eMotion Design Tips

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcut: Changing brush size

2012-01-06T22:58:00.002-06:00

I'll keep this Photoshop Tip brief. You can use the [ and ] keys to decrease or increase respectively the size of any Photoshop brush that you have selected. Just click on your Airbrush, Cloning Tool, Eraser etc an watch your cursor's circle brush size indicator change size as you press either of the bracket keys. Holding either one down will make it change quickly or you can just tap it to change the brush size incrementally. This is definitely one of the handiest shortcuts as you can see the brush size change while it is on top of the image which is much better and quicker then using the size slider. Have fun with it and watch how much faster you can work.

One side note is that there are instances where you won't see the circle brush size indicator. It is a preference that can be turned on or off but is usually on by default. Even when it's on however, I've run into instances (guessing they are memory related) where the brush size indicator doesn't show up and the only way to get it back is to restart Photoshop.

Fireworks Tip - Measure pixel width and height with guides

2012-01-04T13:53:00.010-06:00

One of the great things about Adobe Fireworks is it's ability to quickly get accurate pixel measurements. Believe it or not, this can be a little bit of work in Photoshop but thankfully is a breeze in Fireworks. First of all it's worth noting that the pixel dimensions of any selected object (or layer) are always displayed in the Properties panel (see screen shot below).
This is great but sometimes life gets more complicated. For these instances it's nice to know that you can pull guides out from the rulers and measure the distance between them holding down your Shift key. You will need to have the Pointer Tool (Black Arrow) selected when you do this. Then simply hold down your Shift key and move your mouse between the guides you want to know the distance between. You will instantly see both the vertical and horizontal measurements (see screenshot below).
This is also handy to use when setting up Guides for mockups. If you know an area of your site mockup needs to be 300px across you can quickly drop a guide down to objects will snap to it. Holding down the Shift key while dragging a third guide in the middle will even show you the distance on either side of the new guide allowing you to find the middle point quickly. This an easy to use yet powerful and time saving feature. Once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder how you got anything done without it.

Creating PDFs that display mockups at actual size

2012-01-03T11:32:00.007-06:00

Adobe Acrobat works great for sharing proofs for print projects but lets be honest. If you are creating mockups for a website or simply want to convert screen captures into a PDF, it can be quite frustrating. Doesn't matter if you use Photoshop, Fireworks or some other design program. Saving to, exporting or printing to a PDF is almost always sure to produce a blurry and noisy image. Also just as disturbing is the fact that Acrobat won't display the file at the same size as what you originally created it at but instead usually shows an enlarged version when you select 100% in Acrobat. Sure there are other ways to deliver mockups but the company I work for really prefers PDFs so I decided to figure out a reliable way to get a decent looking PDF of my site mockups. As I started researching for answers on the internet I was shocked at how little information there is on this. All I really wanted to do was have my PDF display muliple mockup images as pages at the same size and quality as if I exported them to PNGs...is that to much to ask?

The good news is it is possible and even better, it's not that difficult to do once you do some initial setup. In fact I'm shocked that Adobe hasn't addressed this themselves as their export to pdf option from Fireworks is pretty much worthless in my opinion. Enough of me venting though. Onto the solution.

First a summary of how this works. By default Adobe Acrobat has a Custom Resolution setting set at 110 pixels/inch (found under Edit>Preferences>Page Display). This needs to match the resolution of the files you create. Most designers that I know don't work at 110ppi but when working on something destined for the screen, the resolution really makes no difference (just the actual number of pixels). You could tell everyone who views your PDF to change their Acrobat Resolution setting to 72, 96 or whatever your ppi of choice is but the more obvious solution is to start working at the default 110 resolution to begin with. Trust me, it won't make your files larger or look any different as long as you don't change the actual number of pixels wide by tall. Very few people know or care that this setting exists in Acrobat so you can pretty much count on 110ppi being the setting on your clients system.

Alright now that you understand the resolution bit, let's move onto some settings in Adobe Acrobat. You will only have to set these up one time on your system. Open up Adobe Acrobat (of course you will need the full version...not just the viewer). Note that my directions and screen shots are for Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro but should be similar on other versions.

