Here’s a quick tips for designers who use Adobe Illustrator.

Before we send our art work for the printer to print it out, we’ll need to outline all of the text objects, to avoid they see it and print it differently. To quickly select all of the text objects in the art work, just go to Select > Object > Text Objects. Then right click on the selection, choose Create Outlines. One thing to remember, unlock all of the layers and objects before doing this. :)

After some time messing around with Photoshop, we couldn’t recall what is the original setting and we’ll want to reset everything. There is a pretty simple way to reset the Photoshop preference to its factory setting.

1. Hold all three buttons: ctrl + alt + shift
2. With all these three buttons held, open the Photoshop program
3. It will prompt you “delete the Photoshop setting file”, press Yes.

Now you get everything reset to its original setting!

Photoshop brushes is a very convenient tool. It helps to create cool visual effects without taking much of your time.

There’s a great resources of photoshop brushes in deviantART. Follow the link here to enjoy this resource: http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/applications/psbrushes/.

You can also create your own brushes. Here’s one of the way to make it:

You can actually create the brush with almost anything. First of all, create a new file in Photoshop, set a size, say 500px by 500px, Grayscale color mode.

Copy the image over to your new photoshop file.

Adjust the image before it is brush-worthy, use the Level, Curves, Brightness/Contrast.

Make a selection around the area you want to make it a brush.

Next, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and give a name to the brush, and TADAA! The brush is created.

Now, you can choose the Brush tool, right click on the new photoshop page, choose the newly created brush, select a color (foreground color), and click on any space as many times you like to “re-use” the graphic!

Are you a Photoshop fanatic? http://www.worth1000.com will worth your time visiting! You’ll be amazed with the “artwork” done by the contestants. See some sample below:

Click here to go to the gallery of worth1000.com to view some jaw-dropping images.

Travis Beckham is kind enough to share these nice patterns for website background: http://squidfingers.com/patterns/. Currently there are more than a hundred patterns free for use, of course a credit is always a plus and appreciation to the creator or owner.

Apart from these nice patterns, Travis Beckham has a nice website and there are some works worth spending some time browsing through. Great portfolio as reference and inspiration.

Having 1GB of RAM doesn’t mean the Adobe Photoshop will use it fully. Check the Memory usage by clicking the Edit > Preference > Memory & Image Cache.

Under “Memory Usage”, the “Available RAM” is the amount of RAM installed in your computer. Adjust the percentage so it will increase the memory for your Photoshop usage. Anyway, do not use up 100% of your RAM for Photoshop. Reserve some memory for other programs as well.

If you think the Photoshop still doesn’t run as smooth, install an extra RAM to your computer or purchase a better graphic card.

Maybe some of you may have faced slightly a little problem when come to choosing nice colours combination for your design, this post might brighten up your days.

It is a community blog where all the colour lovers hang out. Whenever they’ve new ideas on the combination of colours, they’ll just post it there to share with the rest. Most of the combinations are really cool. So, refresh your ideas and start rocking on your inspirations. Let’s go!

Korean web design industry has been one of the most promising and vastly-improved industry through the last decade. If you’re looking for a web design reference or just to have a quick boost to the ideas that has been running in your mind all day long, you may want to pay this website a visit. www.dbcut.com It is Korean website design directory that host many of the great designs that has been tailored in Korea. Have fun!

Here are the steps to export your flash animation into .avi file:

1. Open your flash movie
2. Go to File > Export > Export Movie
3. Choose a location then enter a file name
4. Choose .avi as file type
5. Now enter the size. For example 720 x 576.
6. Video Format: 24 bit color
7. Tick “compress video”
8. Choose a Compressor. DivX is quite popular, can export the flash to avi with very good quality but file size isn’t too big.

Try to play around with the setting after step 5, choose different compressor to see the result.

Ever faced this problem? You have an Illustrator file (.ai) that works fine, you open it, modify your work, and save it as usual. Suddenly you can’t open it, though there wasn’t any problem when saving it previously. You can try the solution below:

• Open the file in Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader).
• Select one of the text or any graphic.
• Move it by pressing any of the arrow key, move one step is enough.
• Save it as eps or pdf.
• Try open it again in Adobe Illustrator
• Now it can be opened! Weird huh?

It works, but not for every single case. Well, at least give it a try before recreating your illustration or vector graphic.