Free stock photography for a graphic designer

camera lens close up

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 photography agencies are Getty Images and Corbis. They offer mostly photographs that [...]

Ways to beat a design and marketing slump

recession, credit crunch, slump, downturn, slowdown

Personally, I have noticed other recessions far sooner than this one. It seems like months and months of dreary economic forecasts had passed before I got an inkling that it was going on. Anyway, here’s some ways to defeat the dreaded downturn. Diversify Do something you’re not doing at the moment. Web designers should diversify [...]

Turn your client’s photos into beautiful images

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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, [...]

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 [...]

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 turn a photo into an illustration

sunflower

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 on the Control Palette offers [...]

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