If you didn’t see it, in the footer of the site is a statement about not having any copyright notices in this site. It may sound crazy, but my view is that copyrights generally hinder creativity. I’m not promoting stealing of any sort as the people who create need to be credited for their work and the people I create work for most likely don’t want their work stolen either. My apprehension towards copyrights is that I don’t care for the fact that copyright law limits the usage of things other people have created and/or does not allow other people to expand the usage of those ideas to further the concept well beyond what the copyright holder is doing with it.

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EDIT: Adobe has now done away with perpetually licensed software, so it looks like everyone HAS to become a Creative Cloud subscriber if they want new versions of Creative Suite applications.

Adobe’s release of the Creative Cloud has posed a huge debate in the design community. Should you invest in a monthly subscription to use applications that have always been free to use after the initial purchase or should you buy the entire Creative Suite and not have to spend a penny more? If Adobe had made the elements of the Creative Cloud identical to the Creative Suite, I think the issue would have been much easier for individuals and companies to figure out, but the Creative Cloud has all the Creative Suite applications and some additional items, which is why people are debating if the added cost is worth the Creative Cloud.

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When I first started getting serious about desktop publishing the program of choice was Quark XPress. At this time, Quark 4.5 had just been released and was definitely better than PageMaker 7, InDesign 1 and light years beyond Publisher. The eventual upgrade to Quark 5 came about at the same time as Apple’s OS X.1 and in the process; Quark seemed to lose something in the transition from 4.5 to 5. The focus of Quark 5 seemed to be more on the ability to export page layouts to HTML than about enhancements to make desktop publishing easier or additional functionality. I was a bit disappointed as I was hoping for more desktop publishing features but Quark was simply meeting the demand of the majority of the customers.A few years after leaving that business, I went to work for an organization that was using Quark 6 on the PC. Adobe has also recently released their CS2 Premium suite and as we only had Photoshop 6, I was allowed to buy the CS2 Premium suite that came with InDesign CS2. InDesign CS2 was a far cry from the very first version of the application as it actually functioned well and the integration between all the Adobe applications in CS2 Premium was something you just didn’t get with Quark. We still had a lot of Quark 6 documents that I was slowly rebuilding in InDesign.

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The internet can be a helpful place but it isn’t always true. I have received quite a bit of help from the Creative Cow, Video Copilot and Adobe user forums when needing assistance in how to achieve something with a plug-in in a piece of Adobe software. I’ve also found a number of online resources that have been very helpful about how to create an effect in Photoshop or how to import your Gmail calendar into Outlook. The downside of help on the internet is that some people actually spend time being unhelpful or the information posted online isn’t explained well enough so that you’re able to see how what you’re reading connects to the bigger picture.

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In my second year of college, I was taking my first painting class. What came up during the class was the assertion that warm light produces cool shadows and cool light produces warm shadows. The textbook even gave a real world example of this by showing an outdoor picture on a sunny day. The image above shows this effect as you can see the warm sunlight streaming through the park creating cool shadows.

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