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If you want to insult me as being a fool I'll insult you right back by calling you blind. If you can't see all the amateur rate visual garbage being installed next to city streets then you must be blind. If you want to defend that garbage and the amateurs producing it then you have no standards...

The so-called desktop publishing revolution of the mid 1980's allowed a lot of businesses to dumb down their design departments. "Hey, since the computer is doing all the design work now we can let the secretary lay out the brochure instead of paying someone with a graphics degree!" Mid...

Both. Anyone who is truly dedicated to creating professional quality graphic design, illustration, etc. is going to be willing to invest his own money to obtain the tools and knowledge of how to do the work well. The vast majority of people who are self taught at doing graphics and using...

Routing tables can be used for all sorts of cutting tasks from little interior wall-mounted way finding sign parts or parts for big outdoor permanent signs. Basically there's little reason at all for a routing table to sit idle. Some third party applications can extend the usefulness of a...

If Adobe and Corel priced their software sky high enough so that only agencies could buy it Adobe and Corel would both put themselves out of business. The user base would be so tiny their cash flow level would be squeezed down to a mere trickle. Another point to consider: lot of amateurs...

Hmm. Smells a little like the old QuarkXpress vs. InDesign debates. I don't know the market share numbers, but InDesign is used by a great deal of newspapers, magazine publications, advertising agencies and design houses. Lots of image setters and RIPs are geared for handling PDF files...

Alpha channels are essentially gray scale images added to the existing primary CMYK or RGB color channels. Alpha channels are often used as masks to hide or reveal areas in the primary image. For instance, a layer mask is merely an alpha channel that either hides or reveals content on a...

Photoshop rarely limits users to certain file formats based on image size. The only time this happens is when the image is very massive, weighing gigabytes in size. Photoshop will suggest the .PSB format. When your image include spot color channels or certain deep bit depths per color channel...

You can save TIFF images with standard alpha channels, even if one of the alpha channels is named "spot white." If you specifically change the alpha channel's properties to where it is listed as a spot color then you're forced to save using Photoshop's PSD format. The rule applies if you're...

Poppl-Laudatio is another face I found bundled in with Adobe Illustrator 4. The fonts were one of the better parts of the package. Illustrator 4 itself was severely limited compared to the versions of CorelDRAW and Aldus Freehand that were available at the same time. If you wanted to do funky...

I have a pretty large collection of Postscript Type 1 fonts as well as a few in Type 1 Multiple Master format. Quite a few of those old fonts still get frequent use. Take Akzidenz Grotesk for example. Illustrator 4 included much of that type family as well as some other Berthold faces. I don't...

I hit the jackpot one better back in the 1990s. An issue of Computer Arts magazine had (on its bonus CD-ROM) a full version of Deneba Canvas 7, an upgrade-able license no less. And it had over 2000 URW fonts on the disc too. Didn't use Canvas all that much (as compared to Freehand, Corel &...

AutoCAD uses a completely different approach to drawing objects than CorelDRAW. Everything is basically rendered as line segments rather than a bunch of closed paths. For example, to draw a brick wall AutoCAD will make the "texture" as a bunch of 2 point open line segments. In CorelDRAW you...

That $50 per month Adobe Creative Cloud price is for individual users. Businesses have to pay $70 per month per computer. So if you have 3 computer systems running Adobe suites you'll have a $210 per month software bill from Adobe. BTW, this thread really didn't accomplish what it should have...

Lettering on its own is different. You can create a piece of advertising with words that use a letter style similar to the lettering on the Bladerunner poster (such as some of the freebie Bladerunner fonts available on the web). But if you use the actual term "Bladerunner" on anything you can...

I immediately thought "Jurassic Park" as soon as I saw the wrap design. The logo is obviously a copy of the T-Rex skeleton used on the original hardcover edition of Michael Crichton's novel. The same skeleton was incorporated into the movie's logo. Not only that, but the graphical...

There's a lot of "do's and don'ts" in creating a good vehicle wrap design. The "don'ts" are pretty important to know in order to avoid installation nightmares. This is one area where taking the "self taught" route is particularly stupid. Taking at least a couple design seminars from guys like...

I have an old copy of Fontographer I keep alive on an ancient PC just for the purpose of tweaking screwed up fonts in cases like this. It can handle naming problems. It's also handy for opening old Multiple Master fonts and generating "single master" versions of a specific MM instance. At some...

Salespeople, like them or not? It depends on who they are and what they're selling. We have reps from a couple different sign supply companies that visit us and go over any issues with certain products or service on our account. Same goes for the couple brands of electronic variable...

Wow, I'm kind of surprised by some of the flames blazing in this thread. It's not like the sample design from the OP involved giving away state secrets in order to list a recipe of how the design could be completed. Pretty basic stuff. I do share the frustration other long time sign designers...