To appreciate how broken most contemporary models of advertising and promotion have become, listen to Jeff Bezos complain about how Amazon's core values are misunderstood. "One of the early examples...was customer reviews," he recalls. "One [critic] wrote to me and said, 'You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow these negative customer reviews?' And when I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

For years, Gabrielle Watson kept her art to herself. She painted large, expressionistic oil portraits of friends and relatives in her Crown Heights apartment when she wasn't at her day job as a lawyer. Some of her friends didn't even know about her art habit. That changed in September when Ms. Watson, who is 31, "came out" as an artist by participating in "GO," an open-studio weekend organized by the Brooklyn Museum, during which artists of every level across the borough welcomed the public into their work spaces.

Quick: Name the product that you can sell and customize for Lady Gaga, the Irish Times, the Toronto Star, ESPN, the WWE, AmazingRibs.com, and Suicide Girls. Give up? Kelly Abbott knows the answer.

According to a 2012 report by Adobe, a whopping 52 percent of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social media marketing. I would like to try and alleviate some of that pain, at least when it comes to marketing on Twitter.

Pictures and images make everything better, especially online. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather see something visual than read a big block of text. I'm sure a lot of your customers and potential customers feel the same way, too.

As creatives we constantly strive to reinterpret the world in new and visually exciting ways. Yet as consumers and critics, we’re inherently conservative and often have a knee-jerk reaction when someone changes something we like. With big-brand logo redesigns, there’s the added element of jealousy – “If I’d been given half as much money, I could have come up with something better than that”.

 Photoshop CS6 is a beast! It’s an all-powerful behemoth capable of producing sublime images, high-quality video and with CS6 Extended it can even create very passable 3D renders.