A hidden gem in my opinion, Illustrator’s “Reshape” tool can come in very handy in a variety of situations. In a nutshell, the Reshape tool allows you to drag a single point on a path and it tries to retain the overall shape of the entire path, while you only move the one anchor point. What? I’ll explain below.

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I knew iStockPhoto.com gives away a free (high-res) image each week, but I was completely unaware that they also give away a free vector each month (and video, if you’re into that). I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but I stumbled onto the vector freebie in one of the latest iStock email newsletters. Oh, and I should probably mention that you need to create an account in order to download all the free stuff. Thanks iStock!

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A very welcome new feature in Leopard is the ability to view fonts directly in the finder (Yay!). You can get a full-alphabet-preview in two places: Column view, and Quick Look. The rest of the views display an icon with the letters “Ag.” Hitting spacebar from any view will give you and alphabet preview (in Quick Look). No need to open Fontbook, or a 3rd party browser anymore whoohoo! Anything that saves a little time, and makes my life a little easier is worth a post. Hope it makes your life easier as well :)

Source: macosxhints

Click on the images for a larger view.

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For those of you that read BittBox via RSS, I’m dropping the “Random Free Vectors – Part X” and simply shortening it to “Free Vectors.” This gives me more room for description, and you probably don’t care which set it is anyway. You’d probably find a description much more useful. As for this set of vectors, it’s pretty simple. I made some paper/notepad vectors for everyone. I like the jagged edge of the ripped-out notepad pages, and I tried to reduce the complexity as much as I could so you can change the colors easily. I did, however, include one pretty complex vector that has the wrinkled texture of the paper intact. Hope you like ‘em :)

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The November featured artist is xLukex.beard, another standout talent from the BittBox User Showcase. xLukex.beard is a music enthusiast, and a master of the grunge, but don’t take my word for it, have a look for yourself and read the interview below…

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