Recently, a lengthy and at times very funny thread on the Illustrator User-to-User forum (at Adobe.com) had people chiming in about how aggravating Illustrator's new Gray Box from Hell feature is, with a small number of Illustrator mavens arguing for the defense.

I'm referring to the gray box outline that Illustrator CS2 automatically puts around a group (items you've previously selected and grouped together via Object > Group) when you double-click any item in the group with the Selection tool.

In recent issues I've mentioned that I did a couple "webinars" (aka webcasts) for Adobe, one on Adobe Bridge, "Your Creative Hub," and the other called "An Introduction to an Adobe InCopy and InDesign Workflow". Each one is an hour long and I covered a ton of material.

If you weren't able to attend, you can now see them on Adobe's web site, since they recently published them as On Demand (recorded) seminars. No cost, of course. Check out the other On Demands while you're there, they're all great!

In between projects, I've been exploring the second version of the QuarkXPress 7 beta (released March 31 and good till May 2, 2006):
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/seven/register.cfm

Most of all, I'm enjoying stumbling on various new features that are barely mentioned — if ever —l in the "What's New in QuarkXPress 7" promotional content on Quark's site. I'm not sure why they don't mention these things, if I were them I'd put every damn new feature next to a big fat blinking bullet no matter how minor.

Here's my latest discovery: There's something new you can do with black-and-white or grayscale TIFFs.more >

Not a tip, really, just something of interest to all you logo designers out there.

How can you tell if a company is a cutting-edge, cover-of-Wired-magazine, Web 2.0ish, acquisition-ripe company? If their logotype uses a soft, rounded typeface and is colored lime green, blue or orange, of course.

Think Friendster, Flickr, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, LinkedIn, Skype, MySpace, Bloglines, Technorati … like that.