Well, At Least It's Gutsy
Poor AOL. Younger CreativePro.com readers may not even remember when AOL was a respected force on the Internet -- in fact, for some people AOL was the Internet. But that was more than a century ago in Web years, and since then the company has lost its relevance and struggled to stay profitable.

Now Time Warner, which eagerly bought AOL in 2000, is "spinning off AOL as an independent company"; that is, chucking it like a hot potato.

One marker of this transition is a new brand identity. While AOL will officially unveil the new identity on December 10, 2009, it has already released samples of the redesigned logo:

No, those aren't six drafts of the logo. Those are all final versions of the logo. We need to talk about this! Join the head scratching at "AOL's Unique Logo."

Terri Stone - Editor in Chief

How to Use Color Effectively
With a series of striking examples, Lauren Krause explains how color affects the mood of a piece, and how it interacts with other elements of the designs.

Even within one color, there can be a wide range of emotions. Say you use red: How can you tell if your piece will project passion or danger? In the ad below, the appropriate shade (deep, rich) and hue (blue-red, not orange-red) ensure that you equate passion with this smokin' heel.

Scanning Around With Gene: Everybody Loves a Party!
Worried that your next party will be a failure? Not when you break the ice by playing the vintage games Gene Gable dug up. Who could resist Bottle Bombing, Appleplexy Race, and Para Shoot?

Gosh, don't you wish you were at this party?

Related Reading: In this previous column, Gene featured a Skin Diving Action Game. Now that's a party in a box!

Free For All: Winter Holidays Edition
Pariah Burke is back with a three-page collection of cool free stuff creative pros will love. Whatever winter event you're designing for, you'll want these free fonts, clip art, stock photos, and WordPress and Blogger templates.

These snowflakes are vector art, so you can easily alter them to make almost as many variations as you'd see in nature:

Manage iPhone Photos
It doesn't take long to figure out how to snap a picture with your iPhone's camera. But this article by Jeff Carlson goes beyond the basics to cover sharing those photos, deleting several at once, and syncing select photos on your computer with your iPhone. Read to the end of the article for the best iPhone camera tip ever.

Did you know you could delete multiple photos at once?

Master Templates in Dreamweaver: Part 1
Templates are production godsends, but they're also flexible enough to let you stretch your design muscles and keep a site's many pages varied and interesting. Dave Sawyer McFarland's three-part series will tell you everything you need to know about making and using Dreamweaver CS4 templates.

In templates, editable regions are marked with a blue tab (circled in red below) and outlined in light blue.

Acrobat.com Gains New Productivity and Collaboration Capabilities

Track Down Image Thieves Online

Quark Selling Design Templates & Printing to Small Businesses

Explore Online Images with Google Image Swirl

Help for Digital Photographers

This week's podcast: Problem solvers for software, hardware, print design, Web design, and more!

This site is all about charts and graphs, but it's not your typical business snore-fest. For instance, a recent favorite plots the appeal of "Twilight" in relation to the age of the female watcher.

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