Tech Tips for Catholics

Finding images for your post is an important part of blogging.  Your images should relate to what it is you are writing about.  The image should be intriguing and cause a person to think to themselves, this might be something I’d like to read more about.  You should have permission to use any images that are not taken/created by you.  Sonia Simone, an Associate Editor of Copyblogger, added in his post titled “The Lazy Blogger’s Guide to Finding Great Post Images,” that the image should also set an emotional tone.

But, what if you are having trouble finding an image that does all of these things?  How about using a cartoon!  There are several Catholic cartoonists out there, whom allow bloggers to post their images.  Each have their own guidlines, so be sure to check out their websites first, or e-mail them and ask their permission.   Most are more than happy to grant permission as long as appropriate recognition is given.

Here are just a few:

Posted with permission of Gary Cangemi
(www.umberttheunborn.com)

Posted with permission of Paul Nichols
(www.catholiccartoonblog.blogspot.com)

Posted with permission of John Francis Borra
(www.veritatisthecartoon.blogspot.com)

If you know of any others, feel free to post a comment.

The topic of giving up social networking for Lent has come up quite a bit.  I have been pondering the idea for about a week-and-a-half now.  I normally give up pop (that’s soda for you whom are living outside the Ohio limits ; )  Friends keep asking me what I am giving up for Lent and before I can reply they say, “Don’t tell me you are giving up pop again” (in that tone of voice too).  “I think you should give up Twitter,” one friend uttered.  To be honest, I didn’t like the sound of it, but upon further prayer and reflection, I have come to the conclusion that this would be the best thing for me to give up this Lent.

So for those like Lindsey Turrentine, the author of “How to give up Facebook for Lent and keep your friends” (who is not even Catholic) and myself, here are some Lenten avatars that you are welcome to use.

I will continue posting to the blog, but other than that, I’ll be focusing on Scripture study and Prayer this Lent.

Below are some related links to this topic:

• Poll Question: “Are you giving up social-networking for Lent?” [current results]
• Giving up Facebook for Lent? Read this first!
• Discerning Our Fasts

Merry Christmas everyone!  Enjoy this video by one of my all-time favorite Christian bands, Jars of Clay.

Here is a live version of the song as well!  May Christ’s peace be with all of you this Christmas season and beyond.

Let the peace of our Lord enter your heart this Christmas!  I invite you to attend Midnight Mass near you!  If you are not Catholic, perhaps you have fallen away from the faith, or maybe you just want to celebrate the Birth of Christ in a very special way this year, I personally invite you to join in our joyful celebration.

Some churches begin earlier than 12:00 a.m. so check with your local parish.  Ours’ is at midnight (which is awesome!)

BUS SHELTER NATIVITY

Download a free, hi-res version of this poster for your church’s Christmas publicity. Since the 15th of December, this specially commissioned painting of the nativity, set in a bus shelter, was displayed at over 1,000 bus shelters across the UK.

The painting is by Royal Academy Gold medal winner, Andrew Gadd. The oil painting is on canvas and depicts the holy family, with halos, in a dark bus shelter. The shepherds and wise men are replaced with fellow passengers waiting for a bus. Some are watching the nativity intently; others appear oblivious and are checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus.

Francis Goodwin, the Chair of CAN, says: “We are very used to the Renaissance image of the Nativity. But what would it look like if it happened today? Where would it take place? We want to challenge people to make them reassess what the birth of Jesus means to them. By using a powerful and contemporary piece of art, from a world renowned painter, we can create an enduring image for our own times.”

See you at Mass : )

I can remember when I was a kid, shopping at the grocery store with my grandma. We were skimming down the cereal isle when a little comic book caught my eye. I picked it up and showed it to her, flipping through the pages. She knew what it was apparently, because she quickly took it from my hands. Now that I’m older, I understand why she reacted as she did.

Jack Chick has been spreading fear into the hearts of Christians for decades (in fact, Chick has sold more than 700 million of his tracts). “It used to be you were only in danger of running into this sort of thing in a Turnpike rest stop bathroom or tucked in a blazer pocket at the thrift store,” writes one blogger.

Chick Publications has sadly jumped into the realm of new media. Chick tracts can now be embedded in Facebook, blogs, and other online mediums.

