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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- The Logos of Web 2.0
-- Tritones from Grayscales in QuarkXPress 7
-- Adobe CS2 Webinar Recordings are Up
-- Illustrator CS2's Gray Box from Hell
Issue 52, 4/12/06
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2006 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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The Logos of Web 2.0
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Not a tip, really, just something of interest to all you logo designers out there.
How can you tell if a company is a cutting-edge, cover-of-Wired-magazine, Web 2.0ish, acquisition-ripe company? If their logotype uses a soft, rounded typeface and is colored lime green, blue or orange, of course.
Think Friendster, Flickr, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, LinkedIn, Skype, MySpace, Bloglines, Technorati ... like that.
Not sure what "Web 2.0" means? Check out the Wikipedia entry here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2
A few weeks ago, an enterprising soul named Ludwig Gatzke assembled hundreds of these Web 2.0 company logos into one large image so you can see the similarities among them, and posted the image on Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/93136022/in/set-72057594060779001/
Since then, the whole "Logos of Web 2.0" meme has taken on a life of its own, fueled by the writing and images of community members in other Web 2.0-type venues, ironically.
I like the FontShop.com blog's analysis of the major types of Web 2.0 logos, grouped by typeface similarities :
http://www.fontshop.com/fontfeed/archives/web-20-logos.cfm
Also interesting is an extended Mind Cloud Map of Web 2.0 terms (MindCloud: the more popular the term, the larger the type size):
http://flickr.com/photos/kosmar/62381076/in/set-1371686/
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Tritones from Grayscales in QuarkXPress 7
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In between projects, I've been exploring the second version of the QuarkXPress 7 beta (released March 31 and good till May 2, 2006):
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/seven/register.cfm
Most of all, I'm enjoying stumbling on various new features that are barely mentioned -- if ever --l in the "What's New in QuarkXPress 7" promotional content on Quark's site. I'm not sure why they don't mention these things, if I were them I'd put every damn new feature next to a big fat blinking bullet no matter how minor.
Here's my latest discovery: There's something new you can do with black-and-white or grayscale TIFFs.
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A New Picture Setting
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Click on a grayscale TIFF in earlier versions of Quark (4, 5, or 6.x), and the Colors palette shows three icons at the top: Frame Color, Picture Color, and Background Color.
In these versions you can colorize grayscales by choosing something other than the default Black for the Picture Color, such as the spot color you're using for your newsletter. The grayscale becomes shades of that second color instead of shades of black. If you change the Background Color from the default White to something else, you can make a fake duotone.
(You can do the same thing in Adobe InDesign by clicking on the image with the Direct Selection tool and choosing a color other than Black, then clicking on it with the Selection tool and choosing a non-white color swatch.)
But in the QuarkXPress 7 beta, when you select a grayscale TIFF, the Colors palette shows *four* icons: Frame Color, Picture Color, Picture Background Color (the new one), and Background Color.
The beta's Help function works, but the new "Picture Background Color" setting is never mentioned by name anywhere inside it, as far as I can tell. (The Help file has a huge "This is a beta Help File!" warning on its splash screen, so we'll assume they'll be fixing this before version 7 actually ships.)
In the Help section titled "Applying color, opacity and shade to pictures," though, there's a hint. It says -- without any further explanation or how-to, by the way -- that you can now modify the "middle tones of black-and-white and grayscale pictures."
Well, I'm not sure where the middle tones of a black-and-white image would be (I'm guessing wherever you can hear one hand clapping, you'll find them) but no matter, because the rest of it is wrong too. You can't change just the middle tones. Get that intern out of there and let one of the engineers write this section of the Help file!
What I'm finding is that the new Picture Background Color icon is what you select when you want to change the light parts of a grayscale from White to some other color -- in other words, what Background Color used to be for.
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Making a Tritone
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In version 7, Background Color now stands on its own. You can have one color apply to all dark tones (Picture Color) in a grayscale, a second color apply to all light tones (Picture Background Color), and a third color apply to the background of the picture box (Background Color). You can't do that in Adobe InDesign.
But how are you supposed to see any background color at all if the Picture Box is filled with image pixels?
Answer: Reduce the opacity of either the Picture Color or the Picture Background Color (or both), and the Background Color will show through, combining with those 2 colors. Remember, that's one of the big new features in QuarkXPress 7, that anytime you apply a color to something, you can change that color's opacity via a slider in the Colors palette. You can set a different opacity for each of these settings, per picture.
So you can make some pretty garish looking tritones out of grayscales in QuarkXPress if you've a mind to. Isn't that great? hahahaha ...
Still, I think it's neat that Quark added another setting designers can play with when they want to add some oomph to grayscale images without having to jump into Photoshop. Just ... be careful out there.
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Opacity Slider for Pictures
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By the way, in addition to changing the opacity of the colors you apply to a grayscale TIFF, you can make the TIFF itself partially transparent.
In all your reading of the new features in QuarkXPress 7, do you remember them ever mentioning that you can change the opacity of images as well as individual colors? I don't.
There's no Transparency palette like in InDesign, but the Modify dialog box's Picture panel has an Opacity slider for the picture itself. If you've selected a grayscale TIFF you can also choose a color for the picture here. With a color image selected, only the Opacity slider is accessible.
