I snapped this picture on one of the many deserted buildings on Western Avenue in South Bend yesterday. Because I am a magnanimous sort, I thought I’d share it with those of you denizens of the interwebs who pay attention to my tiny l’il blog. (Including those of you who just found it and are already helping to trouble shoot the RSS feed…you know who you are).

The image resolution is 1440×900, largely because that’s the resolution to which my screen is currently set. If you’d prefer a different size, leave a comment and let me know.

If you, like me, really dig images like this, check out Treasure Everywhere.

1440×900 Resolution: Click to Download (from Flickr).

*Two people on the planet have even a ghost of a chance of understanding this reference.

I’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating: InDesign is the Swiss Army Knife of PDF file size.

Behold, a section of the new Notre Dame Campus Map file that I am currently building in Illustrator:

Saving this as a PDF at the default file size results in a 2M+ file. Reducing the setting to “Smallest File Size” still comes in at around 1M.

InDesign allows you to further reduce this file size if you create a new document and place the .AI file as a standard graphic, then Export using Cmd+E. Select “Smallest File Size” from the settings menu. In this case the result takes a standard illustrator PDF from 2M to around 800K, or less then half of the original file size…all the better for emailing, especially over slower internet connections.

This works because InDesign basically creates a “flat” image of the placed graphic and then outputs it to PDF. Along the way, this process sheds extra vector data and in the case of layered Photoshop files, extra non-visible image data from hidden layers that adds complexity and file size to your PDF unnecessarily. The concept works to reduce the “weight” of any large image file.

I use this hack all the time to reduce PDF file size. In this earlier article I discuss how I use InDesign and Photoshop together to tame even larger PDFs with file sizes in the hundreds of megabytes.

The good people at InfoZerk, ye of the business card production process from hell (my fault, not their fault), recently commissioned me to redesign the homepages for The Lounge and Ruby Row, two advertising networks that draw together influential bloggers in the development space and apply the “strength in numbers” philosophy to them.

Both are sister sites, with the same basic information architecture and the same structure. I completed the Lounge design first based on a Press Kit design that I had executed for InfoZerk over the winter. Most of the colors and the 50’s inspired formica-looking pattern in the header and footer were driven by this previous design.

Once The Lounge finished and approved, the challenge became to use the existing Lounge structure to construct a clearly unique design for Ruby Row that was still had an obvious connection to The Lounge site design. I changed the color scheme to one that was inspired by the Ruby Row logo and built a new pattern reminiscent of gem facets for the header and footer.

Both designs were built in Photoshop. HTML slicing and CSS was provided by the client.

The Lounge

Ruby Row

“Can’t make the selection into guides. Guides cannot be created or released within the selected object types.”

Didja know you can turn any vector shape in Illustrator into a guide?

Yeah…you can. Select what you want to turn into a guide and then go to View>Guides>Make Guides in the top bar menu. Your selected shapes will be treated as guides exactly like the horizontal and vertical guides that you get by dragging the pointer out of the ruler bars.

What if I get the above error message?

Notice I said you can make any shape into a guide. Type objects are not considered shapes, at least not in the same way as squares, circles, triangles and other vectors are. If you have type objects in the group of objects that you are trying to convert to a guide, you will get the above error message.

Resolution

If there are one or two type objects, resolving this is as easy as selecting everything, holding down Shift, and clicking on each separate type object to deselect.

As the set of objects becomes more complex and harder to work with, try this: Go to Select>Object>Text Objects. This will select only the text. Now hold Shift while drawing a box around everything you want to convert to a guide using the Black Arrow tool. You will select “everything else” and deselect the text objects at the same time. Now convert to guides.

I’m currently working with a converted AutoCad file which I am using to build a map of campus in Illustrator. The file looks right, but none of the vectors are continuous paths: they’re line segments that look like continuous paths. In this case, it’s really difficult to draw a box that selects only what i want to select so I’ve fallen back on a Select Same Stroke Color to grab just the line segments that have the same stroke color as my selected line. This can be accessed through Select>Same>Stroke Color. Also notice that you can (naturally) indicate a selection by Fill color in the same sub menu.

It feels like I did this ages ago, I just forgot that it was live. This is a homepage for a unique investment experience class run through the Mendoza College of Business.

I tried to suggest the idea of a big stock board with a lot of information flying around on a bunch of different screens, hence the repeated square elements in the header and footer. The blurry blue numbers image in the top right is an iStock image. I drew the blue line in the header, representing ideal portfolio performance over time in Illustrator and then placed it Photoshop to add in the little sliver of drop shadow where the line meets the large blue main branding area on the far left.

I’m pleased with the way the buttons turned out in this design. I think they have a nice tactile quality and I like how they echo the basic shape of the repeated square elements in the header. I did the AIM “logo” off the cuff because I needed something to fill that header area that was more graphical then a simple type treatment of “Applied Investment Mechanics,” which is our typical modus operandi in such situations.

This was constructed in Photoshop. The main header font is Clarendon. As always, if you’re interested in seeing my other site designs, check out this set on Flickr. Or you can hit the “Gallery” link above (now that the aftershocks from my abortive foray into styling my own CSS have been finally ironed out of the Gallery styling, that is).