Designing your own logo

As I have now incorporated (become a Limited Company) and got totally sick and tired of Helvetica Neue I’ve finally got round to doing a new logo for myself. Here it is. Done very quickly with one curve and two line lengths in Illustrator. What do you think?

What is good design?

This is an article I wrote for this competition. Looks like I didn’t win.
What is good design? I’ll tell you. Good design is whatever your client wants. Good design is whatever rich people like. Good design conforms to the zeitgeist.
I’ll never forget my first paid assignment in the world of design. I gingerly handed a [...]

Creating cool twirls and spirals with Illustrator

Here is an amazingly cool Illustrator tutorial about creating twirls from Veerle Pieters a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. Twirls from Veerle, you might say. (Sorry!)
The Spiral Tool can be selected by holding your mouse down on the Line Segment Tool. Once you have created a spiral you like, copy (command/control -C) and paste [...]

Freelance graphic designers’ blogs

Here are my favourite three blogs of people who, like me, are graphic designers and write about it on the internet. Firstly, from Romania, I really like webee design blog. Webee has really helped me out with his tips and encouragement.
Also a beautiful creative design blog by David Airey who has blogging help as well [...]

Mac Games: Fairies, Jewel Quest and Ouba

These games involve a multi-object grid and moving rows and columns or swopping objects until you match up three in a row. (I don’t know if there is a special name for this type of casual game!) By far the best and most beautiful of this genre is Fairies. It has extremely high production values, [...]

Hidden object mac games

Using Flash and Photoshop to create beautiful scenes, hidden object games are an ideal distraction for relaxed gamers.
Here are four I got from Big Fish Games at $20 a go.
Three of them are in the Mystery Case Files series: Huntsville, Prime Suspects and Ravenhearst. Ravenhearst is definitely the best. Set in a Victorian English [...]

Working with large files in Photoshop

Preparing artwork for huge exhibition spaces or large point-of-sale displays in Photoshop can be a nightmare and can use up precious processing time on your computer. And this is even if you have a Dual 2 GHz G5 Mac with 3 GB of RAM!
But there’s no need to keep the high resolution you would for [...]

Why RGB colours look bad when converted to CMYK

RGB can be seen in the dark. CMYK can’t. RGB shines out at you. CMYK inks absorb some colours and reflect others.
Somebody wrote to me the other day whose website had lovely blue type on a black background. Fine. Unfortunately, the results when changed into CMYK and printed were dull, muddy and terrible.
How can [...]