Designing logos are the ultimate challenge for the graphic designer and there is nothing simple about doing them. The logo is the first and most important visual cue of a company or brand. Logos (usually) should be simple, compact and of one or two colors. Because you have less to play with, it's … [Read more...]
Free stock photography for a graphic designer
All graphic designers and people trying to create eye-catching imagery for print or web with have at some point used stock photography. Stock photography negates the need for hiring expensive photographers can license individual photos for specific uses. The two largest traditional stock … [Read more...]
How to market yourself #8: How to offer RSS feed and email subscriptions
So you've got your self-hosted WordPress blog set up, optimized and have already published a few great posts and you want to offer an RSS feed and email subscription to your posts. What is RSS? RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a format used to publish frequently updated content from … [Read more...]
What rates should a graphic designer charge?
One of the questions I get asked the most by clients and other designers alike is about (surprise, surprise) money. So what is the hourly rate for a graphic designer? Ahh, there's the question. If you're fresh out of college, I would say (and don't blame me if you can't pay off your loans) around … [Read more...]
Simple design idea for corporate marketing
I was asked to come up with a visual to portray a corporate bank's image. This was one of the largest banks in the world, one that prided itself on coming up with intelligent solutions and, whilst it wanted to evoke reliability and gravity, it also wanted to be known as innovative. The tag line … [Read more...]
Montage design for music DVDs
I have been working on some CD and DVD packaging for a music creation software company. I love doing stuff to do with music and here I was asked to create some montages to express different musical genres. The montages will eventually go on large sierra boxes (a sierra box is a large cardboard box … [Read more...]
How to make PowerPoint presentations and Word documents look beautiful
If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: "The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice", what are you going to do? The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote and get … [Read more...]
How to turn a photo into an illustration
Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator's old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities! As soon as you place or paste a photo into Illustrator a button … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
Designing with keyboard shortcuts in Quark and Creative Suite
Remember you can choose the keystrokes of InDesign to those of Quark by going Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts... The table below is for the default shortcuts. Action Quark InDesign Illustrator Photoshop Show/Hide guides F7 Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-; (Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-H for boxes) Cmd(Mac)/ … [Read more...]
Download my 2 free e-books and 2 free MP3s on running an online business & getting clients
Plus a list of my 12 favorite resources for online business