Select Edit then Preferences
Under Categories: click on Convert To PDF
Under Converting To PDF click on PNG
CLick the Edit Settings button
Under Compression use the drop down by Color to select JPEG (Quality : Maximum)
Click OK button to save and close Adobe PDF Settings
Click OK button to save and close Preferences

What this does is tells the program that any time you use Acrobat to convert or combine color PNG files, you want it to compress them very little keeping most of the quality. Of course this makes for bigger file sizes but I prefer that then having a client become distracted by jpg noise which becomes more obvious in screen captures then it would in a photograph.

So now that you have Acrobat all setup, you should create or save out your 110ppi mockups as individual PNG files. It's also helpful if you number them sequentially. I usually export them all to a new folder where I can then select all of my PNG files that I want to combine into a PDF. Then I right-click the files and select Combine supported files in Acrobat..... Note that it also works to combine them in Adobe Acrobat once the program is open but this way just seems easier to me.

A Combine Files window opens in which you can reorder your files if desired. Once you have them ordered, click the Large File Size button found at the bottom right of the window (just above the Cancel button). Then click the Combine Files button and wait a few seconds while Acrobat converts the files into a single PDF.

You are now basically finished but there is one more step that I always make sure I do. With the newly combined PDF open...

Select File then Properties
On the Initial View Tab use the Page layout: dropdown to select Single Page
Also on the Initial View Tab use the Magnification: dropdown to select 100% - or Actual Size (seems to be the same thing)
Click OK button
Be sure to save your file after you change these settings

This forces the file to open up scaled to 100% so you can be very confident that your client will open the file and see exactly what they should expect to see on the finished website. It really does impact a client's perspective of a design if they are viewing it at a reduced or enlarged size so you want to be as accurate with this as possible.

And there you have it. Your PDF mockups have never looked so wonderful and depending on the number of pages and there size, you can can now create them in a matter of seconds for you client in a matter of seconds.

2010-05-28T14:47:00.001-05:00

Learn one way to blur the background of an image in Photoshop while keeping the subject in focus using a duplicate layer, gaussian blur and a mask.

Photoshop Tip - How to make an image black and white with some color

2010-05-24T09:58:00.001-05:00

Learn one way to make an image black and white with select areas still in full color in Photoshop using masking techniques.

Photoshop Tip - How to convert a color image to black and white

2010-05-20T09:03:00.001-05:00

Learn one way to convert a color image to black and white in Photoshop using a gradient map adjustment layer. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Photoshop Tip - How to fade image to solid color

2010-05-18T15:16:00.002-05:00

Learn one way to fade a photo image to a solid color in Photoshop using an adjustment layer and gradient mask. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions

"White Space" ending???

2010-05-18T00:43:00.004-05:00

"White Space" or "Negative Space" is area in an image that surrounds an object. Good designs make this space come alive by making it as interesting as the objects themselves. Unfortunately white space in a blog isn't such a good thing. For quite some time now the space....ahem....time between blog entries has been negative (in a very unacceptably bad way). The good news is that new tips are coming soon (and I'm hoping to include video). I'll be starting to add new tips to once again enhance your productivity and creativity when using programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Let me know in the comments what subjects you'd like to see me cover and check back soon.

Fonts: List of my favorites

2008-06-26T08:55:00.004-05:00

Occasionally people will ask me what fonts they should use. My advice is to try to use well established fonts whenever possible. In fact in school one of my teachers really pushed us to only work with one or two fonts in all our projects for one semester. Frequently working with the same font really helps you discover it's strengths and weaknesses and helps you get a feel for what you can do with it. Now before I started seriously looking at becoming a designer I loved to use crazy decorative fonts and there are literally thousands of them out there. I thought they looked pretty cool at the time but now looking back at them I see that most of them were really quite hideous. They usually stand out from the design like a sore thumb and draw more attention to the font it self then to the message being delivered. Plus using in using these crazy fonts I tended to lean on them as a way to make the design look good. The truth of the matter is a good design will look pleasing to the eye with a very simple font. Of course there are the rare occasions where I end up using a decorative font here or there but they are pretty rare. I've listed the fonts I use most often on the side and they include: BaseNine, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon 540, City, Clarendon, DIN Engschrift, Franklin Gothic, Franklin Gothic Condensed, Futura, Garamond 3, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica Neue Black, Helvetica Neue Condensed, Shelly Volante, Snell Roundhand, Times New Roman, Trajan and Verdana. There are other good fonts but if you stick with these time tested standards and try to avoid immediately grabbing the newest flashy font, your designs will look a lot more professional.

