Have you been noticing those large download buttons popping up everywhere over the last year or so? I sure have, they are really eye catching and in your face. It’s next to impossible to ignore them, and they get the point accross.

I just recently started adding some these buttons to my site to increase downloads, and I think it’s working so far! Anyway, after I designed mine I decided to to write a tutorial blog about it, and give away the resulting file that I create.

Here is the final result that we will create in this tutorial:

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There are a lot of repeatedly used tools and options in Adobe Photoshop and some of these tools and options do have pre-assigned keyboards shortcuts, and others that do not.

After being an idiot for a while and repeating some of these tasks over and over the long way, I decided to make a set of Photoshop actions that would make my life a little easier, and cut down on production time.

I have decided to share these actions with you, and hopefully they can be of some help. They are all really basic actions, but I find by having them assigned to the Function keys, it makes getting things done less of a pain.

Here are the actions, and their corresponding function shortcut key:

F2 – Flip Horizontal
F3 - Flip Vertical
F4 - Crop
F5 - Fill White
F6 - Fill Black
F7 - Fill Menu
F8 - Select Inverse

As you can see I have assigned the F7 key to bring the Fill Menu up, some of you may know and use the Shift + F5 shortcut already. But that is a bit of a stretch for the fingers, and I know it’s not my favorite position to put my hand in. So it’s just small things like that which save a few seconds here, and a few seconds there, but you do, (at least I do) notice it add up over time.

Anyway, here is the download for the .atn file. I have only tested it in Photoshop CS3, but they are such basic actions I would imagine they would work in many versions of Photoshop.

Being a web designer, with a possible light case of ADD, i noticed that in the past I had used a different organizational method for my css files on almost every website I built. Hell, in some cases there was no organization what-so-ever.

As is often the case when you repeat a task over and over, I got better at organizing my files to make them easier for me to build and edit. I am going to share some of my organizational tips with you here today, and hopefully they will save you some time in the long run. Read the rest of this entry »