The Picture Color button in the Colors palette acts the same way: Select a color image you've imported and click the Picture Color icon in the Colors palette. That wakes up the palette's Opacity field, even though the colors listed in the palette are grayed out.
Remember to change the picture box's Background Color to None (from the default White) to see items behind the image show through.
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Adobe CS2 Webinar Recordings Are Up
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In recent issues I've mentioned that I did a couple "webinars" (aka webcasts) for Adobe, one on Adobe Bridge, "Your Creative Hub," and the other called "An Introduction to an Adobe InCopy and InDesign Workflow". Each one is an hour long and I covered a ton of material.
If you weren't able to attend, you can now see them on Adobe's web site, since they recently published them as On Demand (recorded) seminars. No cost, of course. Check out the other On Demands while you're there, they're all great!
Anne-Marie's Creative Suite 2 OnDemand eSeminars
These are direct links to the recordings (will open in your browser):
Adobe Bridge: Your Creative Hub (April 2006)
Introduction to an InCopy/InDesign Workflow (August 2006, "2nd Ed.")
Full List of Creative Suite OnDemand eSeminars
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Illustrator CS2's Gray Box from Hell
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Recently, a lengthy and at times very funny thread on the Illustrator User-to-User forum (at Adobe.com) had people chiming in about how aggravating Illustrator's new Gray Box from Hell feature is, with a small number of Illustrator mavens arguing for the defense.
I'm referring to the gray box outline that Illustrator CS2 automatically puts around a group (items you've previously selected and grouped together via Object > Group) when you double-click any item in the group with the Selection tool.
Once the gray outline appears on your screen, it feels like a piece of Scotch tape stuck to your fingers. Try as you might you just can't shake it off. Select another item outside the box confines and the box just gets bigger. Double-click something inside the box, no change. Switch to a different tool, draw out a text frame, choose Deselect All, select another layer, that box ain't moving!
What is that thing and why is it there? How can you make it go away?
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Group Isolation Mode
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Illustrator's Help file has no name for this box, but Illustrator guru Mordy Golding has a great term for it, he calls it being in "Group Isolation mode." I suppose the gray outline itself should be called the Isolation box.
If you just click once on an item in a group with the Selection tool, all items in the group become selected. (Well, that's the purpose of grouping, after all). Drag any item and all the grouped items move in unison.
But if you put the group into Group Isolation mode first (by double-clicking on a grouped item with the Selection tool, or selecting a group and clicking the Group Isolation icon in the Control palette at the top, to the left of the Opacity field) then you can use the same Selection tool to drag individual items (or nested groups) around without ungrouping them first.
Is that the point of the Isolation box? No. But Illustrator newbies who haven't mastered the Direct Selection tool may find it useful. (Newbies: Forget about the Selection tool or Group Isolation mode for this. Just use the Direct Selection tool, the hollow arrow, to move individual items in a group without ungrouping them first. Click on an object to move just that object, or Option/Alt-click on a selected object to select its nested group, then drag that sub-group around.)
Another feature of Group Isolation mode is that while it's active, any new object you draw is added to the group automatically -- that's why the gray box expands. I can't figure out a real-world scenario when I'd need that facility, though. Usually I create all my items first, then group them. If I want to add another item to the group, I shift-click the new item and the group and choose Object > Group again.
So what's the point? Mordy says it was added "mainly to assist in the creation and editing of Live Paint groups" in his post about Isolation mode in his Illustrator blog here:
http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-so-hate-isolate.html
I haven't been able to figure out what Isolation mode adds to the party as far as Live Paint groups is concerned, though, and he doesn't go into any detail about it ... well it was already a long blog entry. Illustrator's Help file says double-clicking while in Isolation mode is a "handy way to select objects (as opposed to faces and edges) within a Live Paint Group," but you can use the Direct Selection tool to do the same thing. Hmph.
But as I said, a couple of the posters in the forum thread said Group Isolation mode "was one of the best new features in AI" and that it saved them hours of time. From their comments, I believe they mainly used it for the second purpose outlined above, where new objects automatically became part of a selected group.
For example, designer James Talmadge posted a link to a helpful PDF he wrote on how to create your own Airbrush tool in Illustrator, which relies in part on Isolation mode:
http://www.illustrationetc.com/AIbuds/AIrbrush.pdf
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Make it Go Away
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The easiest way to get out of Isolation mode is to double-click outside of the Isolation box. Poof, it's gone.
If you're zoomed in and you can't find any "outside" area to click in, try clicking the Isolation icon in the Control palette (the one to the left of the Opacity field I mentioned earlier ... it looks like a rectangle with arrow heads on the corners). The icon is a toggle button. With a group selected, click it to turn on Isolation mode; click it again to turn it off. If you have drilled down to Isolation mode of a nested group, it may take a few clicks on the icon to completely escape.
I think the root of the problem is that the Adobe engineers never thought that people would be double-clicking a grouped item with the Selection tool by accident. They thought it'd make a great deliberate user action to invoke Isolation mode, and logically, it should.
But they didn't consider all those twitchy mouse button fingers and trembly Wacom pen users out there, hyped-up on caffeine or under the deadline gun. I don't want to get rid of the Isolation box, but let's hope that Illustrator CS3 has some sort of Preference for disabling the thing.
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DesignGeek is a free bimonthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site:
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Copyright 2006 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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