Blog - Build an Online Business Brand with Personal Freedom

What is a graphic designer?

Websites, posters, business cards, detergent boxes, DVD artwork, movie credits and dog food cans – graphic designers do them. Within just about every conceivable employment sector, a graphic designer brands, advertises and communicates. He works under time and money constraints and, to varying … [Read more...]

Designing web icons

Here are some icons I designed for a friend's website. He asked me to make them at three sizes: 20 pixels wide, 80 pixels wide and 300 pixels wide. There's a real skill to designing icons. You have to make them simple enough to be understandable at small sizes but interesting enough to be beautiful … [Read more...]

Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?

Question: How can you disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book to a large number of people cheaply? Answer: Email a PDF. Almost every computer has Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) and PDFs are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed … [Read more...]

Public art near Tate Britain

Not only can you see art for free at Tate Britain, you can also get some just down the road. On the left you can see Locking Piece (1963) by Henry Moore on Millbank right by the river between Vauxhall bridge and Tate Britain. And on the other side of the road there's JetÃ© by Enzo Plazzotta (1975). … [Read more...]

Photoshop flame effect

Choose and bold sans serif for your type. This is Arial black. Rasterize Type. Rotate canvas by 90º clockwise. In order to get points coming from the top of the type it needs to be white out type on black on the same layer. Go Filters > Stylize > Wind from the left. Then invert and rotate … [Read more...]

Designing PDF newsletters

The first rule of making PDFs is easy... do it in InDesign, don't even think of doing it in Quark. Navigation, linking to the web and even playing movies can be sorted out in InDesign first before the PDF is made. This way when the client has added his changes these elements don't have to be re-done … [Read more...]

Designing at Tate

I have been doing some work at Tate Britain recently. As you can imagine, designing a booklet on contemporary and modern British art compares favourably to some of the more corporate work I've been doing. I've also been very impressed with their design guidelines, typeface and logos that were set … [Read more...]

Gamehouse games

As a Mac user I am limited in the number of games I can download. Recently, I've been getting them from Gamehouse usually at $20 a game! The first three, Tumblebugs, Zuma and Luxor have the same addictive but stressful gameplay – shooting coloured balls making matches of three or more to destroy … [Read more...]

Using the Quick Mask Mode in Photoshop

The Quick Mask Mode is a much overlooked method for making selections. In particular, "burning" or darkening skies more at the top of the image than at the horizon. To do this, go into Quick Mask Mode, either by clicking on the icon at the bottom of the tool bar or by pressing Q. Immediately, the … [Read more...]

Improving photos with Photoshop

This is about the very basics of improving landscape photography. For years I've been taking rather bland photos of both natural landscapes and cityscapes and then pushing those pixels to bits in Photoshop. One of the most important things to learn in Photoshop is selecting areas of pictures. For … [Read more...]