I'm a creative director at Laughing Samurai. I bark orders. Sometimes people listen. Sometimes they don't. When they play nice, I pay with pizza. And sometimes with Nachos. Hell, sometimes even Beer. Wanna work with me? Let's do this.

Optimize your workflow

OK, so I’m back. It has been a minute since my previous blog post, but hey, we’ve got bills to pay. Although I love writing these, clients take precedence.

Enough of that. Today we are talking about optimizing our workflow. Now I am not going to go too deep into how you get your projects done and what kind or project management software you are using to manage your projects.

I want to get a bit more “low-level” with it if you catch my drift. Because it all starts with the basics. Your computer and how you interact with it. Read More »

make an awesome pdf… every time…

As we all know (hopefully), PDFs have become the standard in just about any field of presenting a digital document. It is cross platform and browser compatible, and it serves as a great tool for presenting a multi-page document, including websites. Of course, Acrobat is much more robust than this of course, with capabilities for form creation, interactive PDFs, video and audio, annotations, digital signatures and even capable of starting a meeting with a slideshow. Unfortunately, we will not being going that deep into Acrobat’s awesomeness, but rather stay with the basics. A PDF to send a file to press.
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carnales gotta pee too

found by my boy tulio “tiguere” in san jose, ca

How to deal with the“unexpected end of file” error in Photoshop

At one point or another, we have all encountered this dreaded and nauseating error that Photoshop can lay on us at the last half hour of a sixteen hour work day (wait… don’t you work sixteen hour days?). The problem is that there is no real easy or reliable way to fix this error. There are some solutions out there like the PSD Extract/Repair plugin which lets you open your Photoshop file one layer at a time. This is extremely cumbersome and not always reliable, since with the corruption of the file also comes corrupted layers.
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Good Practices for Delivering Print Files

Currently there is an overabundance of web designers out there that are extremely talented and can create some really cool stuff. But in my twelve years of experience designing for print, on both the Printer and Agency side of things, I have encountered multiple cases where people fall short in the delivery of their creative when it comes to print work, sometimes causing unnecessary charges from the printer to fix their mistakes. Add to that the fact that I have been approached by more than a few of my friends and colleagues with a “deer-in-headlights” demeanor when it comes to creating or delivering stuff for print.

For this, I have compiled a list of good practices and basic guidelines to ensure that your jobs are delivered efficiently. This is, of course, assuming that you are using InDesign as your final delivery vehicle (which I recommend) regardless of which application you used to design the piece.
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Designing in pixels in InDesign

Now hold on… Don’t get your diapers in a bunch! No, I am not claiming to design in pixels, nor am I designing a website in InDesign, what do I look like? An amateur? I was recently confronted with a project, which I had done once before, but approached it a little different this time around. Let me give you some background.

The project involved creating some web pages based on pre-existing landing pages, for the purpose of some focus group research. What basically had to happen was that there would be a few variables that changed over the design of a few ads. On some the laptop screens or the products changed, on others, maybe the copy changed, or a logo was added. The end result was like 4-5 different versions of the same web page, which would then be used for the testing.
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nyc marketing at its best

NYC Marketing

found by my sister on the streets of nyc

suggestive advertising?

muffdiving

you can check out the full ad at http://www.spiritair.com//

friction

FrictionToy

r rated rc toy?

chickens_cluckin’

ChickensCluckin

makin’ eggs