Little is known about this man. For the most part, Jack T. Chick has done a pretty good job of staying out of the public’s eye. Just try to search for a recent picture of Mr. Chick and the only one you may find is the one taken back in the Summer of 2006, at Victory Baptist Church. The first question on Chick Publications’ website, in the FAQ section is, “Is Jack Chick still living?” Their response, “Yes, he’s very much alive, in spite of some very humorous obituaries occasionally posted on the internet…”

So, who is this man? Well, funny you should ask. Jimmy Akin, Director of Apologetics and Evangelization at Catholic Answers, has come out with his latest book titled “The Nightmare World Of Jack T. Chick.” Jimmy Akin’s new book reveals everything you need to know about Jack Chick and the many lies he tells about the Catholic Church and its teachings. Learn how you can defend the faith against Chick’s lies and ridiculous claims!

You can read about the time when Jimmy met Jack Chick. The drawing of Mr. Chick, that is on the cover of the book, was done by Jimmy himself. Here is the story behind this drawing.

Jimmy Akin has authored a few books. You can read Jimmy Akin’s story “A Triumph and a Tragedy,” in one of the “Surprised by Truth” books. He has authored books suchas: “Mass Confusion” and “The Salvation Controversy”, as well as others. You can hear Jimmy on Catholic Answers Live.

Rock for Life is sponsoring the first ever, “design the next NPLTD T-shirt” contest! The contest is open to anyone between the ages of 13 and 35.  Prizes include Rock for Life merchandise, SONICFLOOd CD’s and much more.

Design Guidelines:

• Slogans with designs are encouraged to be submitted
• Slogans and word-only designs can be submitted
• Any entry that violates the rules of the contest will be removed immediately
• Entries deemed inappropriate will be removed immediately
• All ideas must be original. Intellectual theft will be not tolerated
• Creativity is strongly encouraged

Voting:

• Visitors to NationalProLifeTshirtDay.com will have the opportunity to vote
• Top 12 vote getters will then be judged by American Life League and Rock for Life staff

Entries will be judged with the following categories in mind:

• Creativity and Originality
• Relevancy to current topics
• Potential to persuade
• Potential to engage in public discourse
• American Life League and Rock for Life staff will judge the top 12 vote getters with the above mentioned categories in mind to determine the over-all winner, 2nd and 3rd place for prizes and awards

How to Submit and Deadline:

• Go to NationalProLifeTshirtDay.com and submit your design on the web site

• Enter your full name, e-mail address, mailing address and phone number (on the site)
• All designs must be submitted by 11:59pm (EST) on Wednesday, November 19, 2008. Winners will be notified by or on November 26, 2008

Disclaimer

• American Life League reserves the right to alter winning design entry in any way or to not use it at all. Staff members or relatives of staff members of American Life League or Rock for Life are not eligible to win
• Persons under the age of 18 must have parental permission to enter

For rules, guidelines, submitting T-shirt designs and ideas, go to www.NationalProLifeTshirtDay.com.  Make sure to mark your calendar for the next National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day, April 28, 2009.

Tell all your friends!

Today, we (the company I work for) received “good” artwork for custom printed balloons with a Catholic parish’s logo screen-printed on them.  Why am I making such a big deal about this?  You wouldn’t believe how many times we get artwork for Catholic organizations and churches that is simply unusable, either because it is a low-res raster image, or a really tiny high-res raster image.  I am almost embarrassed by this.

Art has always been a big part of the Catholic faith.  There is no reason our logos can’t be great too!  The following is a quick lesson of the differences between “good” artwork and what we classify as “bad”, “horrible”, or just plain “ugly” artwork!

Here is an example of what we are looking for when it comes to good, clean vector artwork (the red selection points are to show the vector attributes.)

What is the difference between raster and vector artwork?

Raster: are images made up of pixels (such as: jpgs, gifs, tiffs, picts, psd, bmp, etc…) and can become distorted or “fuzzy” if blown up larger than it’s intended medium. For instance, web pages are generally created in low resolution which look fine on computer monitors and load very quickly. However, these low-res (usually around 72 dpi) images can not be used for print media. High resolution images are those ranging from 300 dpi or higher, at actual size. The acronym dpi stands for “dots per inch”.

Vector: art created in a drawing program (such as: Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Macromedia Freehand). Vector artwork can be blown up to the size of a building and still look as crisp as it did sized for let’s say a coffee mug. This is because vector art is not made up of pixels, but of shape objects.

Generally vector art is the preferred format of most suppliers, but this also depends on the type of medium the artwork will be used.

It is worth paying a professional to design your logo, or to have them recreate your existing logo in vector form.  The church secretary, using a low-end software package, just isn’t going to cut it these days.

