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OLDER ARTICLES

Sending your Designs to the Printers

18
Sep
posted by                filed under Artwork, Photography

This is usually the skill which takes an amateur graphic designer and takes them to the next level of professional designer.

The most common mistake is not thinking about the colours when designing your piece. As most of you will be aware, by default Photoshop will want you to create graphics using RGB (Red, Green and Blue) at a resolution of 72dpi. This isn’t a problem if you are designing for the web, but nearly all printing houses will have detailed specifications if they are to take your design and work with it.

The Colour mode can be changed by going to image > mode to get a range of options that a printing company may request. The next step is going to image > image size, and then image resolution, changing the value from 72 to the desired rate. Remember that increasing this on an existing piece of artwork may diminish quality.

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Graphic Inspiration

16
Sep
posted by                filed under Artwork

Where do you normally get your inspiration from?

For web designing the best inspiration for me is to just browse other web pages. Web galleries also help to focus on websites that are of a high standard to draw inspiration from.

What kind of graphics are you creating?

If it’s artistic work, go find your local gallery to gain some knowledge on modern and classic art to inspire your piece.

How long of a deadline do you have?

If you have enough time to thoroughly research a piece, try to learn some new techniques to possibly use in your work.

If you have a bit of a designers block, sit back for an hour and come back to drawing board with a fresh mind. This often solves the problem until you get into the swing of things again.

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Photoshop Brushes

14
Sep
posted by                filed under Artwork

For those not familiar with Photoshop brushes they are simply graphics attached to the brush tool.

To view a selection of brushes choose the brush tool and then bring down the collection of brushes by expanding the list, top left of your Photoshop window.

Brushes can range from simple patterns to complex textures that can be dynamically resized without loss of quality.

They are very useful for web design when advanced textures and patterns are required in a background or a content section.

The best place to look for these is Google and a range of websites that focus on bringing you the best of the web, such as brusheezy.com.

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Graphic Training Courses

9
Sep
posted by                filed under General

The next step of developing your artistic skills might be to look at tuition. With the introduction of the internet, there are massive amounts of resources in graphic courses and training. Ranging from Paintings to Internet Web Design you will be able to find anything to help you improve your skills.

If you are interested in branching out into new forms of medium, again this is a great way to do so.

Searching locally via Google can lead to cheap ways to extend your skill set, even if it’s just a few tutorial DVDs to brush up on existing skills.

As the design world keeps moving forward incredibly quickly it’s vital to keep up to date with the latest techniques or the latest software or you may get left behind.

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Free Urban textures from CG Textures

29
Aug
posted by                filed under Urban

CG Textures is one of the best resource when you are looking for high res texture file. I think all of them are free to download and you get some pretty nice stuff from there.

We say Urban in the title but it is not limited to only that and if you need a texture it is certainly there. Some example of what you get below

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Inspration sources

28
Aug
posted by                filed under General

When looking for inspiration, the web is certainly one of the best place to look at. You can find sites about any kind of art so here is a list of the best ones in different field:

Website design galleries:

http://bestwebgallery.com/

http://cssmania.com/

Webdesign trends

http://box.mepholio.com/

Artwork

http://deviantart.com

Packagind, sculpture, object design

http://www.behance.com/

Business card design

http://cardobserver.com/

All round inspiration

http://www.abduzeedo.com/

There are many more so do not hesitate to share yours in the comment section. This is just a quick list of the ones we check on an hourly basis :p

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10 Internet celebrities you should follow on twitter

27
Aug
posted by                filed under General

Twitter is the last kid in the Social media landscape and many very interesting people are using it every day. By following some of them you will keep up to date with the latest links, trends and idea. As a designer I think it is really worth it so here are the top 10 people you should follow on twitter:

chriscoyier – Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks

collis – Collis Ta’eed of Eden

abduzeedo – Fabio Sasso of Abduzeedo

chrisspooner – Chris Spooner of Spoon Graphics

cssglobe - Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe

vpieters - Veerle Pieters of Veerle’s Blog

mike9r – Mike Rundle of 9 Rules

clearleft – Clearleft

ryancarson – Ryan Carson of Carsonified

meyerweb – Eric Meyer

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GimpShop, free photoshop alternative

27
Aug
posted by                filed under General

The Gimp is a free open source image edition software. It has all the features you are use to and many more and can easily replace Photoshop if you are looking for a free alternative.

The pr0blem with the Gimp, which is why it has never been fully embraced by the community, is the interface. Not as intuitive as Photoshop you can easily get lost in the different menus. Plus it made from multiple windows, which makes it not very easy to move/resize the way you want it.

Now being open source means every one can contribute and someone made an adaptation of Gimp using a similar interface as Photoshop. It’s called GimpShop

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Spectacular spiderman illustrations

25
Aug
posted by                filed under Artwork

Spiderman is a comic character first appeared around 1960. The super hero is  a young boy able to climb walls, shoot spider web and react to danger with a spider sense.

The comic was a big hit when it came out because it was featuring a high school student who deal with the normal struggles in life and who young readers could easily relate to, as opposed to Batman and and James Buchanan, heroes of that time.

Spiderman is one of the most popular heroes of all time and it is no surprise that deviant art is full of awesome illustration of the spider in action. …click here to read more

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Improve your Travel Pictures

24
Aug
posted by                filed under Photography

A nice post on phototutplus about taking better travel pictures. All the advice in there are pretty good and should definitely improve the outcome of a nice trip in a foreign country. The best advice are:

Look for a different take on local landmarks

Basically don’t stick to easy to do photos, try to add a unseen details and different angles. The example of the Eiffel tower is a good one. How would take the Eiffel tower so it doesn’t look like the hundreds of picture we see everywhere.

Use a polarizing filter

This is a good advice but not for beginners. And you need a SLR camera as no compact camera will allow you to add filters in the optical.

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