Sac Digital Printing, Graphic Design and Marketing Blog

Century 21 Business Card Templates now online!

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:41:26 +0000

Century 21 Business Card templates are online and ready for ordering. In addition to 20 professionally designed century 21 business card templates you can also chose from over 10 different Real Estate logos/designations like Equal Housing Opportunity, Realtor, MLS, ABR, ABRM, CRS, E-Pro and more. And because it’s the new year you can now take 15% off our already low online prices. The best part is, you don’t pay until your proof is approved. There is nothing to loose. Start now.

Ordering Century 21 Business Cards has never been easier

Ordering is strait forward. First select the appropriate template for the front and backside, enter the text you want on the card, select your Real Estate logos/designations and click continue.
Next select quantity, turnaround and shipping method and add to your cart.
Check out normally.
Wait for your C21 business card proof. You’re not charged until you give your approval.

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Last MacWorld for Apple and Steve Jobs won’t be there?

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:30:48 +0000

Apple has announced that this will be their final MacWorld and that Steve Jobs will not attend. Are you as confused as I am? For apple fans MacWorld is their second Christmas. The magical day when their fearless leader Mr. Jobs gets up on stage and demonstrates something so amazing they would sell their grandmother for.

If MacWorld is where Apple introduces their products and get everyone fired up to go out and buy their stuff, why would they call it quits? All of this and Steve Jobs is not going to show up to say good bye.

The funny thing is that MacWorld is already set for 2010, it’s just that Apple will not be there. I’m not exactly sure how you have a show dedicated to Apple without apple but apparently that will be the case. Something strange is definitely going on and I will be curious to see how this plays out.

Here are some videos of notable keynote speeches by Steve Jobs:

iphone introduction by Steve Jobs:

ipod introduction by Steve Jobs:

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Sacramento Printing Services:

Sac Digital Printing
372 Florin Rd., Suite #250
Sacramento, CA 95831
916-873-2399
866-696-4997 (fax)
www.sacdigital.com

Hours: M-F 9am-5pm

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2009 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. Submit your entries now.

admin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:57:17 +0000

Adobe is accepting submissions for the 2009 Adobe Design Achievement Awards, also known as the 2009 ADAA. The Design Achievement Awards showcase student achievement in the powerful fusion of technology and creative design.

The award categories are:

Interactive Media

Browser Based Design
Non-Browser Based Design
Application Development
Installation Design
Mobile Design

Motion and Video segment

Animation
Live Action
Motion Graphics

Traditional Media segment

Illustration
Packaging
Photography
Print Communications

Submissions are being accepted until June 5th 2009 so get started on your submissions now. Here is the official 2009 ADAA submission form. You might want to check out some of the winners from the 2008 ADAA to get you started.

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Bleeds for Photoshop & InDesign

admin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:43:06 +0000

Bleeds are one of the most common file problems that we come across. A bleed is the term for printing that extends to the edge of a sheet. A business card with a printed background is a good example of a bleed.

When designing a printed product that has a bleed (prints to the edge) you need to include a bleed margin that will be cut off after printing. If I drew a 2″ x 3.5″ black box and told you to cut it out without cutting into the black and without leaving white around the box it would be close to impossible. You would be bound to cut too much or too little and you would either end up with a box that was too small or a box that was too big and had white around the edges.

A bleed margin allows the printer to make the cut without having to worry about the dreaded white sliver. At Sac Digital we request an extra 1/8″ on all sides for jobs that have bleeds. This means if you are printing a business card at 2″ x 3.5″ you would submit a file that is 2.25″ x 3.75″ (1/8″ bleed on all sides).

Tutorial on creating a full bleed business card in Adobe Photoshop:

Tutorial on making full bleed business cards in Adobe InDesign:

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QPS 8 now supports Adobe InDesign.

admin — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 06:14:28 +0000

QPS (Quark Publishing System) now supports Adobe InDesign with a streamlined workflow. The announcement came during Graph Expo and IFRA. QPS can of course use QuarkXPress with QuarkCopyDesk but now you can also use it with Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopy in a single workflow at the component level. Quark fans rejoice!

According to Linda Chase ( GM, Quark Publishing System,) they talked to newspaper, magazines, marketing groups and advertising agencies and asked them their most pressing needs for collaborative publishing. Most responded that they needed to support Quark and InDeisgn in one workflow. With the QPS XTensions for InDeisgn they can spend more time collaborating and less time worrying about what sections are made in InDeisgn and which were made in Quark.

