Dan's blog

Another cool font site

Dan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:16:45 -0600

I've seen a lot of "free font" articles here at The Graphic Mac, so I thought I would share one I recently found.

FontCubes has a ton of really cool fonts for download. What I like about the site is that it's easily navigated and has a clean layout. You can enter customized text to preview the fonts, and the download links are easily recognized.

Many of the fonts can be found elsewhere, but I really like the layout of FontCubes, and the selection is great.

Top 10 mistakes in icon design

Dan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 06:30:19 -0700

I recently was working on some icons for a client and was looking for some advice online. There are plenty of tutorials and programs, but nothing about the creative process — until I came across Denis Kortunov's article at TurboMilk. Here's an excerpt:

Icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16×16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design…

If you're designing icons, 10 Mistakes in Icon Design is a great article to read before you get started.

From sketch to fantastic digital art with Adobe Illustrator

Dan — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:33:02 -0700

I came across this really cool site called IllustrationClass which offers awesome downloadable tutorials for Adobe Illustrator. The tutorials include notes in English and Spanish, screen captures of each step of the process, as well as the actual Illustrator files. Definitely worth checking out if you use Illustrator.

Set default character styles in Adobe InDesign

Dan — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:24:07 -0700

Many InDesign users know you can set the default colors displayed in the Color panel by setting them without a document open. I've recently realized that you can do the same thing with Character Styles.

Open InDesign, but don't open a document (that part is important). Now go to your Character or Paragraph Styles panel and set all your preferred styles like font choice, point size, kerning settings, indents & spacing and a keyboard shortcut. Now just hit OK to commit the settings to InDesign's memory. From now on, whenever you start up InDesign and/or create a new document, those Character styles will already be set up and available.

Working with InDesign Snippets

Dan — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:40:34 -0700

By accident I just found out that InDesign has a feature called Snippets which allows you to drag virtually anything, like a group of objects, off the page and onto the desktop and it gets saved as a .inds file (a Snippet). This file can then be dragged back into, or placed via the Command + D shortcut, any other InDesign document as though it were an image or text file with all the formatting in place (text is still editable). Pretty cool!