When you download a 30-day trial of FileMaker Pro, you’ll also get the FileMaker Creative Pro Starter Kit that includes professional database solutions designed to help creative professionals get up and running instantly with FileMaker Pro.

http://www.filemakertrial.com/creative/cpskppc.aspx

by Jay Nelson

If your QuarkXPress 7 files are growing in size at a rapid rate, check to see if Auto Save is enabled.

If so, disable it. Quark is working on a fix.

http://www.planetquark.com/

by Jeff Gamet

The drop shadow applied to an item in QuarkXPress doesn’t rotate when you rotate the item.

This makes sense, because the drop shadow needs to maintain its relationship to the virtual source of light, which has not rotated.

http://www.planetquark.com/

TripAdvisor®, the world’s largest travel community, today announced the top 10 art museums in the world, based on traffic to the attractions on tripadvisor.com.

1. Louvre Affair: Musee du Louvre, Paris, France
Once a fortified palace that was the home to kings of France, the Louvre is now the world’s most famous museum, renowned for some of the finest pieces of art in the world, including the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. According to one TripAdvisor traveler, “The world’s greatest museum-from its Italian Renaissance Masters, to its Dutch Masters and the exquisite collection from Egypt’s Pharaonic period. Each time I visit I always discover new treasures and I reacquaint myself with my favorites.”

2. Religious Experience: Vatican Museums, Vatican City, Rome, Italy
Spanning nearly nine miles, the Roman Catholic Church’s Vatican collection is one of the largest and most stunning in the world. Estimated to have more than four million visitors annually, the Vatican museums feature the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and, of course, Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. As one TripAdvisor traveler commented, “The amount of history and art that is located here is mind-boggling, from the frescoes to the statues, virtually every nook and corner (even the floor) is a treasure.”

3. Art in the Apple: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
From Picasso to Pollock, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on New York City’s Museum Mile, is one of the world’s largest museums with over two million pieces of artwork and enough variety for any enthusiast. Peruse the Greek sculptures, admire the armory or browse the 2,000 European paintings, all contained in a magnificent Beaux-Art façade building. As one TripAdvisor traveler said, “The building itself is a work of art. This would be a great place to spend a day alone!”

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Contest Offers Grand Prize Winner $10,000 and Trip to Webby Awards in NYC

New York (PRWEB) April 2, 2008 — The Webby Awards (www.webbyawards.com/adobe) today kicked off their second annual “Webby In Motion” contest, giving visual artists worldwide a chance to create a video introduction and have it showcased at this year’s Webby Awards Gala ceremony.

Webby In Motion is sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated because of the contest’s ability to inspire creative and talented Web designers and developers to produce new engaging, interactive experiences. The grand prize winner will receive $10,000 and a trip to New York City to see their work presented during The 12th Annual Webby Awards on June 10, 2008.

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, online film and video, interactive advertising, and mobile content. Previous years’ attendees have included Vice President Al Gore, music legend David Bowie, Prince, Arianna Huffington, and the founders of MySpace, Craigslist, and YouTube.

The Webby In Motion contest gives anyone equipped with Adobe® software and a unique vision the opportunity to produce the twenty-second videos that will be used to introduce category clusters during The 12th Annual Webby Awards ceremony. Each entry must be inspired by one of the following ten topics, with a premium placed on creative interpretation:

• Connections (Blogs, Social Networking, etc.)
• Entertainment (Art, Games, etc.)
• Features (Best Visual Design, Best Home Page, etc.)
• Living (Lifestyle, Health, etc.)
• Marketplace (Automotive, Retail, etc.)
• Media (Music, Film, etc.)
• Services (Banking, Bill Paying, Travel, etc.)
• Society (Activism, Politics, etc.)
• Interactive Advertising
• Mobile

A winning video will be selected for at least three of the ten category clusters. From these finalists, a grand prize winner will be selected to receive the special honor of attending the awards gala in New York City, including airfare and accommodations for two. The winner will also receive $10,000 cash; a copy of the Adobe Creative Suite® 3 Master Collection, a comprehensive creative environment that includes Adobe’s award-winning design and development tools; and a one-year subscription to Stash DVD magazine – which will also interview the winner for a feature article.

To enter a video in the competition, designers can visit: www.webbyawards.com/adobe. Deadline for entries is May 10, 2008.

