The one Adobe Photoshop plugin you should absolutely be using

FlatIcon for Photoshop
I’ve tried a LOT of Photoshop plugins. They all have their specific uses, and many of them are worthy of your purchase. But few are as useful on a daily basis as this one.

FlatIcon is a plugin for Photoshop CS5 and later that places a new panel in Photoshop that allows you to search for, and place in your document, vector icons from a collection of over 41,000. Best of all, they’re free. And because they’re vector shapes, you can resize and edit them without losing quality.

To use FlatIcon, visit Window > Extensions > Flaticon to bring up the panel. Then you simply search for the icon you wish to use, click and drag it to your document, and start editing it as you would any other vector shape in Photoshop. It couldn’t be easier.

FlatIcon is a plugin many designers, particularly web designers, will use daily. For me, having a collection of arrows and typical web elements is worth the install alone.

FlatIcon is free, works with Adobe Photoshop CS5, CS6 and CC. You can download FlatIcon here.

By the way, if Photoshop plugins aren’t your thing, you can also download the icons individually from FlatIcon as a PNG, SVG (vector) or Webfont from the main site.

New look for the site

If you’re not a first-time visitor to The Graphic Mac, you’ve no doubt noticed that the site has changed dramatically. Not just the blog theme, but the color scheme as well. The color scheme change goes against everything I know about “branding” – but quite frankly, I was tired of the bright green. I may even switch the colors on a whim, or go back to the bright green in the future. Who knows.

The layout is a little easier for me to manage. Regular posts get the larger headlines with white background. While link posts, those post that simply point to a page on another site when you click the headline here, have a smaller and italicized headline with a grey background. Everything else, you’ll figure out on your own.

This change to the site, like others in the past, is not meant to be “creative improvement.” I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating: I don’t care about the design of this site. It’s about the content. And because this site is a hobby for me, I have to make it as easy for me to manage as possible.

Don’t get me wrong, I value input if you have it, so feel free to share in the comments.

Quickly change InDesign’s Presentation Mode background color

You probably don’t think of Adobe InDesign as a presentation application like Keynote or PowerPoint. But the fact is, you can apply page transitions, embed movies, and more to your InDesign document and present it without the viewer having to look at object handles, panels or the rest of the InDesign interface.

InDesign presentation mode

Simply hit Shift+W to enter into Presentation Mode. By default, InDesign uses a solid black background. But you can change to a neutral gray background by hitting the letter G, or white by hitting W. If you want to switch back to solid black, hit B.

Of course, to exit Presentation Mode, simply hit the ESC key or Shift+W again.

Photoshop documentor plugin for web designers & developers

Ink plugin

Ink is a plugin that helps web designers and developers provide extra information about their mockups by documenting layers, typography, effects and shape sizes, etc.

Though I’m not a web designer or developer by trade, I can totally see how the free Ink plugin would be extremely useful. Truth be told, I use Photoshop’s built-in Notes feature to document complex PSD files that I share with clients and other designers/vendors. It’s also a great way to leave notes to yourself on how you created a particular effect (the settings you used in Gaussian Blur filter, for example).

The Ink plugin is currently in beta and is available for Photoshop CS6 and CC only.

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