Free PDF Download: The Photoshop Anthology
It’s not very often that I plug work stuff on my personal blog, but every now and then I make an exception.
When I was working as a technical editor at SitePoint, we decided to experiment with printing a full-colour title. The book was called The Photoshop Anthology, which taught Photoshop skills specific to creating web graphics. It was — and still is — a terrific book that I still refer to on occasion.
I was the technical editor of the book, and even though I considered myself to be an advanced Photoshop user, I learned a bunch of stuff during the editing process.
Well, every book moves through a series of stages in its lifecycle, and this book is about to take its next step. For the next 30 days, that same book is available as a free PDF download. The download is being sponsored by 99designs, which is a graphic design crowdsourcing company.
I always feel a nervous sense of excitement whenever we decide to give away something like this for free. The nervousness comes from the fact that a dozen people worked so hard on this book over a period of months, but the excitement comes from watching how popular the giveaway performs.
So anyway, if you have even a passing interest in graphic design and Photoshop, then you should head on over and download The Photoshop Anthology in PDF format before the offer expires.
I’ll finish with some random facts about the book:
- It was SitePoint’s first-colour book, of which we’ve printed several since.
- It was the first time we tried the new cover design, with a coloiur photo on a mostly white background. All of our books now follow this cover design.
- The cover photo was taken by Ellen Waters, a Melbourne-based student. Ellen was living in Japan at the time, so was difficult to get hold of to obtain permission to use the image. Luckily some family friends passed on her mobile number and we managed to track her down.
- It was the first book that we designed using Adobe InDesign (previously every book was laid out using XSL-FO. There are two other books that we used InDesign for — The Art & Science of CSS and The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design.
May WSG Meeting: José Manuel Alonso and Richard Ishida
After attracting over 100 people at last month’s WSG meeting, we’re looking to break new records with our next event, which is jointly hosted by the WSG and the crew from Web Directions.
Our huge double-header for May will feature Richard Ishida (who spoke a couple of years ago at a Melbourne WSG meeting and attracted a huge crowd back then) and José Manuel Alonso, who is the eGovernment Lead for the W3C.
We’re moving to a new location to accommodate the expected influx of eager attendees (Web Directions UX is on during the day, so we’re hoping a large number of conference attendees will come along). Our new venue is The Order Of Melbourne, a large bar in Swanston Street in the CBD that will be able to fit us all comfortably.
RSVP at the WSG site to guarantee yourself a spot. It’s going to be huge!
Tags: egovernment, government, internationalization, melbourne, wsgDesktop 238: The Evolution Of A Web Designer
My column for Desktop magazine this month spelled out the path that a web designer follows in their quest for web design nirvana — from novice, to traveller, and then to master, before finally becoming a web standardista.
This article details the stages through which most web designers travel. Hopefully, you’ll be able to identify where along the path you lay. Once you’ve orientated yourself, you’ll know what your next steps should be in order to truly hone your craft.
Suggesting that the goal of every web designer is to become a “standardista” was a little tongue-in-cheek, but the point I tried to make is that keeping our skills up to date is crucial in order to deliver quality solutions to our clients.
As always, the article is available in its entirety online.
Tags: career, desktop, education, evolution, learning, web
Matthew Magain works as the manager for online media at