Here’s a tip my friend Andrew Young gave me when typing letters with non-English accent marks on a Mac.

Hit the Option (Alt) Key + e

É – violà!

Check out the following link for a complete list:
http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/type_european.html

Ever wanted to apply animations, alpha and masks to a dynamic text field without having to embed the entire font?

Easy!

Simply add a filter like alter color to the text field and it get’s rendered as a bitmap at runtime. Wow!

Here’s a nice design tip for those of you working on animations for CDROM or broadband projects. You can achieve a wealth of amazing effects very quickly by capturing areas of the screen as video when manipulating images using Photoshop or other graphics packages. All those sliders to alter blurs or outer glows etc can be used to serious effect and those transitions can be captured using tools like Snapz Pro or Camtasia and the video file imported back into Flash and integrated into your animations. Obviously it’s not a great solution for websites that require heavy optimisation but for multimedia stuff it can come in very handy.

Next stop those excellent wet media brushes in Corel Painter.