You can easily control the opacity of colors in Illustrator. You can Control the opacity of the stroke and the fill individually by using the appearance panel. Directly under each stroke and fill layer in the appearance panel, there is an opacity section, where you...
This is a great method to get great masks in Photoshop. You can actually have 2 masks on an image at the same time. You can use a vector mask and use a custom shape to mask out an image, creating a clean mask for sharp edges. The pixel mask is great for creating...
After being constantly attacked last week for ruining their logo, Gap decided to revert back to the old logo that everyone knows and loves. They admitted that is was a wrong step for the company, and that the customer comes first, which is great. They should come...
First, take your image and duplicate the background layer, so you can go back to your original if you need to. Hide the background layer and work from your copy. Go into the channels panel and hold down the command key (CTRL on the PC) and click on the RGB channel to...
Red Giant Software has announced the newest version of Knoll Light factory, Version 3.2. This is great because the new version supports Photoshop CS5. It also supports 64-bit systems and it even includes a few new custom lens presets. They have included Blue Halo,...
Something came to my attention yesterday that I just couldn't keep quiet about. Gap unleashed their new logo yesterday, and the media has been buzzing around this decision since. They have had the same logo for about 20 years now, and everyone seems to know the blue...
Many companies and designers think that branding and identity begins and ends with a logo, but there is much more to branding than simply creating a pretty logo. The whole point of building an identity or brand is to build trust with a client and create a connection...
I was asked a question yesterday that really got me thinking: What do you think the future will hold for design and advertising? What will be the next big platform to design for? I thought about this for a long time, and my guess is as good as yours. People are always...
I frequent a lot of design blogs, simply because I like to know what is on the mind of other designers, and also because I like to have my ear to the ground regarding our industry. One thing that I caught wind of was a discussion about designers and web designers and...
First off, I want to thank everyone that participated for their invaluable comments for this post. There are many aspects to branding and corporate identity, and I think each comment touched on a different aspect. Branding is a vital part of marketing and building a...
You can set up a good grid from the start of a new document in Indesign. When the New Document pops up, you can set the number of columns in your document. I tend to use either 3 or 5 columns. You can use as many as you want. I tend to try to keep it simple and to the...
Contest Rules: It's simple- All you have to do is go to the Creative Beacon website and post a comment at the bottom of the giveaway announcement page to win. Post a comment about what you think is the most important aspect of branding or identity. Post your comments...
For those of you that love good plugins, Knoll light factory is a very cool time saving addition to After Effects. The new edition works with CS5, and has a few new features as well. if you own an older version, you can upgrade for a reasonable price of $99, but if...
I got this question yesterday, and thought that it would be a good topic for the day. If you want to fit text to a certain shape, you have a couple of options. The first option is to do what is called an envelope distort. First, you make your shape, and then take the...
Create a Psychedelic image in Photoshop This is a neat trick that will give you some really interesting and extremely colorful results. To start off, create a new document. It can be any dimension that you want, and click ok. Mine is set at 1024 x 768. Then, create a...
When creating type in Photoshop, and you are looking for just the right display face, it helps to use the key commands to get things just how you want them. If you double click your text icon next to the layer, it will highlight your text. Then, simply go up to the...
I was playing around with some of the new stuff inside of Photoshop CS5 and came across one of the new tools that they have included called the mixer brush. This is a great new tool that allows you to take a photo and use different settings to create a painting from...
The other day, I was talking to some friends and colleagues and overheard someone in the background talking about Photoshop. They claimed that they were an incredible graphic designer, because they are incredible with Photoshop. After overhearing this, I asked for a...
X-RITE With this site, you take a color test to see if you are as good with color as you think you are. This site goes off the notion that a large number of people have color deficiencies. RECAVE This is a cool blog about all types of interesting artworks, including...
The masks panel is a big help, because you can easily edit and refine your masks via a handy panel. From the masks panel, you can define the density of your mask, which is very handy. Instead of having a black and white mask, the density setting lessens the affect, as...