers: part 2

In part one of The iMac 27″ for graphic designers, I covered the reasons for choosing the late 2012 iMac 27” to replace my 2006 Mac Pro. As a graphic designer who works in Adobe Creative Suite apps all day long, power is important. But as I found out with my MacBook Air, the Mac Pro just isn’t necessary anymore.

Having covered the pros and cons of the iMac itself in part 1, I’m now going to talk a bit about my experience actually using the iMac for the last two months.

Free halftone dot vector pack

28 clean and grunge halftone dot vector pack.

Easily create vector-based word cloud with this handy service

Every once in a while I have the need to create a word cloud for a project. The problem with most web services that create them is that the resulting artwork is rendered as a raster image. Not very customizable. Here’s a great Word Cloud Generator that allows you to download your word cloud in vector format where you can further customize the fonts, colors, etc.

Astute Graphics updates two popular Adobe Illustrator plugins

Astute Graphics has update two of their popular Adobe Illustrator plugins to work with CreativeSuite 6. Both add a plethora of additional tools to Illustrator users to enhance creativity and workflow.

Quickly access Open dialog box in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

If you want to spare every key click you possibly can, you can quickly access the Open Dialog Box in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator with nothing but your mouse – and you don’t even have to make a trip to the File menu!