Download this free wallpaper at resolution 1440 x 900 (from Flickr). If you’d prefer a different size, leave a comment and let me know.

Graffiti Wallpaper

Download this free wallpaper at resolution 1440 x 900 (from Flickr). If you’d prefer a different size, leave a comment and let me know.

Shameless Plug

For images of cool distressed type and unintentionally beautiful signage, check out Treasure Everywhere.

The Trick

You need to take your hand off the mouse entirely. Remove your thumb and ring finger grip and let your hand hover over the mouse. Now drop your two fingers lightly back onto the mouse surface and use a very light touch to swipe back and forth. The multi-touch sensitivity is more then adequate to pick up your lighter gesturing, and not gripping the mouse gives your hand the freedom of motion necessary to move left and right with ease.

The best simile I can draw here is that by moving your hand off the mouse you’re basically treating the mouse’s surface like a virtual trackpad. This is an unfamiliar hand posture for people raised on Microsoft mice and corded Apple mice without multi-touch, so it takes some getting used to.

Incidentally, did you know that you can two-finger swipe in Safari to activate the “back” and “forward” buttons? Try it…it’s cool.

-oAk-

Mine is a Garth Brooks track that I last played on March 18, 2005 (!). This clearly illustrates (to me at least) that before I go off spending anymore money on new music, I should probably check out the wealth of cool tracks already sitting in my library that I’ve either neglected, or kept because they preserved an album and never listened to, or have just plain forgotten about. (Yes, Garth Brooks is cool. Shut up.)

This post is about the method that I’ve developed for coaxing out the hidden gems in my iTunes library while still keeping all the advantages of iTunes DJ and Quicksilver which I describe in detail in this earlier post.

I have a smart list that I’ve named “Draw From.” The first rule of this smart playlist is “Playlist is Music.” This tells iTunes to automatically fill this playlist with every track that I own while ignoring things like Music Videos, TV shows and podcasts. I then set iTunes DJ to select only tracks from “Draw From,” and press play.

As tracks start to queue up that I don’t want in the Draw From selection, I weed them out by creating new rules in the Smart Playlist. For example: I have a handful of Classical music tracks which I sometimes use as white noise when I really have to concentrate on meticulous tasks (copy revisions for example). I like Classical, but not all the time, so I filter it out of the Smart Playlist using the rules of widest scope first and narrowing down. I’d start by telling “Draw From” to exclude all tracks with a genre of “Classical.” Next would be to ignore all Classica albums that aren’t tagged with the Classical genre and so on until I’ve pared the smart list of the tracks I want to remove from the mix.

Clearly, setting iTunes DJ to source its tracks from the Music playlist would leave me with no way to specify which tracks to ignore. A Smart Playlist resolves this issue.

Why Not Just Use Genius?

Good question. Genius doesn’t allow me the flexibility of using Quicksilver to queue up the next track on the fly without breaking my momentum in another application. Also, when you get to the end of the Genius list, that’s it. You’re at the end. iTunes DJ allows you to queue up tracks, podcasts, whole albums or even the contents of full playlists and when the music finishes, it just goes right back into the iTunes DJ functionality.

It turns out that old iPhones and most models of dock connector iPods were designed to charge with both a Firewire pin OR a USB pin on the dock connector end of the charger. The new 3Gs, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, will only charge with USB. Chances are, if you’re getting the iPhone error message that says that your trusty old third-party charging device doesn’t work with your brand new phone, the device charges with Firewire and you have to go buy a new car charger. It’s as unfortunately simple as that.

On July first my wife and I finally welcomed our first child into the world. We had a son, who we named Ian. To the (literally) tens of you who breathlessly (or not) await the burning missives here at ATCO, thanks for your patience while I’ve spent the last few weeks elbow deep in diapers and cuteness.

In honor of Ian’s arrival, I’ve put together a birth announcement. As you might expect from a designer, I wasn’t content just to buy cards off the rack. I put together this design instead. I’m “oak” so it makes sense (sorta) that Ian would be “Acorn.” That’s his logo at the top of the design.

If you are so inclined, I (and Ian) would like to invite you to download a PDF of this design from the link below.

Download acorn’s birth announcement now. (PDF)

I snapped this picture on one of the many deserted buildings on Western Avenue in South Bend yesterday. Because I am a magnanimous sort, I thought I’d share it with those of you denizens of the interwebs who pay attention to my tiny l’il blog. (Including those of you who just found it and are already helping to trouble shoot the RSS feed…you know who you are).

The image resolution is 1440×900, largely because that’s the resolution to which my screen is currently set. If you’d prefer a different size, leave a comment and let me know.

