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 for … [Read more...]
How to design a 3D crystal ball in Illustrator
This starts, as most tutorials start, with something very easy: draw a circle. So, select your circle tool and drag diagonally to preferred size, not forgetting to hold down the shift key. Fill the circle white, with no stroke. Next, select the Gradient Mesh Tool (U) and click four points … [Read more...]
Freelance graphic designer and SEO
The primary objective of this website is to attract clients to my design business. The two ways I try to achieve this are: Get other good websites to link to me with my desired keywords as the anchor text. For example, freelance graphic designer, designer in London, UK design services, are good … [Read more...]
Improving photos with Photoshop by a Graphic Designer
The above picture is one of my snaps taken very quickly at the end of clearish autumn day. I have improved this picture with Photoshop by selecting certain areas and altering the colour, brightness and contrast. I first thing I did was to copy the photo to a new layer (Cmd/Cntl-J) I then use my … [Read more...]
How to design a montage in Photoshop
Here, as promised, is a short tutorial about creating montages. Here is a montage of three different images which gel together without having to laboriously cut anything out. Layer masking with a brush I sized the cityscape image over the picture of the girl and played around with layer blend … [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 design sound waves in Illustrator
This is a nice little trick using Illustrator's Blend option. To create perfect sine-waves – or something very close – first of all, draw a line. Then go Filter > Distort > Zig Zag... and choose the number and height of waves you want (remembering to click the smooth radio button, otherwise … [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...]
Creating a country’s flag inside its map outline
Quite often I'm looking for a simple iconic device to represent a country without having to just reproduce the flag alone. So, as you can see above, why not put the flag inside the country's shape. Also, it's free! It's relatively easy to find a country's flag and shape on the internet and … [Read more...]
Freelance graphic designer’s picture quiz #4 – spot the logo
The above picture is made from 17 logos of the most famous brands in the world. The question is very simple: which letter comes from which logo? Please leave your answers in the comments section of this post. … [Read more...]
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