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Students can obtain QuarkXPress® 7 (plus Quark Interactive Designer™ and Quark XPert Tools Pro) totally FREE of charge. They can use it at home for the full academic year, provided their school purchases the Quark School Unlimited User License priced at £1,750 excluding VAT.This offer is only available until 30th April 2008

Here’s how it works:1 Order the site license QUK-122922-S
2 Add QUK-123991 to the order, plus a contact within the school responsible for managing the student licenses
3 The contact within the school directs the students to download the software at:
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If your prepress shop is like most shops, you will have a spectrophometer from X-Rite kicking. It may have a layer of dust on the case from being on the shelf for a number of years, but you have one.

Many shops have an Eye-One, it virtually comes with every Prinergy system nowadays. You should use it to calibrate your Matchprint although many shops just calibrate it once and then stick it in a corner.

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 iStockphoto®, the world’s busiest online stock image marketplace, today announced that it will extend a year-old program that makes a collection of low-resolution images and illustrations available free of additional charge to Microsoft (News/Aktienkurs) Office® users through Microsoft Office Online. Based on the initial success of the program, iStockphoto will significantly increase the number of free images to the collection. In addition, the companies are looking to expand the program to new languages and countries in the coming year.

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Create Magazine is officially accepting entries for its 2008 Create Awards – one of the top creative competitions for professionals and students in advertising, film and video, motion graphics, graphic communication, photography, printing, interactive media, and copywriting.

The 2008 Create Awards (www.thecreateawards.com) has once again doubled its prize pool from last year. More than $125K worth of the latest in software and hardware from leading creative industry manufacturers is up for grabs, not to mention national print and online exposure in Create Magazine.

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X-Rite and Pantone Launch ColorMunki Family of Breakthrough Color Products for Photo and Design Markets ColorMunki Photo, ColorMunki Design and ColorMunki Create Empower Users to Create and Control Color from Inspiration to Final Output

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. � March 17, 2008 � X-Rite, Inc., the world leader in color management and measurement technologies, along with recently acquired Pantone, Inc., the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries, today introduced ColorMunki �, a breakthrough in both price and performance.

Based on X-Rite and Pantone�s deep understanding of the photo and design communities, ColorMunki solutions are the industry�s first easy-to-use, convergent technologies developed specifically to feed the artistic imagination of creative professionals � at an affordable price. Designed to meet the requirements of creatives working in a digital environment across industries, the revolutionary ColorMunki family, (colormunki.com) ensures accurate color from inspiration to final output in ways never before possible,

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The 1.4 update for Adobe’s Lightroom and the 4.4 update for Camera Raw, the Photoshop Raw importer, contain a number of errors. These relate to the way that Lightroom deals with the EXIF time stamp, the conversion of raw data to the open-source DNG format and the conversion of Olympus files. While it fixes these errors, Adobe has withdrawn the software update from 13 March, which included support for the formats of several new camera types. In the Adobe Blogs Lightroom Journal,Tom Hogarty from the Lightroom team recommends users who have already updated to uninstall the update and reinstall Lightroom 1.3.1 on their Windows-PC or Mac.

The EXIF error causes Lightroom 1.4 to incorrectly modify the EXIF time stamp in the original raw file, although the information written to the XMP sidecar files remains correct. Apart from this, the raw data itself is not affected by the errors. Lightroom also reports an error when converting Olympus JPDG photos.

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While Microsoft is looking to convince developers and consumers alike to try Silverlight, the alternative to Adobe’s Flash, the incumbent has made some strides of its own.

Adobe Systems Inc. has released the first version of its widely anticipated Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) cross-operating system runtime along with updates of its Flex framework for Windows and Mac platforms. The release of AIR is expected to let Web developers use their existing skills to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the desktop, smart clients and browsers.

AIR is a technology long in coming. Under development at Macromedia, AIR was acquired along with Flex, Coldfusion and Dreamweaver when Adobe acquired the developer tools company in 2005 for $3.4 billion.

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n tune with the needs of QuarkXPress users, Dynagram, the industry leader in imposition solutions, announced today the release of version 7.3 of INposition, its QuarkXPress XTension. This new version offers increased performance and compatibility.
INposition 7.3 now runs natively on both Intel and PowerPC-based Mac processors (Universal Binary). INposition users can thus benefit from increased performance.

INposition 7.3 also offers new compatibility with latest systems and applications such as:
Mac OS X.5 (Leopard)
Adobe Acrobat 8.0
Adobe InDesign CS3

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XChange International, the source for extended technology worldwide, are pleased to announce the release and availability of the Xfile 2 plug-in for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel PhotoPaint and more. The new version offers Seam Carving and Image Resizing capabilities.