Keep it Simple

2008-03-18T08:14:00.003-05:00

The most effective designs are usually very simple ones. One of my college teachers really drilled this into my head through the various exercises he had us do. When I'd show him a draft of a design he'd examine it and ask, "Do you think you really need this element? I think you already saying that with something else." Sometimes an extra graphic picture or effect just clutters the message. My teacher stressed that there was no need to say the same thing multiple times and doing so just clutters the design. An extreme example is if you were designing a poster for a concert and used lots of clipart of of music notes, instruments, piano keys and sheet music. Chances are you could communicate the same idea just as effectively with only one of those elements. In fact you might be able to communicate the idea more abstractly by making the typography and colors convey the feeling of music which would probably make it look more professional. The main idea is to focus on saying your message well and saying it only once. After all you wouldn't type the sentence "Come see a great band!" on the poster in the copy multiple times so don't do the same visually. Ask yourself what the bare minimum is that you need to convey the message and start experiment by dropping what isn't needed. This will take time and even courage to try removing things you've worked so hard on but will make your design more effective and easier to read in the end.

Increasing Tracking (Letter Spacing)

2008-03-06T16:21:00.000-06:00

One of the easiest ways to make text more readable is to increase the spacing between the letters. This is called changing the tracking and it will especially helps make small text easier to read. Just don’t get too carried away or people will start to read a word as individual letters :-) Basically increasing the tracking just gives the typography more room to breath on the page so it appears lighter and not so bunched up. This is an especially common effect used with type on TV or in films. Increasing letter spacing can also be a nice way to make a piece of text, such as a title, stand out similar to applying a bold or italic effect. Give it a try and see how much cleaner a paragraph or line of text can look by simply increasing the overall letter spacing.

Decorative Fonts

2008-03-05T08:24:00.001-06:00

I use to go crazy with decorative fonts. Why use a boring familiar font when there are so many more exciting options I figured. One of the first things I learned while studying graphic design however, was that decorative and crazy fonts need to be used sparingly. They have there place and can be effective at certain times but in general they are going make your design look less professional so it’s usually best to avoid them. Here are a few reasons why decorative fonts spell trouble for your designs:

1) They are hard to read – It’s just a fact that these fonts are more difficult for our eyes to recognize words and sentences. Since design is all about communication, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you make it difficult for the words to be understood. You might be able to get away with this if you use the font sparingly but never use a crazy font for a large chunk of text.

2) They draw to much attention to themselves – Yes, you want your design to attract attention and stand out but a decorative font can distract from your message and what the words actually say. A good design will attract attention through other more subtle means.

3) They rarely are well designed – Fonts themselves are actually designed and it’s pretty safe to say that 99% of all the decorative fonts out there are poorly designed. Well designed fonts are built to be quietly pleasing to the eye and usually have similarities or patterns that can be seen throughout there characters which make the text seem well balanced.

4) They quickly tell people that you’re not a professional – Think about it. How many big time adds and marketing items have you seen with decorative fonts? Using crazy fonts is more or less just a cheap trick to try to make something look more exciting then it is and it usually screams out that the rest of the design can’t stand on its own.

As you can see it’s normally best to stick with fonts that are well established and time tested. Helvetica Neue, Baskerville, Futura, and Garamond are some great examples and there are plenty of others that I’ll cover in later entries. As a general rule just be sure your design doesn’t rely on the font to attract attention and you’re designs will look much more professional.

Flash Quick Tip - Seamless Looping Tween

2008-02-29T13:05:00.003-06:00

Have you ever wanted to make an object rotate continuously in Flash? It sounds simple enough:

1) Convert your object to a Symbol such as a Movie Clip
2) Create a second keyframe a ways out from your first one
3) Tween the two key frames
4) Set the rotation in the Frame Properties of the first keyframe to either Clockwise or Counterclockwise.

This does work and as long as the second keyframe is the last frame in the timeline, the animation will loop continuously when you play or preview your Flash movie. Of course there's one small problem: The animation pauses briefly every time it loops back to the beginning. This is because the first and last frames (the keyframes) are the exact same thing while the rest of the frames all show the object in a slightly different position.

