Step 1: Set up your sliver gradient. Here’s a screen grab of mine, and you can download the swatch here:

Step 2: Draw out a circle with the ellipse tool and fill it with your silver gradient.

Step 3: Draw out a tiny circle in the centre of the larger one. Hold the Option + Shift keys to constrain the proportions and centre the circle on top of the larger one. This smaller circle must aslo have the same silver gradient.

Step 4: Grab the blend tool and Option + Click on one of the handles of the smaller circle. The blending options dialogue box will appear. Enter in the number of specified steps you require. The bigger your circle, the more steps you’ll need. I entered in 70 for mine.

Step 5: Click ok, and with the blending tool still active, click a handle on the edge of the larger circle. This is the result of mine.

For a smoother transition, add in more steps in the blending options if necessary.

1. Once you have created your HTML code with Dreamweaver/Coda/any text editor, open up that HTML file in Safari.
2. In Safari, go to File > Save As and save it as a .webarchive file.
   
   
   
   
3. Go to Finder and open the .webarchive file in Safari.
4. While viewing the page in Safari, go to File > Share > Email this Page.
   
   
5. At this point Mail will open with a new email containing the HTML of the webpage in the body.

If you’d like to hear how I’ve got clients in the countries I’ve lived in, or if you’re interested to hear what I sound like (apparently I haven’t quite lost my South African accent after being out of SA for over 4 years now), you can click over to Rob’s site and listen to the interview. You can also subscribe to his podcasts here.

Below you can see I have 16 artboards set up. Illustrator will order the artboards in the order you create them. When setting up the document, I saw that the sizes were not numbered consecutively – artboard number 7 was supposed to be artboard number 3.

This would have created an inconvenience when exporting the document as I wanted the artboards to automatically be named in the correct sizing sequence and this way the larger artboard 7 would have been saved after the smaller artboard 6. Anyway, to fix this you need to open the Artboards panel (Window > Artboards), select the name of the artboard and drag it up to the order in which you want it to appear. You can also use the up and down arrows in the footer of the panel to rearrange the numbering.

Now you can see that the artboard is now labeled as #3 and will save out in the correct order.

Reeder – In my opinion, the best RSS reader on the market. I’m a news junkie so this app helps me keep track of all my favourite websites and blogs without having to go directly to them. There is also an iPhone version which sync’s up nicely. (Price: € 3,99 )

MacJournal - I try to journal everyday. It’s usually about mundane stuff like ‘Got my blood test results today. I’m low in iron and anemic. Well done, you suck at being a vegetarian’. But I like to remember stuff like that, so MacJournal (and it’s iPhone equivalent) is perfect for me. It could do with better sync’ing functionality between the Mac and iPhone versions, but for now, I think it’s the most complete journaling app on the market. (Price: €31,99)

Postbox – Great for handling all my gmail accounts (I have a few). It also comes with a 30 day trial so you can test it out for yourself. (Price: $9,95)

TweetDeck – I used to use the native Twitter client that comes with OS Lion/Mountain Lion, but I prefer this client because I can view my lists, interactions, timeline and so on more easily. (Price: Free)

Alfred – Some may say it’s a tad redundant with Spotlight being so nifty, but I like this quick launch app. (Price: Free)

Feeds – Feeds helps me keep track of the people I follow on Dribbble, but you can use it to get updates from Basecamp, Beanstalk, Dropmark, Github, Highrise, Pivotal Tracker, RSS/Atom, Trello, UserVoice and Zendesk. It’s unobtrusive and sits nicely in the menu bar. (Price: €2,39)

CheatSheet – Very cool little app that allows you to view the keyboard shortcuts of any program you have active by holding the command key. (Price: Free)

Here’s the before and after (rollover/click to view the original image).

By the way, the rollover is buggy. Sorry.

• Running a business
• Getting work
• Dealing with clients
• Handling client requests
• What to charge a client
• Diversifying and specialising
• How to work from home
• and more…

Included is an interesting section where Rob details his story of how he got into the web design business and how he made a success of his own company. There is also a section where he gives you the lowdown on some of the designers he interviewed while doing research for the book (yes, I’m there too).

You can find out more about the book here.

The aim of the tutorial was to demonstrate how to use the little used “Apply Image” dialogue box to even out lights and shadows on skin (it’s a really nice retouching technique), and to show how you can create brushes to paint with some nice effects, an ice effect in this case.

I’ll post a link to the tutorial when it is published.

The original image is courtesy of Dublin based photographer, Kyle Tunney.

Step 1

Place (Cmd + D) the image in your InDesign document.

Step 2

Create a rectangle frame and fill it with a colour to match the background of your document (in my case I’ll use white).

Step 3

Open the Effects Panel and select the fx icon at the bottom to open the Effects dialogue box.

Step 4

Select “gradient feather” and adjust the settings to suit your image. Don’t worry about the gradient stop being black, it’s just to represent the transparency of that stop – the colour of your gradient will be whatever colour you filled the frame with.

Step 5

Click ‘ok’, and view the result of your image.

Of course should your background not be a solid colour, this technique will not work, but as a quick fix it works like a charm.

Until Apple comes out with a proper fix for this, I’ve discovered a temporary fix that will do for now. When in Thumbnail view, press CMD+2 (to get the list view) then CMD+1 (to go back to thumbnail view) and you’ll see your slider will then work fine.

PS: If you can’t see the slider on the Finder window, activate the status bar by going to View > Show Status Bar, or press CMD+/.