Imaging applications today work with linear resizing, so everything within the image changes size proportionally. Xfile 2 does that too with super advanced algorithms and now features a seam carving tool that allows the image to be resized while changing its aspect ratio and keeping important features untouched. It removes or adds areas to an image that would be least noticed.

To give users more controls on elements of the image they absolutely want to maintain and the parts they do not really care about, Xfile’s Seam Carving features provide an easy-to-use interface to define image areas. Xfile 2 offers a dual set of Protect/Erase masks. Users simply brush on the image to protect an area, or brush to tell Xfile that this area can be carved out during the resizing. Xfile 2 also provides users a preview of the effect an operation will have on an image before they finalise their changes.

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The convergence of still and video went mainstream in the early days of multimedia. If I were to point to one moment in history it might be the introduction of the interactive CD-ROM, which quickly became a vessel for mixing still and video images. Prior to the interactive CD-ROM, multimedia was more of a theatrical production, viewed at shows or kiosks, with a cutting edge appeal that now seems quaint (imagine the sound of 12 carousel projectors tripping through slides for a 6 screen show, sequenced and triggered by an elaborate control system). Artists have long pioneered mixed media, from ancient tribal dance, to Dada, to Broadway. But for photographers and videographers, convergence has entered an era of viability being brought about, paradoxically, as much by tools, as by the need for the tools.

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Web design is going through a change. Maybe it’s already changed, and I’m just behind the times, which is not beyond the realm of possibility. I’m an old timer in terms of web design. I remember the days when nested tables were a new thing, and GoLive was the name of the company, not the name of the application.

These are the days before Dreamweaver. Yes, I’m old. We had to trudge through the snow sixteen miles to make our web pages. So what’s all this CSS table-less stuff? Through my jaundiced eyes, this looks like the web geeks are taking web design out of the hands of designers. All of it looks the same to me. It looks like drapes. It’s all design in columns, and it’s all code design, not design design. It’s not organic, it’s homogenous.

So I’m just going on record to say here and now that yeah, I’ll end up doing it, but I won’t like it. I’ll make my version of those web pages without tables, using CSS and I’ll be unhappy doing it. I’ll probably just find some kid who isn’t even old enough to remember when Macromedia was Macromind, and Aldus owned PageMaker to do the code for me. Ah, I’m just getting old, and this Web 2.0 stuff is not showing me anything that looks like an improvement. Just hurry me along to my death…go ahead. CSS…bah humbug.

200 Words on design
Andrew Shalat

Quark Inc. announced that it has launched a community-based Web site for designers called ilovedesign.com. The Web site is developed around an interactive and accessible community concept that was inspired by a love for design. It features the work of leading industry designers David Carson, Peter Saville, Chip Kidd, and many more and gives users the opportunity to showcase their own work and become part of a design community.

On visiting the ilovedesign.com Web site, users are encouraged to join this community by creating their own profiles and uploading samples of their own design work. Users can also search, view, and rate designs uploaded by other members and even contact them in a secure way. The content of the site will be largely user generated and the aim is to create a platform where designers can showcase their work, be inspired by the work of others, and discuss their love of design.

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AKVIS LLC announces the update of AKVIS ArtSuite (earlier known as Frame Suite) to version v.3.0. The name change reflects the new approach to the program. From now on the software will be enriched with new effects that does not necessarily fall into the Photo Frames category. This version offers three new effects: Black&White, Shift Colors, and Channel Mixer. Also new to this version: button Autorun added,  new interface language - Spanish.

Whether you plan to upload holiday photos on a web-site to share with your friends or you wish to decorate a personalized greeting card, you can rely on AKVIS ArtSuite - it will add elegance and style to any photo.

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Ft. Lauderdale, FL, February 27, 2008 –(PR.com)– Quark Inc. and The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale announces that graphic design student at The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale Lina Herrera, of Coconut Creek, was the grand prize winner of a poster design contest to create an original design in QuarkXPress® that addresses typography in an informative, historical or humorous way. She won full entry to the upcoming Graphics of the Americas conference in Miami, along with software, and international notoriety from Quark.

Herrera’s compelling poster demonstrated the capabilities of QuarkXPress while staying within the parameters of the competition. “Out of a field of impressive entries, the judges selected Herrera’s as the winning poster. Her design stands out visually and her skill in QuarkXPress is apparent,” said Chris Edwards, business development specialist in education for Quark.

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