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This little gem is made up entirely of OSX system sounds — a creative project by a designer living in New York City. You can download the GarageBand file used to create this tune from here.
Fast and easy facial retouching Photoshop tutorial
Fast and easy facial retouching Photoshop tutorial
PSDTuts has a spectacular tutorial titled Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching. There are plenty of these tuts floating around, but this one is particularly easy and highly adaptable. Plus, it includes a link to a downloadable preset for Photoshop’s Curves dialog box that produces stunning color adjustment with little to no work on your end.
Aligning text baselines to InDesign document grids
Aligning text baselines to InDesign document grids
Tim Cole’s InDesign BackChannel has a great explanation of Adobe InDesign’s overlooked and underused Align First Line Only to Grid feature. While aligning text to document grids sounds techy, overrated and downright boring, trust me when I tell you that this feature can save you a lot of time when you’re designing books, training manuals and magazines. I love tips like this, but they do take a while to burn them into your memory for frequent use in your day-to-day work.
Cool site for package designers
Cool site for package designers
Package design is a niche in our industry that gets little attention, even though it’s probably one of the coolest things to design and looks great in a portfolio. There are few resources dedicated to it, so when I came across The Dieline, I knew I wanted to share it with you. The site offers inspirational samples and articles about great package design, as well as design studio spotlights.
Fine-tune your volume adjustments in OS X
Fine-tune your volume adjustments in OS X
If you own a laptop, you probably use the Volume key shortcuts (F4 and F5) to adjust your volume, rather than visiting the System Preferences or Volume menu item. Every time you press the Volume key, a full block of volume is raised or lowered in the Volume bezel on your screen. If the amount it is raised or lowered is too much or not enough, you can adjust the amount by a quarter of a block at a time. 
To fine-tune the Volume adjustment, hold the Shift and Option keys while hitting F4 or F5. This fine-tuning can be done with the Volume menu item as well, but it’s just easier to use the keyboard shortcuts. Update: This trick, as stated in the first sentence, is for Apple Laptops. While it may work with Apple desktop keyboards (I don’t have one hooked up right now, so I can’t check), it also may not work with any other branded keyboard. It’s also a Leopard-only trick.
“You TOO can become a graphic designer!”
A recent post on Creative Bits (and the subsequent commentary underneath) got me thinking about what might be required to refer to oneself as a ‘graphic designer’. Is it a college degree, a kick-ass portfolio, or is it simply because you’ve printed the flyer for the local church’s fish dinner on your home inkjet for the last 10 years running…? There’s a commercial that appears on TV in my neck of the woods for a local trade school called Gibbs College, and it manages to make my blood boil most every time. Not only because of the deafening audio levels at which all cable ads seem to run at, but because it also seems to cheapen what I do for a living.