Type: Link

The open-office trend is destroying the workplace

Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours. But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity.

I absolutely hate “open-office” layouts. I’ve worked for two companies that used them, and found them to be significantly less productive environments to work in. I hated the way my “door was always open” to co-workers to walk up and interrupt me as I was trying to concentrate on whatever I was working on at the time. And as the author of the article writes, they did little to nothing to improve inter-office communication and collaboration; many times it did just the opposite.

Guy quits job at Apple—rants about it. Whatever.

Apple Campus 2

There’s two sides to every story. Ben Farrell has posted a lengthy screed about what it’s like to work at Apple, and why he quit. IF his story is 100% true and not over-dramatized out of bitterness, it’s a sad story. However, I’m not sure this was the best way to leave a job, even if it is accurate. At least Mr. Farrell was classy about it, not calling-out anyone by name or title.

Photoshop Smart Objects: linked vs. embedded

Using Photoshop Smart Objects is a great way to work non-destructively. You can embed a Smart Object directly in a Photoshop file or link to a separate file and update it and reuse it in multiple projects.

I recently had a co-worker ask what they were and why I use them. I had a difficult time explaining it, so when I came across this video tutorial, I quickly fired-off a link. It’s a great walk-through for those who’ve never used them.

Master bullet and numbered lists in Adobe InDesign

InDesign's bullet list feature

Maybe it’s just a sign of our shortening attention spans, but these days we seem to want more and more of our information in quickly-digestible bullet points. And then there’s our insatiable need to quantify. We absolutely love lists: the Top Ten this, the 100 Greatest that, 50 ways to leave your lover, and so on.

So with all these lists to work with, we can be thankful that InDesign has robust tools for creating bulleted and numbered lists. If you’re not familiar with using bullet and numbered lists in Adobe InDesign, this article from CreativePro will make you a “list-master” in short order.

60 expert logo design tips

The title of their article could have also been: “60 things modern clients aren’t willing to pay for, or even think about.”

But hey, you still should. Take a look at all the great advice in this article… just remember that you’re not likely to be paid to put it to practical use anymore.

Feathering the edges of a selection along the edge of a document in Photoshop CC

In previous versions of Photoshop, if you selected an area of an image that included an edge area and then chose Select>Modify>Feather, the Feather would be added to the entire selection. While this might be desirable in some instances, in the majority of cases, it would be ideal if the feather was only applied within the image (and not to the edges). As a result, in the current version, the engineering team has changed the default behavior so that they feather is not applied at the edge (the canvas bounds) of an image.

Julieanne Kost enlightens us about this feature that I’m sure most people don’t even notice is there. Be sure to check out all her other awesome posts while you’re there, she has a lot of great information and tutorials.