Since Illustrator CS2, Adobe introduced live effects which are effects that can be applied to a selection, then tweaked at anytime after. One of the default effects is the popular drop shadow effect which is seen on practically every web page these days.

But the settings for the drop shadow effect are pretty limited and not as easy to use as in Photoshop.

The default settings place a huge shadow under your object and offer no granular way to tweak your shadow except to literally type the decimal values. In this tip I’ll show you alternative way to create even better drop shadows.

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If you have a color photo or artwork in color, that you’d like to turn black and white, but want to keep a color copy around here’s an easy tip.

With your art in view, drag a square or circle or any shape over the color art.

Color your shape with a any shade of gray.

Open your Transparency palette (Window->Transparency) and choose Color from the blend menu.

Now you have a converted black and white image wit your color art safely underneath.

If you use Illustrator for web design and the colors you choose are to be used the final implementation, it’s a good idea to know how to find the hexadecimal versions of your colored objects. Illustrator does let you work directly with web colors but if you need that hex value, theres not way to copy it from an object… quickly.

The way to do it is, select the object then double click the fill or stroke color. This will bring up the standard Adobe color dialog, which shows all the various values of this color. The one you want is the the field with “#” as the label. Select and copy it to the clipboard.

Lost my domain, Lost my old posts, but I still had the theme. Better than nothing I guess.

Freaking 1&1.com turned my account off because of failed payment… how they seem to handle payments is, my domains were on auto renew. When payment time came around - my card failed (It had expired - I could handle the 15 dollars)… but rather than just not renew the domains like most registrars - I get a bill in the mail. 

In my head I’m thinking I’ll let them lapse and pick them up again when they expire with GoDaddy whom I usually buy from. But nope, when I ignored the bill, the payment went to collections. So weird. With most registrars, if you don’t renew your domain - you lose it - you don’t go to collections to pay back payment. And I still lost the domains so I wasn’t even paying for the domain names.

Now I have to deal with collections. I have two accounts with 1&1 and the same is happening with the second account now. I will never use them again.