Just about everybody likes the color blue. It's cited as the favorite color for the majority of men and women. But there are many shades of blue from dark, almost black blues to the pale, icy blues that almost pass for white. Blue isn't just blue. Explore the symbolism of dark blue colors and browse a few 2, 3, 4, and 5 color palettes built around dark blue.

At Postive Space Blog, Anthony Zinni has a good article for new designers trying to create the perfect portfolio for their job search. The advice is, don't. Students, Nothing is Perfect Especially Your Portfolio doesn't want you to not strive for quality but not fall into what I call perfectionism procrastination. I'm actually in the middle of creating a podcast, my first (more on that later on), and one of the things I talk about is procrastinating or putting things off until you have the perfect design or the perfect conditions. Sure we want a portfolio that showcases our best work, but...

If you are watching a number of great jobs come and go because your portfolio just isn’t ready then you are bound to be waiting for a long time. -- Anthony Zinni

The article goes on to give good advice on why you shouldn't wait on perfection (whatever that really is) and offers tips on what to focus on in job interviews and how to use your portfolio.

If you use any of the Adobe products (and there are plenty to choose from) you may want to add to Adobe TV to your regular schedule. And you can do this at work, at your desk, and not be guilty of goofing off. Adobe TV is a series of videos on, naturally, Adobe products. There are photography, designer, video professional, and developer channels -- although there is a lot of overlap with the same video often appearing in two or three channels. Sort the shows by date, popularity, or viewer ratings. It's a mixed bag of quality although most are quite nicely done.

A Few of the Adobe TV Shows

Dr. Brown's Photoshop Laboratory is goofy, cheesy, entertaining, and ultimately educational. I'd prefer a little less of the silliness and more of the how-to, but still a fun, useful series of shows. When demonstrating the actual Photoshop steps it helps to view full-screen.

Lynda.com Training for Designers shows are fast-paced and get right to the point quickly. Covering InDesign, Illustrator, and other programs these are excerpts from the Online Training Library at lynda.com.

Layers TV is a video podcast from Layers Magazine. The shows look and sound good and they focus on practical projects and problem-solving. These tutorials are more for people who are already quite familiar with the programs and know the basic tools and how they work but might not know all the little tricks and shortcuts.

XTrain Digital Arts and Design offers tips and procedures for doing specific tasks or creating a complete project. Some focus on the software and others talk about types of documents. Videos include creating a book in InDesign, a brief talk on the purpose of a brochure, manipulating colors in Illustrator, and converting pixel images to vector images.

This is just a tiny sampling of the shows available at Adobe TV. Tune in. What are your favorite Adobe TV programs?

No, this isn't a political blog. At creativebits there's a great post titled Portrayal of George W. Bush in international advertisements. The pictures of President Bush and his own words are used to sell newspapers, tape, bicycle helmets, television shows, board games, and vodka, and to publicize various animal rights and human rights issues. As some commenters point out, they aren't all necessarily well-designed ads. They rely more on the viewer's (presumed) dislike, even hatred, of Bush to get their point across. Interesting nonetheless.

Related:

• Parts of an Ad
• Ogilvy Ad Design Formula
• Classic Books, Timeless Tips on Ad Design
• Copywriting Tips for Non-Writers

Which of the Bush-inspired ads do you feel are most effective?

While at the UPS store the other day I overheard a conversation between a customer and one of the clerks. They were discussing how to exchange digital files and maintaining the page format. The customer was not extremely computer-savvy and so the clerk suggested a free PDF creation tool. PDF995. I made a mental note of the name and looked it up when I got home. There are a lot of different PDF creation tools out there but this one looks to be quite full-featured yet super simple to use when all you want is to quickly create a PDF from any file. And being free is especially nice (although you'll have to pay a small fee if you prefer to get rid of the nag screens). Install it as a printer driver and choose that option when you print your file. That's the easy method. Want more control? It comes with a free configuration utility so you can "insert bookmarks, add links, combine files, change page orientation, add "Confidential" stamps, create PDF stationery, adjust image resolution, summarize documents, create batch print jobs" and more.

