Jan
29
I’m going to reveal a little known secret. Adobe offers a magazine in PDF format, titled Proxy, that covers all of their products, and it’s free. How cool is that?
Sign up and subscribe to this quarterly mag via email. You can also download previous issues from their website.
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Jan
23
We’ve all sat through far, far too many PPT presentations where the person presenting simply reads off…slide after slide after slide. I’ve always wondered what that was about. Is it for the reading-challenged? Given the opportunity to inspire, tell stories, or perform, instead we read plain bulleted text. Change that by becoming inspired from the following web sites.
Tips for Presentations:
Top Tips for Presentation
Spice up that PPT with some free imagery:
Morgue File Photos
Free Photo Search Engine
Stock Xchang Photos
Free Vector Clipart
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And the aspirational site, Presentation Zen, has a number of videos of presentations that will make you sit up and watch and listen.
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Jan
11
I've snagged a number of old magazines from eBay. This particular advertisement appeared in a 1945 women's magazine.
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Jan
11
iscover a wonderful project named Children's Books Online where you can browse dozens of children's books for inspiration for your own projects. You'll also find some unusual books here, including Maori Folk Tales and The Rubiat of a Bachelor. Even if you're not into kids' books, you'll find some delightful illustrations to fire your imagination here. All of the classics are here, of course, from the Alice in Wonderland to Brother's Grimm to Peter Rabbit. You can browse by title, book, page, and even download entire books. The keepers of this site ask that you only use these books for personal use, citing the "No Electronic Theft Act" of 1997 (no, I've never heard of it either, but play nice as all the translations and scans have been contributed by volunteers).
Take some time to really explore this site. You may be amazed at the yick factor of Gulliver's Travels, or enchanted by watercolor illustrations of imaginary places. Perhaps you'll discover a new way to create borders, or an interesting typeface you haven't seen before. The surprisingly modern illustration I've included here is from a book titled The Princess of Cozy Town, printed in 1922.
The Louis Wain Kitten Book is a surprising find. Wain was a tragic figure, and his cat paintings became more odd as he did.
These stories are all pre-1925, so they are not politically correct. And some of the titles are so very twee they make my teeth ache. What is more cringe-worthy: Twinkle and Chubbins or Nixie Bunny in Manners Land? And don't forget Aunt Louisa's Wee Wee Tales!
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Jan
10
Until we run out of alphabetical combinations, applications will continue to create yet another proprietary file format. If you’ve inherited files from a project and don’t know what type of file it is, mozey on over to WhatIsIt to find out what kind of file it is and which application created it.
If you need to convert a file from one format to another, check out Zamzer, a nifty online tool. Zamzer will convert common audio, video, image, and .doc, .ppt, and .pdf to more helpful formats for you for free.
Should you run into a more exotic graphic file format that you need to work with, XnView converts an impressive array of more than 400 file formats (arf, anyone?) and it's free for non-commercial use.
Should you ever inherit the unenviable task of converting HTML created by Microsoft Word, you’ll be heartened to know that Dreamweaver sports a Clean up Microsoft Word HTML feature that might just save your sanity.
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