One thing that I had noticed that I do differently is how I figure printer spreads for books. I call it “The Ladder” and just recently had to show some fellow designers how to place single page pdfs into printer spreads. They picked up on it quickly and I thought I would share it here as well.
It’s a bad year for birthdays. My daughter was turning 10, I was laid off due to a 40% workforce reduction because of COVID-19, no large gatherings, and our basement had flooded weeks earlier. Like all parents, we want our kid to have memorable birthdays. We usually make a theme to work around: Mario Kart, Camp, Pokemon, Cowboys, whatever our daughter is into that year. We try to do as much as possible ourselves, making homemade pinatas and painting photo booths for the kids. With all of the uncertainty swirling around us, we couldn’t go as big as we usually would. The guest list was, well, exclusive; just one friend over for a sleep over. My wife and I brainstormed about what we could do to make it memorable.
Everyone uses Photoshop differently, it is one of the great things about a well designed tool. I love showing a new Photoshop user a few basic tricks and watching them tackle problems in completely unique ways.
Spot colors can be a super useful tool, especially as a cost saving device for the customer.
Everyone suddenly has a lot of opinions about fonts. It used to be designers and artists trashing Comic Sans and Bradley Hand, after a few years Helvetica had a pop culture following. People got tattoos, it was serious.
So you inherited a file with thousands of high res jpegs that need to be resized for web use, great. You could spend the week mindlessly resizing them one by one, or do it once and have Photoshop do the rest of them.
Nick Folz 