Rubberspark.com is a graphic arts website that was created to help people from production artists to creative directors to the regular Joe or Jane making a birthday card on her new iMac.

Even though the main focus of the website is graphic arts, there will be areas that will also help answer some basic Mac OS X questions for those who are new to Apple computers and the Mac operating system.

If you have a graphic art or OS X question, or if you have a problem that you need help solving, please email me your question at jaugustine@rubberspark.com, and I will do the best I can to help you solve the problem.

sincerely,

Joseph Augustine

So you’re working on a logo and the client asks you “what Pantone colors are you using?” Pantone?

You send a file to the printer for a banner and the printer tells you “we can only print it in CMYK”.  CMYK?

Or you start on a project for web graphics and the client tells you “just give it to us in RGB”.

What are all of these strange letter combinations? What do they mean and how do they pertain to colors? Welcome to Colors 101. Continue reading this post…

How to load Pantone colors into Adobe Illustrator: Continue reading this post…

Hard drives crash sometimes and when they do, it sucks. And if you don’t have all of your files backed up, it really, really sucks. All of your hard work, your designs, your applications, emails … gone. You might be able to pay somebody to retrieve them for you, but that’ll cost money and time. If only you’d backed up your files … Continue reading this post…

Thanks to the internet we can send files quickly to the printer or client via ftp. But sometimes the files become quite large when combined, even when zipped. Here’s a great trick I’ve learned that will help get those file sizes down, which means less uploading time.

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If you’re a freelance graphic artist, there have most likely been times when you’ve had to load up the files of the layout you’ve created for your client and sent them to the printer. And most likely there have been times when the printer has called and told you the files weren’t built correctly.

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If you ever need to create a die-cut of an image, you will need to create a bleed for the image in case the die-line is off a little during the cutting process. Here is how you do it:

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When you sit down at your computer, you want to focus all of your energy on creating great design. These tips will help you become more efficient on the Mac, meaning more time spent creating, and less time spent troubleshooting. 

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Gone are the days of printing out a layout and sending it UPS or FedEx to the client to get an approval. Now, thanks to technology, we create pdfs for fast transit of such materials to be approved. And it all happens within minutes. 

Making a pdf of your layout is easier than ever, and this is how you do it:

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Sometimes the easiest task can be so difficult if you don’t know how to do it. Placing an image in a PowerPoint presentation used to be one of those tasks. But not anymore. 

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