Archive for January, 2009

How to resize a text logo correctly in Photoshop

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

A lot of logos on the web look like they were run over by a truck. Blurry, jagged, hideous. Here's how to make your resized logos gorgeous and sharp.

The first point is to always save your graphics and logos as either a GIF or a PNG. Saving solid colour graphics and logos as a jpeg is a catastrophe and inevitably results in nasty digital noise. This sound elementary but I have had three trained graphic designers do this wrong, including a graduate of the Art Institute of California. The only one who knew the right answer (in what format to save a text logo) was our lead programmer, Peter.

For an example, one doesn't have to go further than the website of Royal Bank of Canada.

rbc logo jpeg text buzz
RBC logo: jpeg text buzz in action

Even billions of dollars won't save you from jpeg text buzz on your logos. Here are the jpeg jaggies in closeup:

Design | 12 comments

Ever make a mistake and sent the wrong message in Skype to a client? You can erase pending Skype messages. Here’s how.

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Ever have the experience that you send someone the wrong message in Skype or worse yet, you send the right message but to the wrong person?

It happened to me today when I wanted to send one of my staff my client's contact info. Instead I sent him his own contact info.

Embarrassing.

But he was offline at the time. So the message showed as pending.

Is there anyway to cancel a pending Skype message?

IT | 30 comments

Backup on Mac OS X: Testing MimMac with Backup Bouncer

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

I just found a great little utility to test backup systems.

It's called Backup Bouncer and like the bouncer in a bar Backup Bouncer is there to keep the patrons honest. It will let you know ahead of time if your backup system is letting you down in complex ways, like not copying metadata or is blowing out resource forks or resetting creation dates.

These are the sorts of things you won't notice until you've lost your original and for some reason your Aperture or iPhoto library won't run properly anymore.

Of course, even a defective backup is better than none.

WordPress | 15 comments