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.

How to adjust the standby time in your MacBook

MacBook Pro lid

Later model MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros offer a feature called Standby mode. Standby essentially takes the contents of your RAM and stores it on the hard drive after your MacBook has been sleeping for an hour. This saves plenty of battery life. Unfortunately, it significantly adds to the amount of time your MacBook takes to wake from sleep when already in Standby mode.

By default, Standby is set to one hour (3600 seconds) by Apple. But you can adjust the settings using the Terminal app to whatever you wish. I’ve set mine to two hours (7200 seconds), instead of one, using the following command in Terminal application:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 7200

I caution you though, setting the amount (in seconds) too high can kill the battery savings that Standby was meant to give you. And in the end, it only saves you a few seconds when you wake your MacBook from sleep.

Free font: Glober

Glober Font

Most suitable for headlines, Glober contains 18 fonts for $19 – or you can download the Thin and Bold fonts for free.

Suitcase Fusion updates adds experimentation and inspiration

Suitcase Fusion 5 update

Extensis released a new update for Suitcase Fusion 5, the best font manager for the Mac on the market (in my opinion). This latest update is free to existing Fusion 5 users, and advances features which foster design inspiration, including a new Fontspiration panel which showcases the latest and most cutting edge typography via a Pinterest feed. Clicking on an image in the panel loads the Pinterest page containing the image, where you can also view the rest of the Extensis Fontspiration Pinterest Board.

The update also doubles the collection of QuickComp templates, a new feature introduced in Suitcase Fusion 5 that allows you to quickly view font combinations in various pre-built layouts for magazines, newspapers, and mobile formats.

I’ve reviewed Suitcase Fusion’s features in the past, and this update adds even more for designers who use a wide variety of fonts in their day-to-day work. There are certainly other font managers out there, but I’ve not come across one that offers more useful tools beyond simple font organization the way Fusion does.

The update to Suitcase Fusion 5 update is free. New users can purchase it for $99.95 or try the free demo to see if it fits into your creative workflow.

Color defines a logo

When you get to own a color as much as Coca-Cola does, you don’t need much more around it.

The wrong color can make a great logo look like something a friend left on your bathroom floor the morning after a party.

Take a look at this brief article at FastCoDesign, then ask yourself: How much does color define a logo? Truth-be-told, you should probably spend nearly as much time thinking about your color use as you do designing the logo.