Certificate borders

The term "Guilloche" (architectural ornamentation resembling braided or interlaced ribbons, New Oxford American Dictionary) is sometimes used to describe the intricate engraving-style backgrounds that appear in stock certificates, currency and awards.

Both Crestock and iStockPhoto are good sources for vector versions of Guilloche borders, ornaments, and backgrounds. Try searching for "Guilloche" or "Engraved Image".

This post was inspired by an article in the latest issue of Design Tools Monthly. If you're not a subscriber, you should check it out. Highly recommended.

Convert a color PDF to grayscale in Acrobat 9

In a previous post, I described how to convert a color PDF to grayscale in Acrobat 8 Professional. The method I described in converts RGB and CMYK objects properly. But objects made up of 0% C, 0% M, 0% Y and 100% K convert to a value less than 100% black, depending on your color settings.

The good news is, this appears to be fixed in Acrobat 9 Pro. Here's how to convert a color PDF file to grayscale in Acrobat 9 Pro.

1. Open a color PDF file in Acrobat 9 Pro. The file may contain a mix of CMYK, RGB or spot color objects.

2. Choose Advanced > Print Production > Preflight.

3. Select the Convert to Grayscale PDF Fixup, and then click the Analyze and Fix button.

4. Give the file a name and location, and click the Save button. The entire PDF file will be converted to grayscale.

Understanding the Flash History panel

Recently I've been helping a number of "print" designers add Flash to their skill set. While Adobe did an admirable job of giving the CS4 versions of Flash, InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Bridge a common user interface, there are still many fundamental differences between the way Flash and the rest of the Creative Suite operate. This is apparent in the functionality of the Flash History panel, which operates quite differently than the History panel in Photoshop CS4.

To key to using the History panel in Flash is knowing where to click. To "back up" in time in Flash, you need to click to the left of the history step, in the gray bar on the left side of the panel. Or you can drag the slider up and down. Clicking on the name of the step like you do in Photoshop doesn't work.

An advanced feature of the Flash History panel is to use it to replay steps. In the example below, I've drawn a rectangle, then rotated, scaled, and skewed it. Then I selected a previously drawn rectangle, clicked on the Rotate step, and then command-clicked (Mac) or ctrl-clicked (Windows) on the Skew step. Next, when I click on the Replay button, the second rectangle will be rotated and skewed exactly like the first rectangle. Wouldn't it be great to see a History panel that behaves this way in a future version of Illustrator?

You may wish to make a couple of tweaks to your settings to make the Flash History panel work even better. First, in Preferences: General, consider bumping the number of Undo steps up to 300.

Second, in the History panel menu, choose View > Arguments in Panel. This will cause the dimensions of objects, rotation angle, etc., to be displayed in the panel.

Stock images with Photoshop Vanishing Point planes

The LiveSurface Image Library is a collection of hundreds of images of high-resolution blank billboards, building signage, packaging, buses, books, folded print objects and more. They are designed specifically to add your own artwork to the photos, to help you evaluate or present a concept on these surfaces. The images contain with masks, transparency, multiple layers and most importantly, pre-built planes for the Photoshop Vanishing Point feature (PS CS2 and later). These planes make it ultra-simple to project your artwork onto a 3D surface. Single images can be purchased inexpensively.

[via creativebits]

Creating a Table of Contents, part 2

In part 1 of this series I described the best way to create and format a simple table of contents. The result is pictured below.

I don't like the way the multi-line TOC entries crowd the page numbers near the right edge of the frame. Most people would fix this by manually inserting line breaks (shift-return) in the text to cause it to break early. This isn't efficient for a long TOC, and it makes the text more difficult to edit in the future. Here's a better way.

1. Select the TOC text with the Type tool, and enter a value in the Right Indent field of the Control panel or Paragraph panel. This will push all the right edge of all the text to the left.

2. Enter the same value you entered in step 1, but negative, in the Last Line Right Indent field of the Control panel or Paragraph panel. This will pull the last line of text back out to the right edge of the text frame.

Using this method will make it easy to revise the TOC at any time without having to fuss with the formatting.