What Others Say About PDF995

If you want to extract pages from a PDF, add pages, stamp it with "Approved" or "Burn After Reading," or do any sort of editing, or if you want to create your own PDF documents, first you have to shell out $95 to $450 for a version of Acrobat capable of creating the files. Instead, get Pdf995 Suite... Ron White, PC World

pdf995 creates files three times as large as pdfFactory. That's no big deal with a two-page doc, but try it with a 40-pager embedded with graphics and you'll quickly see the problem. Nonetheless, if you work with small docs and can put up with the Web-site visit, pdf995 is for you. -- Steve Bass, PC World

For basic—and slightly better than basic—PDF file creation at a great price, it's hard to beat Software995's pdf995. But if you're too strapped to pay $9.95, you can get the full version free (you just have to put up with a simple pop-up ad that appears every time you create a PDF file). Whichever version you use, people who view your PDF file will never know it was created so inexpensively. -- M. David Stone, PC Magazine

What's your favorite free or cheap PDF creation tool? Do the nag screens on PDF995 (or other free programs) bug you?

The full name of the post at Just Creative Design is How To Design A Movie Poster - With An Example. It doesn't matter if movie posters are your thing or not. Jacob Cass walks your through his design process from research through final poster. The project is for a school assignment so the back-and-forth that would be present if you were doing this for a client is missing, but it's still a nice peak into how one designers takes a project from an idea to a cool, finished product.

Related:

• The Design Process
• Form and Function
• How to Create a Workable Page Layout

Red is a hot, stimulating color that is often used to suggest power, grab attention, or signify an emergency condition. But not every shade of red denotes danger. There are many reds and some are a lot tamer than others. Here's a look at 8 specific shades of red used on the Web. These are named colors, that is, color keywords you can specify without using the hexadecimal code -- such as firebrick, crimson, and tomato. See how the mix of red, green, and blue that makes up these shades of red fires up or tones down the meanings and feelings these colors convey.

There's a color swatch, hex and rgb codes, whether or not that specific color is browser safe, and a look at the symbolism of that particular shade of red. Much of it is subjective. If you strongly disagree (or agree) with the suggested symbolism for any of these colors, tell us why and what you feel about these colors.

I've used iGoogle for a while now. I picked a theme when I first set up my page and didn't think much of it after that. Then just a few days ago I was fiddling around (read: wasting time and putting off doing whatever I should have been doing at that point in time) and started looking for new themes. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could use a different theme on each tab so I started picking themes to match the general subject of each of my iGoogle tabs -- I have a tab for topics related to each of my Web sites, one for entertainment/games, and one for general news, etc. There are quite a few nice designs but there are also themes that seem boring or a tad amateurish. The thought crossed my mind ever so briefly that it might be fun to create my own theme.

Then this morning the feed on one of my tabs showed me "iGoogle theme, great promotional tool for designers," a post by Ivan at creativebits. He suggests that submitting your own iGoogle themes might be a good way for artists to get some publicity. At first read the specs seem a little daunting, but not too terribly technical. Not sure if I'll actually do it, but the idea of creating some pretty new themes is floating around in my head right now.

What about you? Do you think the idea of doing iGoogle themes as a kind of promotional tool has merit?

Here's a great article to bookmark. At Just Creative Design Jacob Cass interviews Jeff Fisher of Logomotives. There's a little bit of background info on Jeff (award-winning identity designer, writer, lecturer) but then the interview moves right into the logo design process -- what others do, what Jeff does differently, some great stories of jobs gone wrong, discussion of Jeff's familiar LogoMotives logo, some of Jeff's favorite corporate logo design -- including so-called "rule-breakers," and advice to aspiring logo designers. Long but good read. And Jacob has highlighted a lot of the key concepts covered in the article to make it easier to skim.