Entries Tagged as 'Design'
13 Tutorials for Working with Colors in Photoshop
Published March 1st, 2012 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 8 Comments
One of the down sides of working with a program as powerful as Photoshop is that new users often want to jump into things like advanced photo manipulations or designing an amazing website layout. Unfortunately, getting a firm grasp of the basics and fundamentals often gets overlooked by all of all of the cool things that you can learn to do.
Designers who want to be able to use Photoshop effectively will need to be able to master the fundamentals. Working with color is one of those things that you must learn to do effectively in Photoshop. In this post we’ll link to 13 tutorials that will help you to learn more about working with colors in Photoshop. If you’re already experienced with Photoshop, maybe some of these tutorials can serve as a refresher.
You may also be interested in our post Learn Photoshop.
10 Things You Can Do Today to Become a Better Designer
Published February 23rd, 2012 in Business, Design - 16 Comments
One of the challenges of being a web designer is the need for continual improvement. While you will certainly gain experience and improve skills through client projects, it’s also necessary to dedicate some time outside of client work to focus on new skills and staying up-to-date with an industry that changes at a rapid pace.
Since we all have busy schedules to start with, getting a real impact with the time you set aside for learning is essential. In this article we’ll take a look at some things that you can do today to improve your abilities in some way. Even with just a small amount of time available, there are things that you can do with a focus on continual growth and improvement.
25 Photo Editing Tutorials for Photoshop
Published February 22nd, 2012 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 6 Comments
Most professional digital photos are touched up in some way or another. Photoshop is, of course, one of the leading programs for photo editing, so learning the basics of the possible photo editing techniques can have a positive impact on the end result of your photography. For designers, many photos that are provided by clients will need some touch ups to get the best look possible.
In this post we’ll link to 25 helpful tutorials that teach different aspects of photo editing in Photoshop.
How to Reduce Digital Noise in a Photograph
How to Create a Set of Highlighter Brushes for Illustrator
Published January 26th, 2012 in Design, Tutorials - 3 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 - 14 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 - 9 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 - 17 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 - 6 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 - 18 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, Photoshop Tutorials - 4 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
