Cartoon character mascot & logo design sketch blog of cartoonist/illustrator George Coghill.
A quick note that as of the posting date, there are a handful of plugins not yet available for the Creative Suite CS4 applications.
The list for me so far includes: all font activation plugins for Linotype’s Font Explorer X, “Select Menu” for Illustrator CS4, Canon’s Scangear CS plugin to access your scanner from within Photoshop’s Import menu, and plugins from developer Worker72a such as the ‘Zoom To Selection’ plugin for Illustrator.
Just a quick tip for those out there getting ready to upgrade to the new Adobe Creative Suite CS4: I discovered after the upgrade that CS3 customized keyboard shortcut files do not transition into CS4.
This is a huge bummer, as there is no easy way that I know of to display what you have changed compared to the default set. I can only speak for Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4 and InDesign CS4 as I do not use the rest of the programs in the Design Premium suite enough to customize keyboard shortcuts.
I can’t recall if this is the case with previous Creative Suite upgrades as well or if this is a CS4-only situation.
Continue reading 'Creative Suite CS4: Custom Keyboard Shortcut Woes'
Wacom has a new online service and free companion software tool download called Bamboo Dock. The apps available so far are basic — a drawing/doodling app, a map you can draw on and a handwriting recognition app. The others I couldn’t demo as a Wacom Bamboo serial number is required.
The online service is a sort of virtual sketchpad, allowing you to doodle, draw, scrapbook and upload files to “spaces” which are like collections, and inside of each one can add multiple canvases with different contents, themes and such.
I am having a hard time imagining a use for the online portion, but the companion apps look like they might be handy and should be interesting to see how things progress as new tools are developed/released.
Sharon Steuer’s free ”Zen Of The Pen” PDF is an excellent introduction to the inner mysteries of the vector pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
The pen tool is one of those obscure graphics programs tools that everyone tries once, and then gets so confused by that they never get any further with it. And understandably. It looks like a fountain pen, but it doesn’t act like one. Click and “draw”, you get weird “handles” sprouting out from a dot. Ignore that, and some annoying rubber band line gets stuck to your pen tip, all distorted out of — not even a straight line! Right there most Illustrator users think to themselves “this program sucks”.
But they couldn’t be further from the truth…
Vector artists and Adobe Illustrator users – rejoice! You no longer have to toil away in obscurity. Let the world know where your heart lies.
This t-shirt will get a knowing wink from those in-the-know. If you look closely, you’ll notice the heart is in fact created as a vector object, complete with points and handles. Or perhaps these are “love” handles?
People may go on and on about the (former) Macromedia Freehand, or their own open-source or alternative vector application, but you know what vector software you love the most.
I know, I know. Not everyone is ga-ga over Illustrator. Well, no need to fret — the “I Heart Vectors” t-shirt design is available as well. Regardless of your allegiances, I think we can all agree it’s “Points, Not Pixels”.
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