Doing eye-catching designs in Illustrator

Eye-catching-swirl-spiral

I’m always on the look out for simple eye-catching ways to communicate a message. I think this is a great example of a visually appealing background that could be used when there are no images, graphics or other ways to improve the typography. This is especially useful in direct marketing (email or mail shot). How [...]

Turn your client’s photos into beautiful images

A-client's-portrait-as-a-beautiful-photoshop-image-example-1

The problem Err, sorry, the challenge. How many times does this happen? You have an otherwise beautiful design and your client insists on including pictures of people who’s images weren’t taken by one of the world’s best photographers. This is a reoccurring hitch; we have to include pictures of the CEO, the MD, the whoever, [...]

Designing for the digital grapevine

digital grapevine social web 2

Web 2.0 in design and marketing This is an image I made to try to explain the digital grapevine: A network of users that interact to answer questions, solve problems and have fun or the trend in the use of the internet and web design that enhances creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users that [...]

How to put one image inside another image

forest inside a woman's face

There is an ad campaign in London at the moment for Portuguese tourism. You can see 48-,24- and 16-sheet adverts in the tube with giant portraits of famous Portuguese celebrities (Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho) with a landscape showing through the image. Something similar to this effect that can be achieved with only a few clicks [...]

How to distress or shatter type in Illustrator

shattered-type

This is a good tip if you ever want to change type to invoke a mood. I wanted to give a bit of text a feeling of electricity and this is what I did. First of all, in Illustrator, you must convert your type to outlines. Remember, after you have done this you can’t edit [...]

Using Photoshop channels to create cool montages

davos-connected

A client of mine was illustrating an article about the World Economic Forum whose annual meeting is usually held in scenic Davos in Switzerland. My client was keen to stress the importance of interconnectivity within both the forum and the wider business community and gave me an image of connected wires of light to marry [...]

A gritty, grainy, reportage look and feel to photos

gritty-grainy-effect

The above picture of a couple has been treated in Photoshop to give it a gritty, grainy, reportage look. This has also been described as the “Dave Hill effect” after a Californian commercial photographer (not the guitarist from Slade) although, of course, this won’t be his exact method. It immediately looks like a serious photo [...]

Photoshop trick for smoothing a model’s skin

smooth-skin-photoshop

This is a quick technique to even out blemishes in a model’s skin. I came across this by accident but I think it’s a really good way to instantly make people pictures look more eye-catching and professional. It also has the effect of brightening and adding contrast. Very simple. Get the layer you want to [...]

How to design perspective in Photoshop

pavement-perspective

I used this image as a title slide in a PowerPoint presentation for MasterCard, one of my clients. It was a great excuse to do a reflection and transform its perspective to make it look like the headline is actually there on the pavement. The method I use to do perspective is much simpler that [...]

How to design water reflections in Photoshop

ripple_reflections

“Reflections are the new drop shadows!” If that’s the case, here’s how! Copy the text layer – or layer – that you want to reflect (Cmd/Ctrl-J). If the layer that you want to reflect is a text layer then you should Rasterize it. To do this, right-click on the text layer in the Layers palette [...]

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