Creative Toolbox

I'm really excited to see Adobe Proto come out and Adobe Edge is looking like a really interesting tool.

Mike McHugh wireframes a mobile site using Adobe Proto & opens the HTML output in Adobe Edge to add animation. He then creates some SVG graphics in Illustrator, applies animations, and roundtrips the graphics back to Illustrator. (Skip past the first minute.)

Accomplishing a halftone dot effect in Photoshop my be pretty easy but creating this effect in Illustrator may be a bit more tricky to figure out. This tutorial walks you through the steps to achieve this effect.

A nicely crafted and fully layered Photoshop document of a MacBook Air. This is my Mac of choice these days and can't say enough of how great they are now.

Jonathan designed this PSD at a much larger size than you see in the preview, the screen area is 820px x 530px which should give you plenty of options.

Photoshop Touch comes to iOS for the iPad 2. This is an exciting release. It doesn't have everything in Photoshop for the desktop of course but that's pretty much what's so great about it.

The first in a series of six touch-optimized apps (the other five are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler and Proto), it supports Photoshop layers—arguably the basic and most-oft used Photoshop feature. With simple finger gestures, users can combine multiple photos into layered images, make popular edits, and apply professional effects. It also provides advanced selection tools and adjustments.

The guide tools have been around for quite a while in Illustrator. They are extremely flexible since they go well beyond your traditional horizontal and vertical guides. In this tutorial, learn how to take advantage of the lesser known uses for guides.

Photoshop may be able to help you with whiter teeth but it's not going to help you with fresher breath.

If you haven't had a chance to look into this, it turns out that technology and a bit of cleverness has finally made it possible to use custom fonts on the web. What's more, there's tons of great free web fonts resources to get you started with your next project.

Here's a great tutorial on designing a movie ticket from scratch in Illustrator. Included are some great tips on using the Pathfinder feature with Compound Paths.

Some really amazing new features find their way into the already amazing Content Aware features in Photoshop CS6.

This is a great write up about how to really think about the visual hierarchy of your design when it comes to content and layout.

It’s not uncommon for a designer in today’s world to pay little attention to how type is laid out, especially with the ever-so-convenient default settings of heading tags and web safe fonts found universally on the web.