So today I started the Northwest Arkansas Adobe Users Group. You can find us here at http://groups.adobe.com/groups/f4d624cfc6/summary Once we have a few members I'll send out a note detailing the group and where we will meet and what the agenda of the meetings will be. Since moving here to the Fayetteville area from Dallas I would have to say the design culture is a little weak and I would like to use this to help establish NWA as a design hub. It is one of the major retail hubs with Walmart's home office and the vendor supplier community here but, being the Interactive Creative Director for an agency here I would have to say I have not been all that impressed with the talent in this area. I hope with regular monthly meetings we can help to raise the caliber and create a very cool design community in this area. So, stay tuned more to come and if you haven't joined look us up and do so.

So this morning I was finishing up a design I was working on before heading into work and I hit save to save the file to my HD and then being in a rush I didn't realize it was taking a moment to make the save. So I shut the computer off and when I got into the office much to my surprise the file said "Photoshop unexpected end of file error" and I was freaking out. How can I get my 200 layer PSD back open. So, I searched the forums and most people said I was screwed. This problem is caused when photoshop doesn't complete writing the headers and footers of the file. They said on average it happens once a week and the files are just lost. We'll I had a crafty spark of geniousness and I thought I wonder if Illustrator can open this file. So I dragged it on the icon and Bam! Illustrator CS3 opened the file just fine and kept the layers. Also I was able to export the file from there and save it as a PSD with all my layers. I gave it a different name to be safe and there it was on the desktop. Then I opened it in Photoshop and boom! It worked just fine and kept all the layers. Yeah! So, I'm not sure if this will always work or if this is a new feature with CS3 but it saved my day. 

Over at Sitepoint it seems they have a free version of the The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques for the hi-res version its 64m but for over 270 pages of tips, tricks and tutorials I'm sure it's worth it. It seems all you have to do is just enter your email and then they email you a link for the download. Thanks to the guys over at Sitepoint for this because no matter how long you've been doing this it's always great to remember the basics. So, listen up anyone that wants to learn PS this is an excellent guide for FREE!

Here is the link http://photoshop.aws.sitepoint.com/

Seems like it expires in about 25 days so hurry and get one. I created the pic above earlier today just playing around in PS trying to generate some new styles, this one falls along the current popular style I just really like this look in advertising right now.