Free PDF Download: The Photoshop Anthology

It’s not very often that I plug work stuff on my personal blog, but every now and then I make an exception.

When I was working as a technical editor at SitePoint, we decided to experiment with printing a full-colour title. The book was called The Photoshop Anthology, which taught Photoshop skills specific to creating web graphics. It was — and still is — a terrific book that I still refer to on occasion.

I was the technical editor of the book, and even though I considered myself to be an advanced Photoshop user, I learned a bunch of stuff during the editing process.

Well, every book moves through a series of stages in its lifecycle, and this book is about to take its next step. For the next 30 days, that same book is available as a free PDF download. The download is being sponsored by 99designs, which is a graphic design crowdsourcing company.

I always feel a nervous sense of excitement whenever we decide to give away something like this for free. The nervousness comes from the fact that a dozen people worked so hard on this book over a period of months, but the excitement comes from watching how popular the giveaway performs.

So anyway, if you have even a passing interest in graphic design and Photoshop, then you should head on over and download The Photoshop Anthology in PDF format before the offer expires.

I’ll finish with some random facts about the book:

• It was SitePoint’s first-colour book, of which we’ve printed several since.
• It was the first time we tried the new cover design, with a coloiur photo on a mostly white background. All of our books now follow this cover design.
• The cover photo was taken by Ellen Waters, a Melbourne-based student. Ellen was living in Japan at the time, so was difficult to get hold of to obtain permission to use the image. Luckily some family friends passed on her mobile number and we managed to track her down.
• It was the first book that we designed using Adobe InDesign (previously every book was laid out using XSL-FO. There are two other books that we used InDesign for — The Art & Science of CSS and The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design.

Download The Photoshop Anthology for free.

posted: 15.05. 2008, 13:47 (0)