Every designer knows that sometimes your clients will give you awful photos to work with. But when this happens there are many things you can do to improve the picture quality in Photoshop. http://www.youtube.com/embed/zmpJAfBEQrk Images can be improved by increasing contrast, increasing … [Read more...]
Essentials of great blog post design
Blogs are, in my opinion, the easiest and best way to get stuff on the web. With a blog you can publish constantly updated information about yourself, your company or your interests to the world. And what makes it even better is that this information is chronologically ordered and categorized for … [Read more...]
Create a photo gallery on your WordPress blog with NextGEN Gallery
I wanted to add a photo gallery to this website quickly the other day and to do this I used the NextGEN Gallery plugin. It seemed to be generally well-received by the WordPress community and I wasn't disappointed. I literally had my gallery up and running in five minutes! The plugin was created … [Read more...]
How to market yourself #5: How to optimize your WordPress site for search engines
This is the fifth in the series where I explain how an individual or small or medium sized organization can get themselves noticed in the big bad world. Other installments explained how to set up a web site from scratch, how to install WordPress and what to write on your site. Before we … [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...]
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...]
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...]
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...]