You can get the QPS XTensions for InDesign for both QPS 7.5 and the newer QPS 8. The software is now available for both Mac and Windows platforms. For more info check out http://dynamicpublishing.quark.com/qps/QPS_InDesign.html

It’s good to see Quark still fighting the big “A.” This will make it easier for people to support Quark without having to give up their favorite layout software. For the designers and typesetters out there, which are you using? Are you an InDesign user or a Quark user?

Make sure to check out http://blog.sacdigital.com for more graphic design articles.

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Adobe CS4 is out! Is upgrading worth it? - Part 1

admin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:47:29 +0000

If you keep up on news in the printing and graphic design industry you probably know by now that Adobe recently released the newest incarnation of their software suite. Many that placed their order with Adobe started receiving orders early yesterday. Some are still on the fence on whether the newest version offers anything substantial over the previous version. Let’s face it, Adobe makes powerful creative software but for the smaller shops, $599 is a lot of money and they need to spend each dollar wisely. For those of you on the fence, let’s see if there are any features you cannot live without. In the first part of this series we will talk about one of the most popular programs in Adobe’s lineup, Photoshop.

Photoshop CS4

The new version of Photoshop definitely packs a few gems. I’ll try to take you through some of my favorites.

Content-Aware Scaling:

Here is video of Content-Aware Scaling in action:

This is by far one of my favorites. Basically you are able to un-proportionally re-size an image and not corrupt the subject. Here is an image from adobe that shows a standard sized photo getting the super-wide treatment. You will notice that the surfers do not get stretched out and the background and waves are scaled very nicely. You can see why this is one of the most amazing advances in Photoshop history.

The history behind this feature started a little over a year ago with a program called CAIR or Content Aware Image Resizer by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. Here is a link to a video of the original from August of 07 Content Aware Scaling . I sure hope the authors of the freeware received a little kickback from Adobe. Besides Photoshop this has also made it into the latest versions of GIMP, the open source photo editing program.

Smoother panning and zooming:

One of the great new features of Photoshop is that it now takes advantage of the enormous amount of power on today’s GPU’s (video cards). Graphic cards are not just for games anymore. I’m surprised it’s taken Adobe this long to figure out that graphic cards are very efficient at handling graphics.

What does all this video card stuff mean to the user? If you have used Photoshop longer than 5 min you know by now that using a zoom percentage that is not a factor of 2 (25%, 50%, 100%, 200%) makes for a very distorted looking image. Now using the power of the video card and OpenGL you can zoom in/out and pan smooth as butter.

3D Painting and Compositing:

It’s no secret that most textures for 3D images are created in Photoshop. One of the challenges has always been how to get what you draw to fit perfectly on the model. Even for 3D artists it’s sometimes difficult to make a 2d texture wrap perfectly around the 3d model with everything positioned correctly. Well now with Photoshop to can paint directly on the model itself. It even has a built-in ray tracing rendering engine to boot. While this will not be a feature used by most, it sounds like a lot of fun.

Bird’s Eye View :

If you have ever worked on a very large image and needed to do some very fine editing you have felt the pain of zooming in, making a change, zooming out panning to the spot you want, zooming back in to resume editing. This is all in the past now. With the bird’s eye view you zoom in, edit, hit birds eye and fin the next spot you want to edit, release the button and you are now back at the same zoom as you were before. This is one of the many new features that you can expect to increase speed and efficiency.

Clone stamp preview:

Using the clone stamp on a diagonal line can take a few tries to get just right. You set the location you want to clone with alt then click on the new location only to realize you clicked a little too high or a little too low. With the new clone stamp preview trial and error is a thing of the past.

There are lots of other new features in Photoshop like their new interface that I didn’t include and a bunch of photographer tools that are included in the extended version that are nice to have. Some of futures in the extended version include auto-blending of images where you can let Photoshop handle the heavy lifting of correcting the focal point and color-correction. Some improved workflow when dealing with Lightroom and also improved RAW processing that allows you to adjust portions of the image using masks. All the photographers out there, and even the amateurs like myself, will really enjoy all the new features in the extended version of Photoshop CS3.

Be sure to check out part 2 where I talk about the other CS4 software and make sure to check out http://blog.sacdigital.com for more graphic design articles.

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