Q. I used to use the Filter menu > Color > Invert Color on a group of shapes with multiple colors to quickly change the colors. In CS3 the Color Filter is gone in the Filter menu! I tried the Invert and Complement options in the Color panel, but they don’t work on multiple colors. Invert makes everything black, and complement makes everything the complement of the topmost object… obviously not what I want to do. Where’s my color filter in CS3? I liked some of the other options too… like the saturation filter. Can someone point me in the right direction, or am I out of luck with this? Adobe often moves things around in upgrades, and sometimes it drives me nuts.

A. I totally understand your frustration. I often wondered why, in the earlier versions of Illustrator, spell-check was under the Type menu and not under Edit menu. Then, just when I started getting used to it being under Type, they went and switched it to Edit in the following upgrade.

Like you, I love the Color Filter feature that used to be found under the Filter menu (which only made sense). Well what I have found, after a little searching, is that they’ve moved it to: Edit menu > Edit Colors, in CS3. I read somewhere that the move was to help support the new Live Color feature.

See the related links for a better explanation of Live Color.

• Edit Colors in the Live Color dialog box
  
• Create a Color Group in Live Color
  

Blessings,
Joshua

If you have a question about anything computer or faith related, contact us and we will gladly respond in a futurer post.

To change the default font (Myriad Pro for CS3 and Myriad for CS2) in Adobe® Illustrator, you must create a custom startup file by editing the Normal Character Style in the Illustrator startup files for CS2, or the default template files in CS3.

To change the default font for Illustrator CS3

1. Choose File > Open and go to Documents and Settings/User/Application Data/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator CS3 Settings/New Document Profiles (Windows) or to Users/User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator CS3/New Document Profiles (Mac OS).
2. Open one of the default document profile template files (Basic CMYK, Basic RGB, Mobile and Devices, Print, Video and Film, or Web, depending on which type of document you intend to use).
3. Choose Window > Type > Character Styles.
4. Select the Normal Character Style and choose Character Style Options from the palette menu.
5. Select Basic Character Formats and choose the desired font from the Font Family menu.
6. Click OK, and then choose File > Save and close the file.
7. Choose File > New and select the desired default document profile.

To change the default font f or Illustrator CS2

1. Quit Illustrator.
2. In the Adobe Illustrator CS2 Plug-ins folder, copy the current default startup file–Adobe Illustrator Startup_CMYK or Adobe Illustrator Startup_RGB–and save it with a different name. (This creates a copy of the original startup file in case you need it again.)
3. Open one of the default startup files (Adobe Illustrator Startup_CMYK or Adobe Illustrator Startup_RGB, depending on which type of document you intend to use).
4. Choose Window > Type > Character Styles.
5. Select the Normal Character Style and choose Character Style Options from the palette menu.
6. Select Basic Character Formats and choose the desired font from the Font Family menu.
7. Click OK, and save the new file as Adobe Illustrator Startup _CMYK or Adobe Illustrator Startup_RGB in the Plug-ins folder.
8. Restart Illustrator.

If you have any questions about this tutorial, please post them here.

As many of you know, I am a graphic designer. I use Adobe® Illustrator almost every single day.

One of the first things you should do, after you have purchased and installed Illustrator, is to customize your workspace, toolbars, shortcuts, scripts, fonts, and other preferences to your liking. In the weeks to come I will be posting some helpful tips on how to do just this!

The following tutorial will help you customize your starting document (new document). This also works in Illustrator CS2, however the process is slightly different.

To create a custom document profile in Illustrator CS3:

1. Open the New Document Profile file you want to customize in the New Document Profiles folder located in the below directories.
   • Windows: Documents and Settings\(User)\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS3 Settings.
   • Mac OS: Users\(User)\Library\Application Support\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS3
2. Delete any existing swatches, graphic styles, brushes, or symbols you don’t want to retain.
3. Do any of the following:
   • Select the font and style you want as your default font.
   • Create any colors, patterns, and gradients you want, and save them as swatches. You can also import swatches using the Swatch Libraries command and then move the swatches you want in the Document Profile file into the default Swatches panel.
   • Save any graph designs that you want available in your files using the Graph Design dialog box.
   • Create any graphic styles you want and save them to the Graphic Styles panel.
   • Create any brushes you want and save them to the Brushes panel.
   • Create any symbols you want and save them to the Symbols panel.
   • Select the options you want as default settings from the following: View preferences (from the View menu), ruler origins, page origins, print settings (in the Print dialog box, File > Print), and actions.
4. Save the Document Profile file and restart Illustrator.

If you have any questions about this tutorial, please post them here.

Continue Reading »