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If the employees are getting paid hourly then a move to a 32 hour work week amounts to a very serious pay cut. Lots of people working jobs in retail, restaurants, etc get hit with all sorts of reduced hour schemes like that. Many companies deliberately over-staff so they can fill shifts with...

I could only see our shop going to a 4/10 setup if business got slow. The way things are with our current Monday-Friday schedule we get a good amount of pressure from some customers to be open on Saturdays. We have had crews working on the weekends for some projects. Some people in our office...

Castle Ultra (bundled with CorelDRAW) looks similar. If that isn't a match the lettering in the sample is simple enough that it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to duplicate using manual digitizing and shape-building methods.

I've tried doing the form thing as a way to streamline my dialog with people actually making contact with the customers, be it a full time sales person, our company owner or even someone else answering the phone. All too often something the customer needs doesn't fit into that form. That's the...

GIMP is arguably the best free/open source alternative. Affinity Photo is a pretty good image editor ($49). It has a fairly similar tool set to Photoshop and can read PSD files. Procreate is a great painting app for the iPad. For a one time purchase of $10 in the app store it's quite a bargain.

The setting "Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities" is checked "on" by default in Illustrator CC as part of the default Adobe PDF Preset. Users can change any of the options. Certain setting get changed when saving under a different PDF Preset, such as the "smallest file size" preset. What...

Sign customers routinely want everything cheap as possible. Compounding the problem, far too many can be lazy as hell providing details and assets to get the job done promptly. The "logo" files they provide are very often the first stupid JPEG image they found on their personal computer's hard...

The mess of clipping masks, clipping groups and even embedded raster-based images in those groups is usually auto-generated when someone exports a graphic design with application-dependent effects in a format like PDF for viewing or even editing in a non-native application environment. No one is...

Customers often get irritated by those rates. That's because they don't think it costs us anything to drive out to their businesses to swap out a lamp or ballast. We pay out the wazoo for worker's comp insurance premiums along with all kinds of other stuff. So we track the amount time a crew...

Or you can make your own wheelchair logo thingie to hang from the rear view mirror. Seriously, I think there should be more stringent standards for who gets to park in those spaces. Here in my town I've seen perfectly able-bodied guys park giant $90,000 diesel 4X4 pickups in those spaces and...

Sadly this situation is far too common. I've dealt with people saving raster-based images in vector-oriented file containers (like EPS, AI, CDR, PDF, etc) for over 20 years. Way back then I had thoughts (or perhaps fantasies) that technology and knowledge would catch up to this problem and snuff...

I think that's an entirely different topic that what Apple is doing to strong-arm customers hopelessly locked into its hardware platform. I'll agree that Adobe has a monopoly of sorts. My workplace is suffering a bit under it. We have 3 Adobe CC licenses we're paying about $53 per month each to...

Is this proposed legislation perhaps inspired by Apple and its tendency lately to glue and solder the computer components that were previously upgrade-able by end users? That's one of the big turn-offs for me regarding Apple-branded computers. IMHO if you buy a notebook computer or desktop...

That approach can only, at best, get in the ballpark in terms of accuracy. First of all, mobile phone cameras only stink when it comes to tasks like zoom. Mobile phones have fake zoom, not an actual optical-based zoom lens. They crop into the image and then blow up the cropped result. Lousy. A...

The difference with configuring a professional workstation tower from HP, Dell and other vendors of that sort is the price balloons up based on the CPUs, graphics boards, ECC RAM and other stuff that goes inside the case. The price isn't inflated based on the styling of its outside or the...

The new Mac Pro tower is ridiculously over-priced for what's included in the tower. Let's not forget about the especially douchey $1000 computer monitor stand. I don't even know what kind of customer Apple expects to buy this polished cheese grater, other than rich, modern-day Marie Antoinette...

Avid is still popular on the high end, where their software has been entrenched for a much longer time. On the sound editing angle, Pro Tools is still the king of professional-level audio editing applications. Nevertheless, all the local TV stations in my viewing market are using Adobe software...

Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign have been ruling the roost of the print graphics and publishing world. Adobe is not dominating that market out of customer apathy either. The 3 applications have close integration with each other which is completely unmatched by anyone else. Those 3...

I can't get anything from Inkscape to work correctly. Maybe it's a bug with this latest version. But the art board in SVG files output from Inkscape come into Thrive Cut Server only showing a 12" X 24" art board and the graphics going way out of those bounds. That's confirmed by opening the...

I've been in this business even longer. It's possible for a sign shop not to use any Adobe software at all and use whatever it likes if the shop is creating all of its work from scratch. When you have to use artwork from a broad variety of clients (national brands down to mom and pop...