If you, like me, really dig images like this, check out Treasure Everywhere.

1440×900 Resolution: Click to Download (from Flickr).

*Two people on the planet have even a ghost of a chance of understanding this reference.

I’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating: InDesign is the Swiss Army Knife of PDF file size.

Behold, a section of the new Notre Dame Campus Map file that I am currently building in Illustrator:

Saving this as a PDF at the default file size results in a 2M+ file. Reducing the setting to “Smallest File Size” still comes in at around 1M.

InDesign allows you to further reduce this file size if you create a new document and place the .AI file as a standard graphic, then Export using Cmd+E. Select “Smallest File Size” from the settings menu. In this case the result takes a standard illustrator PDF from 2M to around 800K, or less then half of the original file size…all the better for emailing, especially over slower internet connections.

This works because InDesign basically creates a “flat” image of the placed graphic and then outputs it to PDF. Along the way, this process sheds extra vector data and in the case of layered Photoshop files, extra non-visible image data from hidden layers that adds complexity and file size to your PDF unnecessarily. The concept works to reduce the “weight” of any large image file.

I use this hack all the time to reduce PDF file size. In this earlier article I discuss how I use InDesign and Photoshop together to tame even larger PDFs with file sizes in the hundreds of megabytes.

Both are sister sites, with the same basic information architecture and the same structure. I completed the Lounge design first based on a Press Kit design that I had executed for InfoZerk over the winter. Most of the colors and the 50’s inspired formica-looking pattern in the header and footer were driven by this previous design.

Once The Lounge finished and approved, the challenge became to use the existing Lounge structure to construct a clearly unique design for Ruby Row that was still had an obvious connection to The Lounge site design. I changed the color scheme to one that was inspired by the Ruby Row logo and built a new pattern reminiscent of gem facets for the header and footer.

Both designs were built in Photoshop. HTML slicing and CSS was provided by the client.

The Lounge

Ruby Row

“Can’t make the selection into guides. Guides cannot be created or released within the selected object types.”

Didja know you can turn any vector shape in Illustrator into a guide?

Yeah…you can. Select what you want to turn into a guide and then go to View>Guides>Make Guides in the top bar menu. Your selected shapes will be treated as guides exactly like the horizontal and vertical guides that you get by dragging the pointer out of the ruler bars.

What if I get the above error message?

Notice I said you can make any shape into a guide. Type objects are not considered shapes, at least not in the same way as squares, circles, triangles and other vectors are. If you have type objects in the group of objects that you are trying to convert to a guide, you will get the above error message.

Resolution

If there are one or two type objects, resolving this is as easy as selecting everything, holding down Shift, and clicking on each separate type object to deselect.

As the set of objects becomes more complex and harder to work with, try this: Go to Select>Object>Text Objects. This will select only the text. Now hold Shift while drawing a box around everything you want to convert to a guide using the Black Arrow tool. You will select “everything else” and deselect the text objects at the same time. Now convert to guides.

I’m currently working with a converted AutoCad file which I am using to build a map of campus in Illustrator. The file looks right, but none of the vectors are continuous paths: they’re line segments that look like continuous paths. In this case, it’s really difficult to draw a box that selects only what i want to select so I’ve fallen back on a Select Same Stroke Color to grab just the line segments that have the same stroke color as my selected line. This can be accessed through Select>Same>Stroke Color. Also notice that you can (naturally) indicate a selection by Fill color in the same sub menu.

It feels like I did this ages ago, I just forgot that it was live. This is a homepage for a unique investment experience class run through the Mendoza College of Business.

I tried to suggest the idea of a big stock board with a lot of information flying around on a bunch of different screens, hence the repeated square elements in the header and footer. The blurry blue numbers image in the top right is an iStock image. I drew the blue line in the header, representing ideal portfolio performance over time in Illustrator and then placed it Photoshop to add in the little sliver of drop shadow where the line meets the large blue main branding area on the far left.

I’m pleased with the way the buttons turned out in this design. I think they have a nice tactile quality and I like how they echo the basic shape of the repeated square elements in the header. I did the AIM “logo” off the cuff because I needed something to fill that header area that was more graphical then a simple type treatment of “Applied Investment Mechanics,” which is our typical modus operandi in such situations.

This was constructed in Photoshop. The main header font is Clarendon. As always, if you’re interested in seeing my other site designs, check out this set on Flickr. Or you can hit the “Gallery” link above (now that the aftershocks from my abortive foray into styling my own CSS have been finally ironed out of the Gallery styling, that is).