Great computer graphics magazine

If you do anything related to computer graphics and design, one of the best print magazines is the monthly Computer Arts Magazine published in England.

The focus is British, but includes lots of rest of the world design. It’s great to see what people are doing in Brazil and Hong Kong and Russia and Singapore.

The range of tutorial projects is wide. Recent ones include designing a letterhead for your company, drawing in anime style, designing a logo, branding online, and creating an animated book.

The art and design they feature is unusually current. Perhaps British illustrators are on the leading edge right now. At any rate, trends you see first this magazine often appear within the year on album covers, other magazines, TV commercials, and print advertisements.

Perhaps the best parts of the magazine are the tutorials, simple, clear, richly visual descriptions of how to do a variety of design-related tasks, using a variety of software.

In addition, each issue comes with a CD containing goodies like free Illustrator brushes, fonts, tutorials, or stock photos.

And hey, you get to do on the fly currency calculations, and occasionally puzzle over British slang. The magazine is somewhat expensive— $15 or so an issue in the US. On the other hand, for great design and excellent tutorials, you get as much instruction and inspiration in two or three issues as you would in a how-to book, except these are lots prettier, and much more current.

Best of all, the publishers are generous— a trip to the website, http://www.computerarts.co.uk/ gives you the opportunity to look at an amazing variety of articles and tutorials from previous issues. Try some of them out, and if you find them useful, subscribe.

Easily customize your WordPress blog

There is a very easy way to customize the look of your WordPress blog.

Generally, the standard WordPress blog works fine for most people. It’s a clean, simple design, and after all, your text content is so compelling that looks don’t matter!

But if you decide you want to change your look, here’s the easy way to do it.

1. It’s best to work in Firefox—for some unknown reason, certain aspects of WordPress do not always work in Safari.

2. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and click on “Presentation”

3. When the page comes up, scroll through it until you find a look, a “Theme” you like.

4. Click on the Theme to see what your new blog page would look like.

5. If it’s not quite what you want, hit the backspace button and keep looking. When you find just the right one, click “Activate,” and you will have new Theme!

And you can change it again whenever you want.