Typography

Make Your Typography Shine in Under 30 Seconds

Making Your Typography Shine Sometimes you need to create a quick type treatment to dress up a project. This situation applies when flat text just won't do. You just need an extra something to make a headline or an important word stand out. Photoshop is great for...

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Web Design, Graphic Design, & Typography Weekly 1

What's New in Web Design, Graphic Design, & Typography on the Web I decided to change the name of my weekly post, "Cool Stuff For Designers" to a name that made much more sense. This will be a weekly digest of the latest resources for Web Design, Graphic Design,...

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Cool Stuff For Designers 5

Cool Stuff For Designers 5 This week there is a lot of incredibly cool stuff for designers. There are a couple of Adobe Illustrator tutorials to sink your teeth into. You will also find some useful Dropbox add-ons to extend its capability. Create a cool denim effect...

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15 Essential Serif Fonts for Professional Designers

15 Essential Serif Fonts for Professional Designers This is a list of 16 quality serif fonts for professional designers that you will find in most professional graphic design work. These are all found in body copy of books and magazines. They are all beautiful and...

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The Importance of Including Sketches in your Portfolio

As art artist, designer and illustrator, I have come to understand the importance of sketching. Sketching is the proverbial drawing board. It is the place where our ideas start, and where we can put them down on paper. I have found that sketching helps tremendously in...

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Creating Glow Effects in Your Designs With Photoshop Part 2

Yesterday, I covered some basics regarding glow effects and how to use them to your advantage. Today, I will cover some more advanced techniques that will help you to achieve some really cool effects. I created a new document with the dimensions 1024 x 768 and filled...

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Create Amazing 3D with Textures In Photoshop

In Photoshop CS5, the new Repousse Panel is fantastic, in that you can create 3D from almost anything. You can create a 3D object from a selection, a path, text, a mask, etc. What is really cool is that you can create your own textures, or you can use images as...

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Create 3D Gothic Text In Photoshop

Create 3D Gothic Text In Photoshop

This tutorial is just in time for Halloween, with an eerie background and 3D text with textures. In Photoshop CS5 the Repousse abilities give you a lot of flexibility, especially with textures, so you can create some really interesting work. This is only available in...

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Should Pentagram Sue? Would it do any good?

I recently came across a case involving Pentagram, where one of their designs were blatantly ripped off by a famous clothing company Sean John, owned by the famous rap artist known as P Diddy. Sometimes you can argue that a work is inspired by someone else's work, and...

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The Future of Design and Advertising

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...

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Is the design field seeing the end of its day?

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...

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Make your text fit an object in Illustrator

Make your text fit an object in Illustrator

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...

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Quiktip: Key Commands For Type

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...

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Places to go for Creative Inspiration #9

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...

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Playing with Opacity and FX In Illustrator

Playing with Opacity and FX In Illustrator

Opacity has a lot of uses for different types of effects. We like to see certain things bleed through in some areas, while in others we want a shape or text to be a certain color. Recently, I was playing around with opacity in the appearance panel in Illustrator, and...

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Calling All Readers

I wanted to open the floor to fellow designers to request tutorials and how-to's. I post my own articles each day, but if any designers have any burning questions or would like to know how to do something in particular, how to approach a design, how to create a...

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Typography: x-height and descenders

X-height refers to the height of a lowercase letter in a typeface or the top of the midpoint of lowercase letter such as d, p, q and so on. Some typefaces have a tall x-height, some medium, and some have a short x-height. This drastically changes the look of the text...

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Clients are Not Our Enemies

I love to read articles about design and art and how to be a better designer. I am knowledgeable, but I always think that there is something new or new insight that I can gain. With that being said, I began to notice a trend on multiple blogs and different sources...

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