Adobe has some cool stuff in the pipelines for instance this smart video manipulation. Hopefully this will come to Premiere or maybe even Photoshop in the not too distant future. Check out the video here

I love flash games and creative advertising.  The other day while looking at the Movember site, I came across this mini site for Holden promoting their affiliation with Movember. I especially like the adaptation of their slogan “Go Better” to “Mo Better”!

check it out at: holdenmobetter.com.au

There’s also one for Shick who sponsor Movember as well: schickfreeyourskin.com.au

Everyone runs out of ideas sooner or later. It helps to have people around to brainstorm with. Lately I have come across a lot of people who don’t know what real brainstorming is.

Google defines brainstorming as: A group process used to generate a large number of ideas about specific issues in a non-judgmental environment.

Basically it’s bouncing ideas off other people, you can brainstorm with anyone. Collegues, friends, partners and even kids (inocent minds can sometimes trigger a creative breakthrough.)

There is only one rule to this fantastic creative process
THERE IS NO WRONG ANSWERS!!

It’s as much about clearing thoughts out of your head as it is about coming up with new ones.
So give it a go and don’t listen to negative people who yell “Thats not right”, if you don’t get unsuitable ideas out of your system at the concept stage, they may come back to bite you later!

If you have Indesign CS3, you no doubt know about GREP. For those of you who don’t, GREP stands for General Regular Expression Parser (Oh NOW I know what it is!!?!) It’s basically turbo-boosted Find/Change. It lets you search not only standard text strings but also complex strings with rules and exceptions and bells and whistles (expressions).

Now, I’m not going to explain all the simple stuff. If you want to get to know GREP, play with it. It has an entire dictionary of expressions you can string together as well as some basic searches pre-saved.

Recently I had a list in an ID document which needed to be culled. My list was a few pages long but here is an example:

John - Weight 60kg
Peter - Weight 75kg
Sandy - Weight 57kg
Peter - Height 172cm
Sandy - Height 165cm
John - Height 170cm
John - Male
Peter - Male
Sandy - Female

Say I needed to remove all entries except John’s stats. Manually it would take too long (again it was longer than this!), with find/change it can’t be done. So I turned to GREP.

The expression goes like this:
Find Feild:      ^(?!John).*$
Change Field:                        (nothing)

The expression explained: FIND

^ beginning of paragraph (?! look ahead through paragraph for:   John but DON”T select it (called Negative Lookahead) ) . then ANY character * one or more times $ till END of paragraph

This expression is actually a ’select all lines’ and change to nothing search with an exception. It looks through the lines for all occurrences of ‘John’. If it finds it, it ignores that line and moves on. This is because of the ‘negative lookahead’.

Hope I haven’t rambled too long but after I worked through this expression, I was able to understand how many other searches were put together.

To anyone reading this…Welcome to the One 2 Design Blog. This is my first forray in to the blogging world and so far…I like it! I will be using this web log to keep track of all things one 2 design related and also hints, tips and info for the design industry in general. Stay tuned for my first post on Indesign CS3’s GREP. Seeya