[Award Winner] Assorted tips and tricks

[torstan]

First lunchtime tip of the New Year - today how to do simple city icons in Photoshop. This is more of a series of pointers to tools that will make your life easier. The actual tips are in the image this time.

Some useful tricks here:
• When you're on the Move Tool (V), if you hold down Option, the tool will create a copy of an object and move that rather than moving the object itself. This saves a lot of copying and pasting, or duplicating layers and really speeds up laying out a lot of icons.
• There's a little arrow beside the list of shapes in the Shape Tool toolbar. That has all sorts of useful options, like arrows on lines, or turning polygons into stars.
• Layer styles are very powerful. They are worth any amount of time invested into learning them, especially as they can be saved (using the New Style... button in the dialog). Once saved they can be applied very quickly.