Every friday a fresh, high-resolution, royalty free stock photograh for free download.

Our friends over at AbsolutVision are offering The Design Weblog readers a free download:  A new, royalty-free image every week. This high-resolution stock photo comes in JPG and JPEG 2000 (JPF) formats, complete with clipping path and alpha channel.

Download the above image in JPG and JPEG2000 now (2.2 MB ZIP)

More:  Past FotoFridays and How To Use JPF/JPEG2000 Files

If you are a stock photography agency interested in providing free, royalty-free images to readers of The Design Weblog, please contact us.

Tags:  design howto tutorial photography Photoshop ImageReady  

The FedEx logo is known throughout the world. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it among the eight best logos of the past thirty-five years; it was in the company of Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, IBM, Starbucks, McDonald's, and Playboy (a logo with which I've had some experience).

It's a simple logo with clean, bold lines. It can be recognized on the side of a truck from sixty stories up—even when the constituent letters are unreadable. There is even, inside the FedEx logo, a subliminal and simple message of motion, going forward, getting from point A to point B.

How does one create a logo as strong and ubiquitous as FedEx's? What is the design process that leads to the creation of one fo the best logos of the past thirty-five years?

In a November 2004 interview with The Sneeze Lindon Leader speaks out on how he came to design the world's most reliable logo.

Quark VS InDesign.com announces simultaneous design competitions celebrating InDesign and QuarkXPress. Creative pros to compete for US$14,000 worth of prizes.

Yesterday Quark VS InDesign.com, The Authority for News and Opinion on the War Between Desktop Publishing Giants QuarkXPress® and Adobe® InDesign®, announced two simultaneously running design contests to create promotional postcards celebrating and honoring InDesign and QuarkXPress.

According to the website:  "This is about celebrating and honoring two incredible tools of our trade, tools that spare us from the grueling labor of hand-cutting ruby lithe and waxing up headlines, tools that save us from having to get real jobs."

For those in the mind to switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign CS, Total Training is offering a free Switching from Quark to InDesign CS video workshop CD. They're even picking up the cost of shipping!

Call 1-800-546-9620 to get your free copy. Ours are already on order.

Every friday a fresh, high-resolution, royalty free stock photograh for free download.

Our friends over at AbsolutVision are offering The Design Weblog readers a free download:  A new, royalty-free image every week. This high-resolution stock photo comes in JPG and JPEG 2000 (JPF) formats, complete with clipping path and alpha channel.

Archived to permanent home. Download from Past FotoFridays.

Check the Design Weblog each Friday for a new, high-resolution, royalty-free stock photo for download—before they expire!

More:  Past FotoFridays and How To Use JPF/JPEG2000 Files

If you are a stock photography agency interested in providing free, royalty-free images to readers of The Design Weblog, please contact us.

Today's How-To's Day tutorials:

• Illustrator CS2:  Live Trace & Live Paint
  By Dave Cross / NAPP

• Photoshop CS2:  Vanishing Point Tool
  By Deke McClelland / Total Training

• InDesign CS2:  Footnotes
  By Jamie McKee / InDesign Magazine

• GoLive CS2:  Package for GoLive
  By Lynn Grillo / NAPP

• Acrobat 7:  Adding Page Numbers
  By Donna Baker / Planet PDF

View all How-To's Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

View all How-To's Day:  Photoshop Edition tutorials.

How-To's Day is a regular feature of the Design Weblog in which we give you five highly useful how-to tutorials—four from around the Web, and one created specifically for you by yours truly. How-To's Day is the first, third, and, if there is one, fifth Tuesday of every month.

Sometimes the How-To's Day tutorials are hardcore design techniques, other times they're cunning production procedures, time-saving shortcuts, and, once in a while, just plain old fun and funky how-to's.

Got an idea for a How-To's Day tutorial? Know of a cool tutorial elsewhere on the web? Let me know. Have you written a killer tutorial? Send it my way; it may appear in a future How-To's Day.

Tags:  design howto tutorial software CS2 Photoshop ImageReady indesign quark corel acrobat 

From Dave Cross and NAPP comes a video showing the biggest new additions to Illustrator CS2, Live Trace and Live Paint. Watch as Dave instantly vectorizes a photograph with my favorite new feature, Live Trace, and then how Live Paint sets aside the concept of paths and paints like a Photoshop image—without losing the ability to change the resolution-independent shape and size of paths.

View all of today's How-To's Day tutorials.

View all How-To's Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

In this video clip from Deke McClelland and Total Training, you will discover Photoshop CS2's new Vanishing Point Tool, which allows you to paint and clone in true perspective. In just 3 minutes and 22 seconds you'll see how to draw a perspective grid, how to set source points, and then clone and paint in true perspective without the need to resort to the Transform tools.

