Speedlinking - Resources for Working Smarter
Oct 5th, 07 | 4 remarksThere have been so many good articles in my Reader lately, that I wanted to share a few to finish out the week…
- Are you a keyboard person? Over the past year I’ve gotten to the point where I do way more with my keyboard than with the mouse. (It’s so much faster!) For that reason I was delighted when I saw Lauren Marie’s excellent list of Photoshop keyboard commands. Nicely done Lauren!
- Sketchcasting is a form of illustrative blogging, and is likely to gain a lot of attention (particularly from designers and coders who work in remote teams, I’d imagine). Randa Clay jumped right in and published her first one today. Check out Sketchast: The Basics of CSS. Incidentally I’d love to hear more from Randa on the usability of this new tool.
- Do you typically include a lot of screen shots in your blog entries? You might be interested to learn about a new plugin for Wordpress called WP Vivtiger Image Resizer. Inspired by Vivien, it looks to be very useful in managing image attachments/uploads to your posts.
- If you’re a designer, chances are you’re forever in search of backgrounds, textures, etc., for use in a project - but you don’t always have the time to search for them. Char answers the call with another excellent resource list of sites for beautiful patterns and backgrounds.
It just occurred to me as I dropped in that last link - these resources are all from women! Reminds me of that old Annie Oakley song, Anything You Can Do.
Easy boys, I’m just teasing. ;)
Thanks Charity! I’m glad you found it useful! Did you know most of those shortcuts before? I just wrote another one today on shortcuts for common functions (as opposed to the tools from last time).
I’ve also recently discovered all the contextual menus available when you’re in certain tools. They are SO nice! If you just right click, you have a menu of many useful functions. For selection purposes, sometimes I find the pen tool much faster and more accurate than lasso, marquee or quick mask painting. So, for example, in the pen tool, you can right click and there’s an option to turn the path into a selection!
Oct 5, 07 | 11:47 amI knew several of them (the ones I use most often), but believe it or not I never knew the Crop tool! So silly considering I use it all the time. :)
Seems like I read something about contextual tools recently in the iStockphoto newsletter, but honestly I haven’t looked at them yet. Is that just in CS3? I haven’t used it much yet because it takes so much RAM and I need a new machine. :(
p.s. I TOTALLY dig the pen tool! To me, Lasso is only useful when you have a very distinct line of color separation to make your selection from. If the lines are blurred or pixelated, I tend to use Pen.
Oct 5, 07 | 12:10 pmNo, actually, I’m on CS2 (and I keep CS installed on my desktop because it’s the only one that works with my Epson printer!) so I know the contextual menus are in at least CS2. I’m on my laptop and not at home so I can’t check CS. But they are SO useful and I don’t know how I’ve lived without them (especially the transform selection option when in the selection tools).
Oct 6, 07 | 1:58 pmThanks for the mention Charity! Did I tell you I love your new theme?
Oct 6, 07 | 6:09 pm