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Design Evangelist Rufus Deuchler shows how you can save time when applying and editing fills, strokes, effects and more with the new Appearance panel in Illustrator CS4.

Thinking of releasing a website? Launching a website in the near future? Run it by the The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist by BoxUk first to make sure you've got everything covered. It's a comprehensive list of things to do before launching a website, such as SEO optimization and user testing.

Adobe officially announced the launch of the Adobe Air Market Place, a central resource that collects the broad and ever-growing array of available AIR applications. Here are three of my recommendations:

New York Times recently released a web interface prototype called Article Skimmer. It utilizes a grid layout for current articles and has keyboard support for scrolling through the sections.

Following in the steps of the enhanced integration across the CS4 lineup, Dreamweaver now supports Photoshop PSD files. Drag and drop a PSD file into a Dreamweaver page to create an image Smart Object.

Professional software is expensive and can be financially out of reach to students and young professionals. However, there are other places to look for software. No not bittorrent! I'm speaking of free, open-source software readily available to download and use, license-free.

Designing some business cards? Need some inspiration? Card Observer, a website featuring a curated gallery of business card design, has got you covered. 

Adobe TV's Jorge and Paul of Inside the Dreamlabs demonstrates how easy it is use to bind a Yahoo! UI calendar widget to a Spry dataset in Dreamweaver. Video embedded below:

Yes, having your own website and domain helps a lot. It also helps if your website is a blog or has blog-like features such as dated entries and comments — even better. But if you're a creative professional you're going to need multiple outlets for your work for the sake of achieving two goals: exposure and building your community presence. Having more media outlets equals more exposure, that's a given. The main task at hand is choosing which ones will work best for you and keeping your profile updated.

There's a certain amount of nerdiness when it comes to ascii art because they're heavily rooted in early computers and video games. My first experience with ascii art is from the wonderful page headers of GameFaqs faqs. They were simply wonderful.