Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS offers in-line embedded image editing, color checking and separations, duotones and vector halftones, filters and live effects color adjustment. Looks like a pretty great plugin for Illustrator users who do a lot of bitmap image placing.
Personally I do any layout work in InDesign, and not much of my work requires having bitmap images in the Illustrator file outside of placing a template for tracing. However, the halftone and separation features look like they might be really handy.Â
Continue reading 'Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS Studio Offers Duotones,Vector Halftones, Filters, Live Effects Color Adjustment & More'
by George Coghill -
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Just a quick tip for the freelancing and self-employed — that pain you feel paying all your taxes at once because you’re too lazy or forgetful to dole out your quarterly tax payments to Uncle Sam? It’s over. If you’re like me, and 99% of your banking and bill-paying is done online, there’s a tax payment solution for you.
Continue reading 'Automated Online Estimated Tax Payments For Freelancers & Self-Employed'
by George Coghill -
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James Dempsey’s illustration & design software tips and tricks blog The Creative Guy has been retired, and rising from the digital ashes is The Graphic Mac. Looks like all the previous GC content has been migrated the TGM. James mentions that the big reason for the big change was to switch from WordPress to Drupal so he could implement more community features like message boards and the like.
Continue reading 'The Creative Guy Is Now The Graphic Mac'
by George Coghill -
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Just stumbled across these handy Mac OS X software applications to help designers and artists simulate the effects of color blindness on-screen: Sim Daltonism and Color Oracle.
Sim Daltonism works as a floating palette which converts an area under your mouse cursor to the selected type of color blindness — it works similar to the Apple Digital Color Meter sampling utility. There are 8 different types of color blindness to test. Color Oracle works as a menubar item which converts the entire monitor to the selected mode of color blindness, but only offers the three most common forms.
Continue reading 'Color Blindness Software Tools for Artists'
by George Coghill -
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I stumbled across Design Float recently, can’t recall where. The title says it all: it’s a Digg.com type site for designers. For those of you not familiar with Digg (or Reddit), it’s a social news site, where content is submitted and then voted up or down by users. The idea is that only good content makes it to the top.
The site seems pretty new — you don’t see votes in the hundreds (or thousands) yet, as you do on Digg. I’ve already found a few cool resources on there, it’s definitely worth checking out.
by George Coghill -
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A great quick tip, from the excellent design blog BittBox, to create a color group of all the colors in an Illustrator document: Select all the art in your document, go to the Swatches fly-out menu and choose “New color group” – you now have a color group folder of all the colors in the artwork. Very cool!
Since color groups are a CS3 feature, this tip is Illustrator CS3 only.
via BittBox
by George Coghill -
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A cartoon illustration & design project for a friend’s party required the resulting art to be suitable for reproduction on a photocopy machine. After some trial, error, Google search, trial, error, Google search, trial, error I discovered the magic combo that allows you to create a halftone in Photoshop for an image and print it out on your inkjet printer so the art will be perfect for photocopying.
This technique is perfect for flyers, newsletters or any other short-run printing needs you have where the cheapness of a photocopy is desired, but so are grayscale images.
Continue reading 'Cartoon Art & Halftones Tutorial: From Inkjet Printer to Photocopier'
by George Coghill -
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If you aren’t familiar with cartoonist Tom Richmond, make yourself familiar. This guy’s work is absolutely amazing. Very much in the style of Mort Drucker from MAD Magazine — only taken to the extreme. Not only is his cartooning & caricature style excellent, but his color work is also phenomenal. Tom graciously has taken the time to outline exactly how he digitally colors his artwork in Photoshop in a juicily-detailed three-post tutorial/how-to series on his cartooning blog.
Continue reading 'Digital Coloring Tutorials by MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond'
by George Coghill -
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I just discovered these free PDF downloads of Inkspot, the Australian Cartoonists’ Association’s official magazine. The current issue feature über-caricaturist Mort Drucker. The publication is about 24 pages and contain interviews and news. I haven’t delved into the complete issue just yet, but looks to be a great resource.
Lots of interviews with cartoonists and other informative cartooning and cartoon industry resources in each issue.
by George Coghill -
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Genopal is a color scheme generator software application I just stumbled across, and it’s pretty interesting.
Instead of the standard color wheels most color scheme generator/explorer software programs utilize, Genopal doesn’t give you the option of choosing a color model such as Complimentary, Triadic and such. Instead there are two sliders, one for Color Diversity and one for Lightness Diversity. There’s a “Generate” button which them cycles though color schemes as analagous or as wild as you set the sliders.
Continue reading 'Genopal Color Scheme Generator Software: Weird Name, Cool Tool'
by George Coghill -
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