View all of today's How-To's Day tutorials.

View all How-To's Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

One of the key impediments to InDesign's wide spread adoption in the field of book publishing and other areas where footnotes are often used has been its lack of direct support for footnotes (footnotes in placed Word documents become endnotes, there's a difference). This impediment exists no longer, and, with other features new to InDesign CS2—like automated bullets and numbering, import/export user dictionaries, and anchored objects for managing margin content—the old standby of QuarkXPress 4.1 will soon begin losing shelf space among the literary community.

Within the current issue of InDesign Magazine Jamie McKee shows the straight shot of creating footnotes in InDesign CS2.

View all of today's How-To's Day tutorials.

View all How-To's Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

InDesign users should also pay attention to this one.

The Package for GoLive command, first introduced in InDesign CS to replace the much more useful Export to HMTL, survives largely unchanged in InDesign CS2. However, when you get the package into GoLive CS2, there are some interesting changes—like inserting text from the package into your GoLive web page layout as a Smart Component, which retains the link to the package. If the text changes in InDesign CS2, just repackage it to instantly update your GoLive web pages to match.

In this video (QuickTime) tutorial from Lynn Grillo and NAPP, learn the new and updated features of working with repurposed content from InDesign.

View all of today's How-To's Day tutorials.

View all How-To's Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

Back when Acrobat 5 was the current version, the single most often requested feature was page numbering. Think about it:  PDFs can have different page sizes within the same document. A single PDF can—and often is—made from the documents of several applications; you could have a proposal composed in Word and accompanied by product package design drawn exploded in Illustrator, a 3D mockup of the package done in Photoshop, the product's brochure from InDesign, a Website mockup exported from GoLive, and spreadsheet financials from Excel. The problem with combining documents from their best of breed applications is page numbering. With a little work you could page numbers added to all of them in their native applications, but why would you? Acrobat 7 Standard and Professional can do it for you, as Donna Baker explains in this tutorial on numbering pages in Acrobat.

View all of today's How-To's Day tutorials.

View all How-To's Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) launches the Photoshop CS2 Learning Center—the most comprehensive look at Adobe Photoshop CS2 available anywhere

Today NAPP announced the launch of the Photoshop CS2 Learning Center. The learning center, which covers not only Photoshop CS2 but InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, and GoLive CS2, features free online videos, articles, reviews, news, a downloadable CS2 overview, and a CS2 discussion forum.

"I loved Photoshop 7. I thought Photoshop CS was even better, but Photoshop CS2 blows them both away. This is clearly the most significant update to Photoshop in years," said NAPP President Scott Kelby. "This update has something for everybody, but if you're a photographer, it's absolutely going to make your jaw drop. It's that good." Kelby added.

Photography more your bag? Don't miss Photoshop CS2—Every New Feature for Photographers

What are the hot new tools and updated features in the latest version of the graphic design industry's workhorse, Photoshop CS2?

• Multiple Layer Control

• Image Warp

• WYSIWYG Font Menu

• Adobe Stock Photos

• Automated Variable Graphics Creation

• Customizable Menus

• And much more!

Get comfortable. There's a lot to tell you about.

Not a photographer? Don't miss Photoshop CS2-Every New Feature for Graphics Pros

Next to a camera, Photoshop is the most important tool of any professional photographer's trade. So what can the photo pro or prosumer look forward to in the ninth release of Adobe's favorite son, Photoshop CS2?

Plenty.

• Noise Reduction

• Optical Lens Correction

• Smart Sharpen

• Spot Healing Brush

• Red Eye Tool

• Task-Based Presets & Customizable Menus

• Digital Asset Management with Adobe Bridge

• HDR Support

• Multi-Image Camera Raw Processing

• Export to Television Monitors

• And more!

Get comfortable. There's a lot to tell you about.

Initial Pricing and Availability

Following the accidental early posting of the press release announcing Photoshop CS2, which hinted at coinciding announcements about new versions of Adobe's InDesign, Illustrator, GoLive, InCopy, and the Creative Suite itself, Adobe officially announced the new versions at midnight Eastern Time.

According to Adobe.com:  "Adobe® Creative Suite 2 Premium software is a unified design environment that combines full new versions of Adobe Photoshop® CS2, Illustrator® CS2, InDesign® CS2, GoLive® CS2, and Acrobat® 7.0 Professional software with new Version Cue® CS2, Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Stock Photos. Delivering the next level of integration in creative software, Adobe Creative Suite 2 enables you to realize your ideas anywhere — in print, on the Web, or on mobile devices."