Entries Tagged as 'Design'
How to Create a Set of Highlighter Brushes for Illustrator
Published January 26th, 2012 in Design - 2 Comments
A few months ago at Vandelay Premier we recently released a set of highlighter brushes for Adobe Illustrator,and in this tutorial we’ll show how you can accomplish the same thing on your own. We’ll scan some lines made by a highlighter and that will give us a nice brush for using whenever highlighter or marker effects are needed.
Ultimate Roundup of Photoshop Custom Shapes
Published January 25th, 2012 in Design - 10 Comments
Photoshop presets like brushes and patterns get more attention, but custom shapes can be equally useful. Because custom shapes are vectors, they can be scaled to larger sizes with no decrease in quality.
In this post we’ll link to some of the best custom shapes sets that can be downloaded for free. As always when working with freebies, be sure to read the terms of use or license details to make sure that you are using it in accordance with the designer’s guidelines.
7 Keys to Effective Blog Re-Designs
Published January 19th, 2012 in Design, Design Process - 7 Comments
Many blogs get re-designed every couple of years, if not more frequently. Re-designing a blog brings a number of challenges because more content is being added to the site all the time, new types of content may have been introduced since the last design, and the priorities and goals of blogs often change or evolve over time. This means that when re-designing a blog you’ll need to take some time before jumping into the design work in order to think about how to prioritize the right content, how to make it easy for visitors to find what they want, and how to use the design to make the blog more effective at achieving it’s purpose for the owner.
The success of a blog re-design is more heavily influenced by a proper planning process than it is by the design skills of the person creating it. A blog can get a fancy new design that looks great, but if it doesn’t help to make the site more user-friendly and it doesn’t do an effective job of achieving the blog’s purpose, the impressive look ultimately has very little impact.
In this article we’ll take a look at 7 keys to the blog re-design process. These are all things that should be considered at the time of the re-design in order to make the site more useful for visitors and more effective for its owners.
1. Same Design Style or New Approach?
Most of the time when a blog is re-designed it will maintain a similar style or look and feel, just with an updated approach. Brand development takes time, and if a blog has established a certain identity with its audience you will usually want to maintain that identity through the re-design process. However, there are some cases where the re-design presents the opportunity for the blog to go in a new direction. This includes color schemes, logos, and general design styles.
One of the first decisions that should be made is whether the blog should keep a similar style to the existing design, or if it should feature a new design style. Think about the blog’s current audience, how they view the blog and the brand, and if that still fits with the direction the blog is headed.
30 Examples of Photoshop Disasters
Published January 16th, 2012 in Design - 15 Comments
Photoshop is an amazing tool that allows designers and photographers to do some incredible things. But not every Photoshopped creation works out exactly as planned. Whether it is poor execution, going too far, or oversight of something important, Photoshop disasters are not uncommon. In this post we’ll showcase 30 examples that come from psdisasters.com, photoshopdisasters.com, and photoshop-disasters.net.
Photoshop Actions for HDR Effects
Published January 9th, 2012 in Design - 5 Comments
A few weeks ago we posted a showcase of beautiful HDR photography. True HDR photography involves taking multiple shots of the same subject with different exposures and combining them, but Photoshop allows you to mimic those effects with just one image. While you can always go through this process manually, there are also a number of Photoshop actions that can do the work for you very quickly. In this post we’ll highlight some of the best HDR Photoshop actions that will make it easy for you to create your own HDR images.
Premium HDR Photoshop Actions:
HDR Legendary Image Action by mrcharlesbrown $5
10 Resources for Creating Website Color Schemes
Published December 28th, 2011 in Design, Tools - 12 Comments
Choosing the right color scheme is one of the most important decisions of the website design process, and it can also be one of the most challenging. Fortunately, there are a number of great tools available to help with color selection.
Some of the resources mentioned in this post will allow you to browse through a variety of color palettes or schemes, many will allow you to create and save your own color schemes, and some are interactive, allowing you to quickly create an effective color scheme.
Kuler
Adobe’s Kuler includes a large library of user-submitted color schemes. You can view the color schemes online or download them to be used in Adobe Creative Suite products.
20 T-Shirt Design Tutorials
Published December 21st, 2011 in Design - 2 Comments
If you’re interested in designing your own custom t-shirts, there are a number of helpful tutorials that explain and demonstrate the process. Many web and graphic designers like to branch out to t-shirt design, even if it is only for fun and experimentation. In this post we’ll link to the best tutorials available for teaching how to design your own t-shirts.
How to Design an Impressive Graphic Tee in Photoshop
35 Icon Design Tutorials for Photoshop
Published December 7th, 2011 in Design - 7 Comments
Icons are an important part of web design. In many cases you can buy icons or download free ones, but sometimes you may need to create custom icons to get exactly what you need. Fortunately, there are a lot of tutorials out there that go through the process of designing an icon. In this post we’ll feature 35 tutorials for designing icons in Photoshop.
How to Create a Detailed Gauge Icon in Photoshop
25 Free Graffiti Fonts
Published November 23rd, 2011 in Design - 11 Comments
Graffiti effects can be replicated with fonts that are designed specifically for this purpose. There are a number of free graffiti fonts available, and in this post we’ll showcase 25 of them. To download the fonts, click through to the source. Be sure to read the terms of use, especially if you are planning to use on a commercial project.
For inspiration, please see our Graffiti Art Showcase.
35 Free and Fresh Photoshop Actions
Published November 22nd, 2011 in Design - 11 Comments
Photoshop actions can be great tools for editing photos and for improving efficiency in Photoshop. You can, of course, create you own actions, but there are also a lot of actions out there available for free download.
We’ve posted collections of Photoshop actions in the past, and today we’d like to feature some fresh and new actions that are available for download. If you see something that you would like to try, click on the link or the image and you’ll be led to the source where you can download the action.
