Miscellaneous

good info and some good links at the end.

Dropbox is great for syncing essential files over the Internet, but it's good for more than just your daily images and Word files. Ars highlights five ways you can use Dropbox to sync essential info in your life, from passwords to your to-do list.

Every blogger is guilty once in a while of "gaming the system" or doing something they know ticks people off. But some of these people are just plain silly. This rant covers the most prolific of jerks found on the Web.

We designers tend to get frustrated with developers when they take liberties with our work.

But we have to understand they’re not entirely at fault.

Put yourself in their shoes: imagine what it’s like opening a Photoshop file (PSD), only to find a jumble of poorly labeled layers and folders, plus a heap of unchecked hidden layers and other half-baked ideas that didn’t make it to fruition.

The following tutorial outlines how to create organized, designer and developer friendly PSD files.

should be an interesting link. as of 8/10, he's counted down from 40 to 37.

File sharing services are not as popular today as they were four years ago. It’s not that people are sharing any less. Rather, they just found easier ways to do it. Would you upload a funny video from a friend’s email to any of those services or would you search for it on Youtube and share only the link? Would you upload an MP3 file in order to share with whomever, or would you search for it online, grab the link and then share it? And finally, would you use a file-sharing app just to share a picture on Facebook when you can do it directly from your desktop to your Facebook profile? Of course, you wouldn’t!

My neighbours are stealing my wireless internet access. I could encrypt it or alternately I could have fun.

Flip all images, make everything kitties, blur images. :)

“What font is used on the Absolut Vodka bottles”?

“Can you identify the font used in the new Star Wars movie”?

“Do you recognize the font in the attached PDF“?

I get questions like these daily. I don’t mind them. Fact is, I enjoy the challenge. What I don’t like, however, is the nomenclature. It seems that just about everyone is using the word “font” when they are referring to a typeface. “Fonts” and “typefaces” are different things. Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art.

If this doesn't sum it up, I don't know what does.

As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format. As a Photoshop (or any other image editor) user you might think that there is not that many options for PNG optimization, especially for truecolor PNG’s (PNG-24 in Photoshop), which doesn’t have any. Some of you may even think that this format is “unoptimizable”. Well, in this post we’ll try to debunk this myth.

This post describes some techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images. These techniques are derived from laborious hours spent on studying how exactly the PNG encoder saves data. We’ll start with some essentials about the PNG format and will then move to advanced optimization techniques.