Dealing With Your Ego as a Designer
A fundamental difference between programming intensive web-development work and graphic-focused web-design is that everyone – client to business associates – has an opinion and an alternative vision for the latter. The technically-steep learning curve of coding, whether it be the front-end or server-side configuration, tends to elicit few opinions and observations, simply because only a handful of clients actually possess the technical skills to analyze and interpret such work. Not…
Presiding as Editor over your own Design Magazine
WordPress has made it easier than ever for a web designer to setup their own blog. This system allows you to add content into your website and publish in a number of different ways. But with the ever-advancing Internet we are seeing posts transform into articles and webblogs are slowly turning into online magazines. In the realm of design we can find tens of hundreds of different design magazines. It…
Ignore the design, please
“Hey, I want to show you something I built. Ignore the design please, it is not finished yet.” From school science fair projects to real world product prototypes, if I had a nickel every time I heard that sentence I would be a lot richer by now. The truth is that a lot of people ask us to ‘ignore the design’ simply because we humans tend to judge anything new…
30 Realistic Pencil Drawings
It’s hard to believe that all of these beautiful pictures are pencil drawings and not digital. Pencil, paper, creativity and a heck of a lot skill are the only attributes of these masterpieces. Check them out: Gurn Drawing Christopher Reeve FuFu What a Lovely Picture Karlstadt Watermill Snow White Broken Heart Yendos Nature Pencil art by Rupak Rai The Tower Not a gammy leg in sight Mic the Dog Sin…
Why and How to Write Better Graphic Design Tutorials
For every single quality graphic design tutorial out there, another 50 just plain suck. They’re poorly written, use bad graphics, are about bad graphics, or just altogether skip important steps. It’s a shame, but bad tutorials also create an opportunity for those who are willing to take the time to produce quality work. Writing and publishing graphic design tutorials is an excellent way to promote yourself as a designer and…
Create a Stylized Election Poster Using Illustrator
It’s election season! Time for graphic designers to start helping clients design posters for their upcoming campaigns. It’s a great time to be a designer as each and every city has candidates making their run for spots. Using Live Trace and Live Paint in Illustrator makes stylized posters an easy task. This tutorial walks you through how to quickly make stylized posters that are vector based. This lets you use…
Enigmatic Black and White Flyer Design Tutorial with Photoshop
With this tutorial I wanted to create a club flyer design that was not your typical “scantily clad” affair that appeals to the more discerning club goers. So, with a few easy Photoshop and Illustrator effects, and my preference for black and white elegance, I created this enigmatic and outer space type design. Here is a preview of what we will be creating… …and here are the source files. Required…
The Deeply Graphic DesignCast
As graphic designers, it is so important for us to always keep learning in order to stay at the top of our game. Outside of classes, and actual on-the-job learning, there are many outlets for us to teach ourselves new tricks. One of my favorite new places to go for a bi-weekly dose of design inspiration, education, and yes – entertainment – is a fairly new podcast available on iTunes…
Design Trends: The Present, The Future, and You
Whether you agree with them or not, design trends can teach us important lessons on what works and what doesn’t for users. They’re popular for a reason. The true value of a trend, however, lies in its longevity. If you can identify trends that have the potential to last in the distant future, you will have a great advantage in making your own work successful — especially if you manage…
Improve Your Workflow By Eating Out – The Link Between Restaurants And Design Meetings
Let’s face it: when we eat out at a restaurant, we usually aren’t making the most logical choice on any front. Restaurants are quite a bit more expensive than cooking meals at home; they’re also less nutritious, less filling, and sometimes the quality of the food or the service can leave you more unhappy than you bargained for. Nevertheless, millions of us around the world eat at restaurants every day…
On Tastes, Trends and Personal Styles
The most important thing a designer needs to have is a good taste. A good taste at identifying great work. It doesn’t matter if your work doesn’t match up with your taste yet. It will slowly but steadily catch up. Ultimately your taste ends up defining your style. In fact your taste will be few steps ahead of your talent in the initial years of your career. Your taste can…
40 Humorous Photo Manipulations
In this post we have collected some humorous imagery that we know will make you laugh. Many of the images blend 21st century technology with the natural world and do so in a fashion were different parts of the images are so finely blended with each other that you will not be able to find any discontinuity. They are amazing. Some of these images you will find are pretty strange,…
50 Detailed Icon Design Tutorials for Photoshop
We are visual creatures. As much as we like to think we appreciate the inner quality of things, the reality is that we start off judging every book by its cover. It comes as no surprise then that icons have a huge impact on how we experience the digital world. So as a web designer, the ability to create quality icons is critical to your ability to breathe life into…
