Welcome to O'Reilly Digital Media's Creativity Center, the place to go
for all our blog posts and features for graphic designers. We've also kicked off a new set of posts tagged as "The
Creative Beat" that focuses on a wide swath of issues related to our collective creative lives, and in particular, the way tech is changing things up. We'd love to hear what you think. Please add a comment, join us in the forums, or drop us a line at creativity@oreilly.com.
I was just looking at yet another vacuous presentation graphic, this one purporting to illustrate the SMART test for defining objectives. It looked something like this: This is of course rubbish. Infographics guru Edward Tufte would object strenuously to its...
No doubt these are tough times - times that can get one down, emotionally and creatively. But heck, are you going to let a tanking stock market sink your digital imaging creativity? Hope not!
However, if the winds have been knocked out of your creative sails, here are a few ideas that may stimulate the creative artist within. At the very least, I hope they distract your from the stock market chart, which looks like a bad - a very bad - histogram.
Microsoft Songsmith has been stuck in my mind lately like, well, a bad song (follow that link at your own risk). It's got me reflecting about the long trend towards using music technology to increase productivity, but not creativity. And...
I attended a session here at the Viz Think conference yesterday, facilitated by Eileen Clegg and O'Reilly's own Robert Schanafelt. The purpose was to collaboratively identify trends in visual innovation, and then, well, put them together in a visual way that helped display the collaboration in a functional and informative way. Participants were first asked to identify moments of visual...
If you use Photoshop, then you probably browse your images with Adobe’s Bridge, which shows you thumbnails of your files. Good news: The Bridge lets you preview images without going to the trouble of opening them. Bad news: Those previews result in large cache files that eat up your hard drive. Worse yet, they permit others to track what you’ve been looking at. Even if you’ve long since destroyed the original file, the thumbnail persists! Learn how to protect yourself—and maybe even save your job.
Adobe's landmark pen tool defined an industry. But to the uninitiated, its reliance on anchor points and control handles makes it as approachable as first-year algebra. Until you see it's nothing more than a mating ritual: The points are boys and the handles are girls. Once you get that, it all falls into place.
How best to encourage people to use an obscure but super-useful Photoshop feature? Rhyme, rhythm, and romance. Hence a music video that will make all your automation dreams come true. Give Deke five minutes of your time and he’ll set your world on fire.
Photoshop masking isn't easy, in fact, the elusive alpha channel has been described as the least understood feature in Photoshop's enormous arsenal. In this video from Lesson 1 of Photoshop CS4 Channels & Mask One-on-One, Photoshop Guru Deke McClelland gives you a tour of the Channels palette in Photoshop. This handy palette is truly Command Central for your Photoshop masking operations.
It’s the best of times and the worst of times for fans of Battlestar Galactica. The second half of the season premieres on Friday, January 16 on SCI FI Channel (yay!), but it’s the series’ final season (awww). VFX Supervisor Gary Hutzel hints at what’s in store for the explosive finale, plus takes us behind the scenes of the stunning Cylon versus Pegasus sequence from Battle Galactica: Razor and the spectacular “continuous shot” introducing Cylon U-87 from the upcoming Caprica—as well as reveals a few juicy details about what may be Ron D. Moore’s "lost" series, Virtuality.
Rick "Loop.pooL" Walker's shows veer from hypnotic to energizing to amusing in the space of a single minute. Follow along as he whips DayGlo orange plastic, bar glasses, vibrators, and digital electronics into a swirling cloud of sound. Includes nine MP3s.
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