To remedy this, all you have to do is add a couple extra step to the list above. After you've set the rotation (or any other property):

5) Right-Click on the frame just before the last keyframe and select "Insert Keyframe"
6) Right-Click the last keyframe and select "Clear Keyframe"

Now when you play or preview your Flash movie it will loop seamlessly. The one thing you need to keep in mind is that if you need to change the length of the tween (the amount of frames in between the keyframes) you will need to redo all the steps otherwise you'll again see a slight stutter.

Flash Quick Tip - Scale and Rotate

2008-02-14T12:04:00.003-06:00

Here's something simple that took me a while to discover about Flash. Normally when scaling and rotating objects I would use the Free Transform tool which works similar to similar tools in other graphics programs. To get more exact I also would use the Transform Panel. Flash actually offers a third way to transform object though and using it can really speed up development time. With any object selected press the <<Ctrl>> <<Alt>> and <<S>> keys at the same time and a little box titled "Scale and Rotate" will pop up. Enter whatever values you want and press the <<Enter>> key. The time saving trick will be evident when you use this command again as it will save your last values. This means that if you have 50 objects that all need to be rotated or scaled to the same dimension, you set values to the desired number for the first object then just keep clicking objects, pressing <<Ctrl>> <<Alt>> <<S>> and then <<Enter>> and you will be through all your objects in about a minute. To do the same thing with the Transform Panel would probably take twice as long and a lot more clicks and typing.

Controlling the Timeline with simple script in Flash

2008-02-11T12:17:00.000-06:00

Timelines really only become useful when you learn how to control them with action script. Otherwise they will just continuously play, looping to the beginning once the end is reached. To stop a timeline at a certain frame all you have to do is place the a stop(); action in a keyframe. It’s a good idea to designate an empty layer as a script layer so you can easily find your script later. Then insert a keyframe at the place you want it to stop and be sure you have the keyframe selected. Then open the Actions Panel (hit F9 to toggle) and add the action script:

stop();

So now you can stop your timeline which will keep it from looping. What if you want to start it playing again though? The script for this is really just as simple but you will also need something to trigger it like a button.

Buttons are pretty easy to make. Simply select an object on the stage (or just draw a box) then right click it and select <<Convert to Symbol>>. This opens a little window in which you need to set the Behavior to Button and click Ok. You now have a button. To add the play(); script to your button be sure you have the button selected and open the Actions Panel and add the action script:

on (release) {
play();
}

You’ll notice that this starts with what is called an event handler. This is what will trigger the action which is contained in the {} brackets. All button handlers start with “on” followed by in this case (release) which tells flash to run the script play(); when the user releases the mouse (basically right after the mouse clicks the button). You won’t see any of this script functioning till you test your movie so give it a try by selecting <<Control>> <<Test Movie>>. Congratulations! You now can control your timeline.

Movie Clips and Timelines in Flash

2008-02-08T14:13:00.000-06:00

One of the most difficult concepts for me to grasp when I started learning how to use Flash was the idea of using multiple timelines. It made sense to me to have the main timeline but I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what the advantage of more timelines would be. Why not just animate everything on the one timeline to make it less confusing, I figured. Then one day the light bulb came on in my head and all at once I realized all the advantages this concept offered.

The idea is that you have a base timeline referred to as the main or _root timeline. This is the main timeline in a flash file. In the frames of this timeline you can place a variety of objects including shapes, text, video, music, pictures, buttons and movie clips. Movie Clips are special because they are basically another Flash movie complete with its own independent timeline and objects. The difference is that you can then animate the position, scale, transparency and other attributes of the entire movie clip from the _root timeline allowing you to easily create some very complex animations.

