The Graphic Mac

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.

Vecte: OS X application switcher replacement

Vecte is a simple Mac OS X application switcher replacement. All the standard keyboard shortcuts still work, the only difference is how it looks and feels. It’s a great way to customize how OS X looks and works.

Free brand icon collection

Simple Icons is a collection of 100 brand icons, available in PNG format in eleven different sizes ranging from 16 to 4096 pixels. You can download Simple Icons from Smashing Magazine here.

10 useful tips for Adobe Acrobat XI

Mike Rankin offers the following tips for Acrobat XI. Many of them also work in older versions of Acrobat, though the locations and names of specific menu items may be different.

How to design direct mail so nobody opens it

With so much competition in the consumer’s mailbox, you have to design a direct mail piece for clear readability and quick communication of your message. Tell the reader too much and you risk them not reading the entire piece. Don’t tell them enough and they lose interest and toss it in the bin.

Rather than go into all the best practices of designing direct mail, I thought I would share my thoughts on a direct mail piece I received recently.

Printing absolute page numbers in your Adobe InDesign document

I know. You’re probably thinking “just type the page number in the Print dialog box.” But that only works when your pages are numbered in the default method where page one is actually the first page in the document. This isn’t always the case. Many times, you’ll have a multi-page document where you’ve used the Numbering & Section Options in the Pages panel and the page numbering doesn’t start until (for example) page six—to accommodate a cover page, table of contents and intro pages. So how do you print “page one” which isn’t actually the first page in the document?

Here’s a quick tip to allow you to print the page you want.

Free font: Manteka

Manteka is a nice sans-serif headline font with a blocky style. Free for personal and commercial use.

Stocksy: A better stock photography resource

I’m always on the lookout for stock photography resources, and I tend to bookmark any stock photo site that shows any potential. But let’s be honest, client budgets aren’t what they used to be. Sites like Getty and Masterfile are just too expensive. At the other end, ThinkStock, Shutterstock and iStockPhoto are affordable but have a rather poor selection of images for high-end advertising use; they’re overloaded with cliché images with poor cropping and mediocre subject matter.

I recently found Stocksy, a relative new royalty free stock photo site that prefers to sell quality images, rather than high-quantity.