Sometimes the biggest time savers are in front of your eyes the whole time but you can’t see them. Mostly because this great features are so part of the system that nobody actually talks about them anymore.
One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.
The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.
I’ve moved my email accounts to Google Appz a few weeks ago and I’m quite glad with it. The search is great and I looked for a way to search my Inbox directly from the Firefox search box without another addon. After looking around I’ve found a way through the Opensearch capability of firefox. Since it’s handy I wanted to share it with you even when it’s not strictly design related .
Just make a text document with the the extension .xml in the Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/searchplugins directory (on Windows) /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS?/Search/Plugins/ for Mac, cut and paste the following lines of code and replace the highlighted parts (Shortname, Description, yourdomain.com) with your details.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>My Gmail</ShortName>
<Description>My Emails on Google Appz</Description>
<Url type="text/html" template="https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/#search/{searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
After saving the file (eg. mygmail.xml) restart Firefox and you will see the new search engine in the drop down box.
In the last couple of month I’ve attended to a few workshops related to the new tools we are going to use in our marketing departments. The two main tools I’m talking of is the DAM (digital asset management) and a translation management and approval system based on a indesign workflow (very handy if you manage publications in 32 languages). I know both systems already because I was one of the initiators of the group wide projects and because I tested them before choosing the solutions. This enables me to have quite some notion of “how to do things” with the software. But this does not mean that I already now the fastest way, or the most effective or future proof way to do it.
It’s much like when you learn Photoshop or Indesign. There are many ways to get results, but you might not figure out the best way by yourself. I’ve expected to get from the software vendors some advice, some “best practices” as they are called, what is the most effective way to get your taxonomy (keywords and structures) right and what are good workflows to follow. They should know as they see what theyre clients are doing and what works well and what not. But this was obviously not the case. You get the usual “Every firm has it’s own way to do things.” and “Our system is so flexible that it can be customized and setup to your needs.” This might be true, but if I just match my current workflow I could miss some great improvements or even worse, I discover later on, that if I structured the system or prepared the documents a little bit different in the first place I would get much more out of it. Nobody starts over such a project without a bad need. I hope, that with the spreading of this kind of systems there will be more user groups and tutorials to help firms setup their DAMs, in the meantime I will stick to this subject and bring my experiences.
Trainees or intern as they are called are part of the responsibilities an art director has. I’m not talking about the bad habit of using trainees as regular workers, sometimes referred to as “precarity” or “underclass”, but about the trainees coming from schools doing a few weeks of internship to learn about the real work in an agency.
I had in the past problems finding the right jobs for the trainees as I was caught up in my daily routine and when they actually showed up at my desk I wondered what would fit. I therefore setup a routine for finding jobs around the year to have them ready. Find out how I did it and the 3 rules for successfully managing a graphic design trainee. …click here to continue…
How many times have you heard your client say: “You can fix this later in Photoshop.” or “We don’t need a photo shooting, we just combine the photos we have.” As an art director one of your jobs is to ensure that the quality of the final product lives up to the standard you set. To ensure this quality you have to look at all aspects. We already discussed the copywriting part, now let’s look at the photography. …click here to continue…
Most of us designers and art director use systems based on DAM every day without noticing it. If you search for images on a website like Getty Images or Corbis you use the web frontend of a DAM. Actually every website has it’s own DAM where it stores the images. But what are the new capabilities of modern DAMs and how can they help you in your daily work. Here some ideas. …click here to continue…
Why should an art director be bothered with file structure, server setups and all this organization stuff? Isn’t this the business of the IT-departments? Well, yes if you are in a big agency and you have an IT-department and even then only for the “physical” part. At the end of the day you and you team have to work with the files every day, not the IT-department, so it’s time to get in charge. Here a few tips. …click here to continue…
At the end of the month when all the work is done the only thing that counts is the money in your pocket. It may sound drastic, but it’s the truth. You can be proud of your work, be passionate about your design and network with designers all over the work – but without the money you won’t last long. The worst thing I’ve seen are designers with plenty of work but no money on their bank account. How can this happen? I will show you a few examples. …click here to continue…
This lesson is aimed to small design departments and freelance graphic designers. If you work for an advertising agency you should already have some sort of tracking. You don’t? What are you waiting for.
In this lesson, where I explain the benefits of tracking, is a free to download spreadsheet included to get you started in minutes. …click here to continue…
Following rules is not often seen as something positive in design. “Break the rules” and “Be different” are more common to be heard. And while it’s true that design should be different and break the rules to attract attention, it’s advisable that you establish a few rules if you want to get along with you co-workers.
We had in the last weeks a few meetings in our department where we tried to polish our teamwork and we established these 5 simple rules:
Language - No tongue is discriminated and everyone can express thoughts, opinions and present in their mother tongue as long as all involved understand everything. If someone has problems to follow, everyone helps to avoid misunderstandings.
Feedback - We follow the feedback-rules for positive and negative feedback.
Information - We inform ALL members of the project team about changes, improvements, new ideas, conclusion and everything else concerning the project
Competence - We respect the fields of competence of the co-workers and believe that they are willing to do their best for the project. It is though allowed to discuss about the solutions and bring new input.
Reaction - We react promptly upon requests (from inside the department or from outside) by confirming that we have received it. We also give a statement on how we are going to proceed.
The first rule about the language is quite important for multi-lingual environments, in my case German/Italian. Sometimes firms tend to prefer one language over another, in most cases the smallest common ground, and cripple the interaction. You probably can express yourself best in your mother tongue and you may be even capable of transmitting your ideas in a simple way that foreign-language speaker can understand it. On the other hand if you are forced to use another language to express yourself you maybe miss the point without noticing it and misunderstandings are quite often.
Another good thing about allowing more than one language is that you can avoid the “YOU have to speak my language in order for me to understand you”. Everyone knows that he has to understand the other languages of the department – the more the better.
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
Subscribe
Don't miss a lesson, subscribe to the RSS feed or enter you can subscribe to receive email with the newest content.
One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.
The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. 
Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.
.