Think about it like the windshield wipers on a car. In essence they are part of the car and if the car moves a few feet forward in a parking lot, the wipers will move along with it. Now if these wipers are turned on they would not only be moving forward with the rest of the car but they would also be move up and down relative to where the car is in the lot. In this metaphor of the parking lot is your _root timeline and the car as a movie clip. The windshield wipers don’t exist directly on the _root timeline but rather are an object inside the car movie clip. This way we can animate the car on the main timeline without having to worry about whether the wipers are moving or not. Of course you could animate every moving part of the car on the _root timeline but if you did that you would have to be very careful that the car didn’t start moving ahead of the wipers as that wouldn’t look realistic at all. And then if you needed to change the animation it would be a ton of work updating the cars position as well as the wipers. Fortunately using the movie clip method we can stop the care and keep the wipers moving or move both at the same time very easily and the car will always take the wipers with it.

This whole concept is really very similar to how real live objects work so once you get use to it, the whole thing is quite natural. Think about it: I can move my fingers but their position changes will also change when I move my hand. My hand will move relative to my arm, my arm to my body and so on. My body, even if it’s sitting still, is still moving in our solar system relative to Earth’s movement…gets pretty complicated. But everything is connected and is a “child” of something else and that’s the way Flash works as well. Movie clips with their timelines just make up one huge family tree.

“Best” Image Quality in Flash

2008-01-25T21:41:00.000-06:00

A while back I was having a problem with animating a raster picture in Flash. I had a JPG image and wanted to animate its position and scale so it would move across the stage while growing bigger. This seemed simple enough, so I converted the JPG to a movie clip and set up a tween adjusting the keyframes and it previewed perfectly on the stage. I was less then impressed however when viewing the published SWF. For some reason my animated picture had very jagged edges and didn’t look smooth at all. Interestingly enough if I didn’t animate the clip or just scaled the image directly on the main timeline it looked fine when published. After much frustration and doing some investigating, I found the answer to my problem.

The Flash Player has an image quality setting with three selectable settings (Low, Medium or High) from the contextual menu when viewing a published flash file. You can see these settings by right clicking the screen in a running Flash SWF file and selecting <>. I always left this set at the default <> setting but what I didn’t realize is that there is a fourth setting called <> which solved my problem with poor quality images when animated. You can only set the quality to <> through action script but it’s a very simple line of code that can simply be pasted into the first frame of your Flash movie. The code is:

_quality = "BEST";

I found very little documentation on this but it’s so useful that I’ve gotten in the habit of putting it in most of my flash projects. Basically what it does is it applies an anti-aliasing filter to pictures in the Flash movie which smoothes out the scaled images. About the only time when you might not want to use this is if your movie has a lot of complex animations working at the same time. In a case like this using the <> setting may slow down the animation or make it look choppy so it may be better to use a lower setting. Most of the time though, this will be a great and easy way to get better looking animations.

Design is Communication

2008-01-17T21:02:00.000-06:00

The Purpose of Design
Let’s begin this blog with a tip on how to think about graphic design. Design is really just a form of communication. Some people communicate with spoken words and others by writing a blog, but a graphic designer communicates visually through the careful use of shapes, colors, images and text. You can have a poster or website that is full of eye-catching flashy elements but if it fails to get across the intended idea(s) it is totally worthless as a piece of design. Similar to writing a speech, one must clearly understand what and to whom they are attempting to communicate before they ever formulate an outline or begin writing. If you were to begin with attempting to write the final draft, it is highly probable that the result would end up being confusing ramblings with no clear point. Then to go back and make sense of your ramblings would require more than twice the time then if you had planned it out from the beginning. Obviously it pays off in the long run to establish your goals/objectives and outline at the outset of any project.

Your Goal(s)
Think of your main goal as the thesis of the project. It’s the one thing you absolutely want your audience to take away from the experience of the design. The better you define this goal, the better you will be able to convey it to your audience. Most projects are more complicated then only having a single goal so it’s also good to establish any secondary goals. A very simple example is a business card design which probably has the main goal of clearly identifying an individual, but may have a secondary goal of promoting the company the person works for. Whatever your goals are, having them set up in a hierarchy like this will ensure that you keep the focus of the design project on what’s most important while allowing you to be sure to include everything your client wants to communicate.

Your Audience
A doctor may understand long medical terms but the same terminology that makes perfect sense to him will mean little to the general public. Similarly in design, people with different demographics will understand and view varying designs quite differently. Thus, the more you can narrow down your target audience, the more effectively the design can communicate.

Coming Soon....

2008-01-15T09:17:00.000-06:00

This site is currently under development so come back soon for some useful ways to improve your designs. See you soon.