As many of you will know, I've been working as a solopreneur since 2005. During that time, I've tried a lot of different business models, but one of my favorites has to be Print on Demand. Print on Demand is a great side business as it allows you to sell a wide range of products with zero inventory … [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...]
What is an artworker?
Many people have asked me this question and, in the absence of a Wikipedia entry, here's my definition. The term pre-dates desktop publishing when "artwork" or "mechanical art" meant the material (photography, bromide, film, tranparency) or completed, camera-ready pages that could be photographed … [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...]
Working with large files in Photoshop
Preparing artwork for huge exhibition spaces or large point-of-sale displays in Photoshop can be a nightmare and can use up precious processing time on your computer. And this is even if you have a Dual 2 GHz G5 Mac with 3 GB of RAM! But there's no need to keep the high resolution you would for … [Read more...]
Price quotes and estimates for graphic design
One of the most asked questions on graphic design forums is: "How much I should charge?" Well, the answer is, I don't know! But here is a list of my most recent price quotes. These design estimates include image sourcing and copy editing but assume images and most text have already been supplied or … [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...]
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...]