Strangely this is the first piece of Christmas work to pass through my fingers this year. For some designers the festive season starts about July time when the concepts are hammered out. By now they would’ve been long finalised and production starting in earnest to produce all the Point of Sale that will soon be overwhelming retail outlets across the land.

It always makes me chuckle when people start complaining at the first signs of Christmas. By the time the public get their first glimpses some poor designer has had weeks of it already.

But not me. Not this year. For once I have no idea what the “in” colours and themes will be. Who knows – by some sort of designer telepathy system I may have stumbled on to this years theme of greyish-blue, Burton-esque top hats & icicles… It’s unlikely though. It hardly conjures up images of festive cheer, does it?

Bah Humbug, one and all!

I have finally got round to trying out one of the cool functions available on CS4 InDesign – the ability to export your document as a Flash file with turnable pages. If you are not sure what I mean have a look here – www.thetrouserpress.co.uk/sketchbook.html
This is such a neat effect that can be achieved really simply.
I might post a tutorial on how I tweaked some of the settings (the default InDesign settings are slightly frustrating) but it really is dead simple – all you really need to do is export your document as a SWF file. Go on, try it.

PDFsam logo

A while back I was looking for a piece of free software to split PDFs by batch. After a lot of looking around I came across PDFsam (sam = split and merge dontcha know…) which did pretty much everything I needed. The only issue was that it had a very pixelated icon which look very untidy in the Dock of my Apple mac. Continue reading →

ouch!

I have always ben impressed with how sturdy my MacBook Pro is. For such a sleek and stylish piece of kit it has proved itself to be surpisingly tough.  After nearly 2 years it was still as good as new… Continue reading →

Still doing POS the old fashioned way?

This is an idea I had to promote The Trouser Press. I decided in the end that it didn’t get over modern, cutting edginess of what I do so I had to drop the idea (for something much cooler). But it is a nice little drawing so I though I would put it up here.

Just adding some URLs to google and was mildly shocked to see this:

Is Alf Garnet now working for google?

I am sure google has some safeguards to stop any insulting words from being randomly generated, but obviously this one slipped through the net!