Designing tables with a hanging bracket

It’s the joyous season of the dreaded companies’ annual report and accounts where artworkers and printers try to make money by producing horribly boring documents full of endless tables with horrendously dull titles like “Intangible Assets”.
But, do you know the trick of how to get columns of figures to line up, as the accountants like, [...]

Designing a crystal ball in Photoshop

This is cool technique I’ve discovered which uses the Polar Coordinates filter in Photoshop to make a globe or a planet.
Start with picture (I chose one of some nice clouds). You may or may not at this point convert it into a square, but at some stage you will need to. As the edge of [...]

Choosing colours while designing

Choosing a group of colours can be a daunting exercise. OK, so there’s some golden rules to follow, like “always choose from the same third of the colour wheel”. Golden rules are made to be broken.
Adobe has a colourful website to make this a bit easier. If you sign in you can download the [...]

Designing waves and wavey lines in Illustrator

You can use this tutorial to make weeds or grasses swaying in the wind as above. Or colour them orange, yellow and red and you’ve got flames. They are also a useful decorative feature that seems to be quite common these days.
Start with a line…

Go Filter > Distort > Zig Zag, or Effect > Distort [...]

Graphic designer’s picture quiz #2 with hidden object

Feel free to put your answers in the comments section.

What is it? (OK – that’s easy)
Where is it?
Who designed it?
What and where is the hidden object (only one)?
What is the relevance of the hidden object?
What is the relevance of the image to this site?

Easy?

How to design shiny web 2.0 buttons in Illustrator

You could do this in almost the same way in Photoshop but I have recently been following the mantra “If you can do it in Illustrator, do it in Illustrator” – to save on disc space if for no other reason.
First draw the circle of your button (I’m following the bottom line of blue buttons [...]

Quark contacts this website!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short article entitled Things I love about designing in InDesign that I couldn’t do in Quark which, I’m afraid to say included a couple of mistakes.
Then I got an email from Quark Inc.!
Matthias Guenther, a Senior Product Manager at Quark’s offices in Hamburg, Germany contacted [...]