rotate

Welcome to Halloween! And today's scary technique, in which I show you how to make that vector-based craft that's sweeping the nation: Scareflakes! Here's a detail:

They're like snowflakes, in that every one is beautiful and unique. But they scare the poop out of you! (Just look at the image above. Admit it, you're pooping in fear!)

Here's the official poop-free description from lynda.com: Read more » 

This week marks my favorite Deke's Techniques so far, in which I show you how to create an ambigram, which is a word that reads the same whether the page is right-side up or upside-down. Here's what we're about to make:

Don't you just love animated GIFs that play forever and ever? Me neither, but I figured it was important to employ one in this case. Because the first time you see it, it's like what? The second time, it makes sense. And then after that, it gets very annoying. Consider it a test of your ability to concentrate. From now on, IGNORE THE SPINNING THING!

Meanwhile, a word of warning: Even at nearly 12 minutes long, this video goes by fast. If I had it to do over again, I would have slowed a few steps. But that's the nature of blog videos. Once they're out there, they're out there. Still, it's cool. And you can always pause, back up, and replay.

(Ye gads, my favorite Deke's Techniques so far requires a lot of apologies. I'm so sorry. Ope, there I go again!)

Here's the official description from my video publisher lynda.com, which comes to you entirely without my (come to think of it) idiotic qualifiers: Read more » 

You never forget your first voyage into the great seas of graphics navigation. Mine was in 1985. I was using MacPaint, my supposed (but entirely fictional) mastery of which helped me land my first design job. I was panning an image using the scroll bars and a coworker, horrified by my behavior, showed me a trick: Hold down the Option key to get what he called "Muffy." While I found it troubling that he'd invented a pet name for something that looked and worked like a hand---did he have a nickname for his actual hand?---I had to admit, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me that such a tool (otherwise unavailable in the software) so much as existed, let alone might save me so much effort.

In creating Photoshop, Adobe "borrowed" the hand tool. But it assigned a different shortcut: the spacebar. Which just so happens to be the biggest key on the keyboard. It's as if Adobe was saying, this tool needs a shortcut more than all the others. And I couldn't agree more. Read more » 

As powerful as Photoshop is, there is little about the program that is obvious. Case in point: How do you rotate a layer? Right-click on it and select Rotate? Choose Rotate from the Layer menu? Click on the rotate tool? The answer is no, no, and no. Fortunately, there’s the Free Transform command, which lets you not just rotate but also scale, slant, and distort a layer in one continuous operation. Edt > Free Transform is one of Photoshop's most fundamental commands, with a keyboard shortcut to prove it: Ctrl+T (Cmd-T on the Mac). Read more »