Library: Creative Design

You’ve probably read countless techniques on how to retouch and refurbish old art and photos to make them look their best. However, have you ever considered doing the opposite? We’ll show you how to do just that by speeding up the aging process and turning line art into a worn out and faded image, giving a sense of history and old-time elegance. In no time you’ll be able to transform the boring line map shown in Figure A, into the vintage style antique shown in Figure B.





Do you like the vintage look? If so, find out how to make antiques labels in “Reinvent a vintage look by imitating antique labels” (March 2007) or if you like realistic aged metallic surfaces, check out “Create grungy metal surfaces with sophisticated corrosive effects” (August 2007). You can read these articles online at www.elijournals.com/premier/ showArticle.asp?aid=24193 and www.

Smart Objects and Smart Filters significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for graphical changes without destroying the original image, allowing you to concentrate on designing. To clear up any confusion you may have between the two, let’s explain their relationship with each other. Smart Objects are layers containing either raster or vector image data, which preserve the integrity of that layer throughout countless scaling and transforming attempts to allow nondestructive editing. Smart Filters, on the other hand, are any filter(s) applied to a Smart Object.

A non-destructive way to work
Like we mentioned earlier, you can create a non-destructive Smart Object from pixel or vector data in Photoshop. When you modify your document in the original a

I’ve been struggling with using anchored objects in InDesign CS2. First off, I was wondering if I can anchor existi

The appearance of your printed documents is as important as meeting your deadlines and staying within your budget. It’s hard work to make these elements align, but you can make the job a lot easier if you add preflighting to your production workflow. Acrobat Professional makes it easy to do with its preflight tools.

Preflight inspection
Some issues preflighting identifies are color, fonts, transparency, image resolution, and PDF version compatibility. Preflighting your PDFs checks the file against a set of userdefined values called preflight profiles

I know multi-page newsletters can easily be produced in InDesign. However, I prefer to work in Illustrator. I was wonde