Comics, Art, 3D, Web, Tech, Social Media & other stuff by John Garrett
This is where I reveal my wisdom to the teeming millions.
Great news everyone, there’s a NEW Variable Importer script in town, and it has even more cool features! Even better, I’ve created an in-depth **2-HOUR** course to walk you through it over on Lynda.com.
If you’re familiar with InDesign’s Data Merge, you know how it can take your one design, then “build” the page by creating as many of those designs as it can on your page, at which point it will create a new page and continue building until it has enough pages for all of your data. Illustrator’s Variable Data feature won’t do this, but we can get pretty darn close with this method of creating multiple datasets on the artboard.
SUPER-DUPER Update: I’ve completed a 2.5 hour course on how to use the NEW Variable Importer 8.0 script, and it’s available on Lynda.com! Click to check out more info on the Adobe Illustrator Variable Data Lynda.com course! And now back to our in-progress blog post… Previously, I wrote up a tutorial for an easier method […]
If you’ve ever had to use Adobe Illustrator to set up multiple variations of a single file, then using the “Illustrator Variable Data” feature could save you a lot of time. It’s not very intuitive to set up, though, so I made up this tutorial.
How to make Joomla image menus (image only) with rollovers and without javascript in the Joomla CMS system using CSS Sprites.
Good news, people…I’ve discovered the most fun you can have with Wordpress -and it’s with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Come on in and join the party!
I’d like to take you guys behind the scenes in a different way than my usual posts. The different thing is that I didn’t make this comic. The only thing I had to do is add the laettering and my part was done.
If you’re using Wordpress with the Genesis theme, I’ve found a way to take all the pain out of adding dynamic headers by using a few awesome widgets and a very helpful video tutorial.
This one is an intro to Firebug tutorial for those looking to get started. The video deals with Firebug, Wordpress and TextWrangler but you can apply it to your own tools of choice (ie Joomla and Notepad, etc.).
I’ve decided to unleash some of the vast store of Photoshop knowledge I’ve gathered over the years into a top 10 list of tips.
I saw a really cool piece of Superman art over on DeviantArt, and I thought I’d give it a shot in Blender.
I got back into some more Blendering since my last outing with my Nova Helmet debacle. So this time I truly graduated up to the latest Blender 2.5 beta, which at this point is 2.56.0.
I recently had cause to resort to an old trick to target a single page with CSS. It turned out to be a bit of an ordeal in WordPress, although I must admit it’s still easier than in Joomla.
I was uploading some pictures to my Facebook Fan Page and I noticed the “Download in High Resolution” link on the bottom right of the image. A few months ago I had read that FB was going to implement this feature but I’d forgotten all about it.
Actually maybe that should be Facebook Cache Limbo? It is a mystery. Anyway, great news, people! An issue that came up in the comments section of my previous article on Facebook thumbnails has been solved (or at least reliably worked-around). Commenter Nélio (man, you rock!) tipped us off to the existence of the Facebook URL […]
I’ve had this site running on WordPress now for a little over a year, and I’ve wasted a lot of time by not optimizing it. For this reason, I decided to enable my related posts plugin to try to encourage some more reading of the articles on the site. To that end, I finally got […]
I did another video tutorial recently on Joomla module positions, and I used the old trick of adding “?tp=1” to the end of the url to display the module positions. If you’re unfamiliar with this, try browsing to your Joomla site and adding that to the end of the url. So if I had: “http://www.example.com/” I […]
Here’s a quick video tutorial on adding a stroke to a raster object in Adobe Illustrator. It’s not very intuitive so it’s unlikely you would just stumble onto the answer. It eluded me for years until I finally decided to hunt down the method. Adobe really should just fix this, already. There’s no reason in […]
Here’s part 2 of my 3D character walkthrough using Daz Studio 3. Parts 3 and 4 are up on my YouTube Channel as well. In this one I go through changing the materials and colors on your props and models. I had to move kind of quick to get in under YouTube’s 15 min time […]
I just posted a video tutorial on setting up the SWmenufree extension in Joomla 1.5. It’s true that sometimes people don’t know what to do first when they install this extension, so I came up with a basic walkthrough. Here’s the vid (and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube Channel if you don’t want […]