Top 10 CreativePro Articles of 2012

CreativePro Staff Mike Rankin

The end of the year is a time to pause and reflect. And of course, it’s a time for making lists! So I thought it’d be fun to find out which were the most popular CreativePro articles of 2012. Interestingly, some articles remain freakishly popular many years after they were written. The “long tail” is a very real thing. But since I wanted to focus on this year, I only included articles written in 2012 in the list below. The results are a nice mix of content on photography, Photoshop, InDesign, free stuff, fonts, and typography. Naturally, articles written earlier in the year have an advantage just by virtue of being around longer. So without further ado, here are the Top 10 Most Popular CreativePro articles written in 2012.

1. Create Picture Frames in Photoshop: Part 1 by Steve Caplin

Using Photoshop, you can create a silver, gold, or wood-grain picture frame, fill it with a photo, and transform both frame and photo so that they’re skewed in different perspectives. The realistic results are easier to achieve than you might think!

2. Create a Table of Contents in InDesign by Sandee Cohen

Don’t create a table of contents (TOC) by hand! Let InDesign’s automatic TOC feature generate it for you. The big bonus (besides no human errors): If your document changes, one click updates the entire TOC!

3. Free For All: Free Fonts Galore (Part 1) by Pariah Burke

In the first of a two-part Free For All, Pariah S. Burke goes prospecting for free fonts and comes back with a motherlode.

4. InDesign How-to: Balance Columns with Vertical Justification by Jim Felici

The conundrum: You need to align type to a baseline grid but you don’t want any widows or orphans. Making uneven columns of type line up in InDesign is the job of vertical justification. Here’s how to make it work for you.

5. How-To: 10 Techniques for Copying Pages Between InDesign Documents by Pariah Burke

There are many reasons why you might want to combine pages or objects from one or more InDesign documents into other InDesign documents. Perhaps you need to join unchanged pages from an old financial report with the new one; or use a previous design’s page geometry and elements as the template for a new project; or combine individual chapter INDDs into a single “book” that can be output as one long PDF; or… Whatever the case, InDesign has several paths to that end.

6. Photoshop How-To: Trace on Object without the Pen Tool by Deke McClelland

Tired of dragging and clicking with Pen tool to outline a shape in Photoshop? By breaking down a complex object into simple shapes, you can create a vector outline of complicated images. The secret, says Deke McClelland, is geometry, paths, and alignment.

7. Free For All: Templates for Every Project and Purpose by Pariah Burke

Packaging? Clothing? Marketing materials? There are templates for every conceivable project. Here are 60 of them – including a demotivational poster!

8. The State of E-book Typography by Jim Felici

Whether on Kindle, iPad, Nook, or other LCD display, type suffers compared to print. So is good typography even possible for today’s electronic devices? From the standpoint of the craft’s two underlying principles — legibility and readability — the answer is “no.”

9. Photography How-to: Learning to See in Black and White by John Batdorff

Everything from portraits to landscapes can be more powerful when they’re black-and-white photos. Once you know how to recognize tonal contrast, texture, shapes, and patterns, your monotone images will be anything but monotonous.

10. Importing Photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4: Part 1 by Martin Evening

There are several ways to import images into Lightroom 4, and here Martin Evening describes all of them. Whether you want to import directly from your camera or from your desktop, if you work differently each time or want to create presets, there’s an import method for you.

Thanks for reading and see you in 2013!