Hot Stuff

Win a Subscription to "InDesign Magazine"
5 Winners Selected.
The Big Picture Magazine - FREE
Real-world solutions to design challenges
Get Creative Videocast
New every week. Watch what's important to you.
Subscribe to Author CreativePro Author > George Penston
George Penston
George Penston is a San Francisco-based User Experience Designer and an authority of all things Apple and Adobe. With an extensive background in print production and design, George segued into Web and interface design. George spends his spare time playing video games and learning of emerging technologies that may prove valuable to creatives.
The Creative Toolbox: Share and Share Alike from Photoshop to Illustrator (Part 3)
How-Tos: Written by George Penston on August 10, 2004
With the introduction of Adobe Creative Suite, you can easily move artwork from Photoshop into Illustrator -- and continue to edit it in the illustration application. Here's how to transfer Photoshop art into Illustrator along with how to find everything once it's there.
The Creative Toolbox: The Legacy of Illustrator
How-Tos: Written by George Penston on June 29, 2004
Adobe Illustrator CS includes a much-improved text engine and a pared-down Save menu -- both of which may puzzle you when trying to open a legacy document or save to an older version of Illustrator. Here's how to overcome Adobe's changes to these fundamental actions.
The Creative Toolbox: Packing Up InDesign Layouts for GoLive Pages
Features: Written by George Penston on March 30, 2004
With the Creative Suite, Adobe application integration has never been tighter, especially between InDesign CS and GoLive CS. See how you can turn an InDesign layout into a GoLive Web site in a few steps.
The Creative Toolbox: GoLive CS Goes for Broke
Reviews: Written by George Penston on December 23, 2003
Adobe's Web design application gets its share of new features as part of the Adobe Creative Suite but does it have what it takes to go up against the favored Macromedia Dreamweaver?
Creative Gifts for Creative People: The 2003 Holiday Gift Guide
Features: Written by Sandee Cohen Sharon Steuer Brian P. Lawler Eric J. Adams George Penston John D. Berry Susan Glinert Stevens David Morgenstern Gene Gable on December 8, 2003
Looking for imaginative gift ideas for the creative professional on your list? Creativepro.com's editors are here to help, with creative suggestions for all.
The Creative Toolbox: Macromedia Studio MX 2004 Reviewed
Reviews: Written by George Penston on October 28, 2003
The awkwardly named product suite favored for interactive and Web design receives a number of improvements, including better CSS support. But is the sum of Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand better than its parts?
The Creative Toolbox: FreeHand MX Integrates and Innovates
Reviews: Written by George Penston on April 15, 2003
Macromedia gives its venerable illustration software FreeHand an MX makeover -- a unified user interface, tighter integration with other MX products, and some interesting new features. Do they add up to make FreeHand MX a worthwhile upgrade?
The Creative Toolbox: Share and Share Alike 'Twixt Illustrator to Photoshop (Part 2)
How-Tos: Written by George Penston on March 4, 2003
Illustrator and Photoshop are like characters in a digital Patty Duke show: They act alike, but they're different as night and day. Still, these cousins are quite a pair that work together seamlessly. In this sequel to an earlier story, learn how to transfer compound shapes and image maps from Illustrator into Photoshop.
2002: The Creative Year in Review
Features: Written by David Blatner Sandee Cohen Bruce Fraser Sharon Steuer Sean Wagstaff Brian P. Lawler Eric J. Adams Pamela Pfiffner George Penston Sonja Schenk Susan Glinert Stevens David Morgenstern on December 31, 2002
What kind of year was 2002 for creative professionals? The staff and contributors of creativepro.com reflect on the year that's been and the year that's about to be.
The Creative Toolbox: Surprisingly Agile Photoshop Elements
Reviews: Written by George Penston on August 26, 2002
Adobe updates Photoshop Elements, its highly accessible, more affordable, only slightly limited version of Photoshop. With most of the same features as Photoshop and a list price of $99, what's not to like?
The Creative Toolbox: Share and Share Alike with Illustrator and Photoshop
How-Tos: Written by George Penston on July 30, 2002
With Illustrator 9, Adobe introduced some remarkable capabilities for exporting vector files to Photoshop -- and brought even more to the table with Illustrator 10. The net result is that not only is it possible to write out individual Illustrator layers to Photoshop layers, but Illustrator text can also be saved as editable Photoshop type layers.
The Creative Toolbox: For Flash, MX Means Most eXcellent
Reviews: Written by George Penston on June 10, 2002
Now three versions later, I've taken the new version, Flash MX (6.0), out for a spin, and all I can say is, "You've come a long way, baby." MX is the surname given to the entire product line recently rolled out by Macromedia. The substance of this upgrade is more than a flashy new moniker.
The Creative Toolbox: Is LiveMotion 2.0 a Flash in the Pan?
Reviews: Written by George Penston on May 13, 2002
A couple years back the only true solution designers had for Flash animation (SWF) creation was Macromedia's Flash itself. Many found and still find Flash difficult to master and strange in its manner of going about even the simplest tasks.
The Creative Toolbox: Upgrade to Photoshop 7.0?
Reviews: Written by George Penston on May 7, 2002
Whenever a new version of Photoshop comes around, I look forward to exploring and uncovering the newly added features and to figuring out how I can exploit them in my day-to-day work. Unfortunately, with the release of Photoshop 7, there's not a lot to write home about.
The Creative Toolbox: A First Look at GoLive 6.0
Features: Written by George Penston on February 19, 2002
I've been using Adobe GoLive since its first incarnation. In its previous five versions, it's gained powerful, unique features and undergone a couple of name changes.
The Creative Toolbox: A Designer's Reflections on the iMac and Mac OS X
Features: Written by George Penston on January 9, 2002
2001: The Creative Year in Review
Features: Written by David Blatner Sandee Cohen Bruce Fraser Brian P. Lawler Eric J. Adams Pamela Pfiffner George Penston Susan Glinert Stevens David Morgenstern on December 30, 2001
We asked the writers and pundits who contribute to creativepro.com to review 2001 from the perspective of product releases and news events for creative professionals.
The Creative Toolbox: Illustrator's Almost-Perfect 10
Reviews: Written by George Penston on December 10, 2001
Adobe has released Illustrator 10, which marks Adobe's first product release to offer both Windows XP and OS X compatibility (it also runs on Mac OS 9 and on several flavors of Windows). .... underneath the slick veneer of the interface, Illustrator 10 brings an assortment of new tools and features to foster creative freedom and boost productivity.
The Creative Toolbox: 'Tween LiveMotion and Illustrator
Features: Written by George Penston on November 13, 2001
Although Live Motion is easy to use and has an intuitive workflow, it's not without its share of shortcomings. One of these lapses is shape tweening, or the transformation of one shape into another in an animated sequence. But you can easily overcome this limitation by getting some much needed vector help from LiveMotion's big brother, Adobe Illustrator.
The Creative Toolbox: Off the Beaten Path with Flash and LiveMotion
Features: Written by George Penston on September 10, 2001
The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but the shortest path is rarely the most interesting. Animating objects along a custom motion path in Flash and LiveMotion is easier than you may think.