The web abounds with free tutorials on applications that I use, but I don’t often have time to spend on complex lessons, which is exactly why I’m finding some of the tutorials at Expert Village useful. The site houses how-to videos that are done in easy-to-digest formats. Expert Village provides how-to content on topics outside the sphere of technology, too, but its tutorials are quite good for commonly used applications. Here are some examples of what you can get out of the site.
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As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.
Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites – onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.
These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ – I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context – and in a connected era – is strangely unsociable.
Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.
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When working on the web, an aggravating task is working with images. There are image manipulation software tools, but most are costly and poorly-implemented. Today, Adobe has released a tool that will ease frustration when it comes to working with, sharing, and storing images.
In a long awaited move, Adobe opened the door for mass use of their Adobe Photoshop Express online tool. This web based tool is a diluted version of the very popular (and expensive) Adobe Photoshop application that is the defacto standard for image manipulation. This “cloud based application” allows users a simple way to enhance, share, and store photos.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
