I design a holiday ecard every year for colleagues, friends and family. This year I decided to create a frosty top layer partially wiped away to reveal a flower (japanese magnolia from our garden - my husband's photo).
My Work: Japanese Magnolia Card
The Difference between FSC and SFI
As a designer, I use a lot of paper. I use the most paper when printing jobs for clients. Nothing like printing 25,000 copies of something to use up a ton of paper. These days I often get asked to choose certified paper for print jobs. So what's the difference between FSC and SFI certifications?
These two older articles from Treehugger explain FSC vs SFI: Article 1 and Article 2. In summary:
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
- Never harvests more than what grows back
- Protects biodiversity and endangered species
- Saves rare ancient trees
- Guards local streams
- Supports the local people
- Uses narrow skidding trails so as not to disrupt the rest of the forest
- Prohibits replacement by tree plantations
- Bans toxic chemicals
- Bans genetically modified trees (no GMO)
Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)
- Allows large clearcuts
- Allows logging close to rivers and streams that harms water supplies
- Allows use of toxic chemicals
- Allows conversion of old-growth forests to tree plantations
- Allows use of genetically modified trees
Some certification is probably better than no certification and I think SFI certification is improving its standards but at this point, I'm choosing FSC.
From a purely practical point of view, if you are a tight print schedule, FSC tends to be more responsive with my local vendors (getting back within hours) rather than SFI (24-36 hrs).
Florida Gardener's Resource
This beautifully realistic flower on the cover of Florida's Gardener's Resource caught my eye. I like the background texture and typography too. It's also a nice layout/design inside - lots of photos, type is well organized and pleasing to read. A good resource for my bookshelf!
Prana's Beautiful Footer
I love this oversized footer on Prana's website. The design is subtle and artsy and calming.
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Typography: Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster
Everything you ever wanted to know about the the actual parts and pieces of a font is on this elegant typography poster from FPO.
Paste It in InDesign
Copying and pasting bits of text is even more efficient when you take advantage of all the Paste options InDesign has to offer. Most of the time, when I'm pasting in text, the box or the text area I'm pasting into already has a style applied. I want to make sure the text I'm copying takes on the new style, leaving any previous formatting behind. The following options help keep that formatting in place while pasting text.
When pasting into InDesign from outside of InDesign (email, web, MS Word, etc), make sure your preferences are set up correctly to strip away any extraneous formatting. Under Preferences > Clipboard Handling, check "Text Only" in the "When Pasting Text from Other Applications" box.
When pasting within InDesign, from one text box to another, use Edit > Paste without Formatting (Shift-Cmd-V).
My Work: Graphics.com Contest Entry
I entered the Graphics.com and 123RF.com Design Challenge to design a wine magazine cover.
Going Backwards: Extracting a Jpg Tile from a Photoshop Pattern File
It's pretty easy to go forward in the pattern making process—use Photoshop to define a pattern from an existing graphic. It's a little trickier to extract the original file — convert a Photoshop pattern to jpg.
A lot of the free patterns available online are available in Photoshop pattern (.pat) format, but if you want to use a Photoshop pattern as a website background, you need the original tile in jpg or gif format, not the pattern file. Here's how to get an accurate jpg file from a Photoshop pattern (so you don't have to guess where the seams are, crop, test, crop again, test again):
- Open your file in Photoshop. Choose the layer you want to apply the effect to and choose Pattern Overlay. In the Layer Style dialog box, Pattern Overlay, scroll through the patterns to select the pattern you'd like to use. Click on it to select it.
- With the thumbnail view still open, hover on the pattern you selected for a while until its tool tip appears. The tool tip will tell you the original file name and pixel dimensions of the original tile! (If there's somewhere else this information is, I'd love to know - this was the only place I could find.) Write down or screen capture the pixel info. In this example the pattern is 250px x 307px. Click OK to to exit the Layer Style dialog box.
- Select Image > Canvas Size. Select the top left corner of the canvas (patterns are always applied from the top left corner down) and enter the pixel dimensions from the previous step. Click OK to crop the canvas.
- Export the cropped file as a jpg or gif.
- Bonus step: If you would like to test your file in Photoshop to be 100% sure the tile was created correctly, make sure the file is flattened, select all (Cmd-A) and select Edit > Define Pattern and save your pattern. Create a new document at a much larger size than your pattern. Then choose Edit > Fill, choose pattern, find your pattern (usually new patterns move to the end of the list) and click OK. The pattern should fill the document seamlessly.
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