Ivan's blog

Just a short service announcement. I've installed file attachments to comments to help with critique and forum support questions feedback. Images appear inline and other files are as attachments. Hope you'll find it useful.

There is an exciting new medium about to become mainstream. It's a combination between a magazine and web design. It's rich and exciting. And it's pioneered by the the iPad. Soon, we'll be getting requests to design rich media brochures for companies that will be read on tablet devices. Get inspired and get ready for it. Watch the videos of two publications showcasing some of their designs.

Adapted from Adobe InDesign CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing)
By Galen Gruman

A clipping path is essentially a shape that acts like a cutout mask—anything inside the shape displays and anything outside does not. It’s a very handy way of displaying just the pieces of a graphic that you want to display, such as masking out extraneous background or focusing on a specific portion of a larger image. Clipping paths are also frequently used to control text wrap around graphics.

InDesign can work with clipping paths that are already part of an imported TIFF, JPEG, Photoshop EPS or Photoshop image, or with clipping paths you create in InDesign. And no matter the source of the clipping path, InDesign lets you modify it.

Typography can be a powerful tool to convey a message. Check out hundreds of great examples from around the world below.

Logorama is an Oscar winning movie about a police chasing an armed criminal in a version of Los Angeles comprised entirely of corporate logos.

You can watch the full movie here or on YouTube here (broken into 2 parts).

We all use lorem ipsum copy for our print layouts. What about webdesign? HTML Ipsum is a simple site offering similar lorem ipsum texts with html markup which will help you create pages to test css styling.

In OS X there is no cursor in the calculator.app and the calculator dashboard widget, therefore it is not possible to select the numbers appearing on their screens. Yet this doesn't mean you can't paste in a number from your clipboard or copy the results of your calculation to the clipboard.

Just use the Apple(Command)-C or Apple-V keyboard shortcuts as if the screen was selected. Not very intuitive but it works.

For quick calculations you can also use Spotlight or if you're in an Adobe app you can do math right within some of the input fields.

Adapted from No Rules Logos: Radical design solutions that break the rules (RotoVision)
By John Stones

Rule 1

Convention has it that one of a logo's first tasks is to be immediately accessible and readable; it shouldn't daunt the viewer at first sight. The logos that follow, however, make demands on their viewers and require deciphering.