Design Inspiration : Startdrawing.org

Posted by Jennifer Farley | February 15, 2008

A big whopper of inspiration comes in the form of Start Drawing. It’s a web site dedicated to drawing - not just with a pencil, but with every kind of medium - by artists based in Asia. It covers everything from beautiful traditional paintings, slap bang up to today’s digital artwork.

StartDrawing.org

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Design Resources

Guest Photoshop Tutorial : Make a simple logo

Posted by Jennifer Farley | February 12, 2008

Once again I’m delighted to post a Photoshop tutorial from Sherif Salah. Sherif is starting work on his own blog where he will be providing Photoshop tips and tutorials. In this tutorial Sherif explains how to create a simple logo using selections and layer blending styles.

1. Start out with a new document.

2.Create a new layer.

3. Using your new layer, Go to the toolbox, choose Eliptical Marquee Tool .

4- Make a circle selection as shown , or you can make whatever shape you feel comfortable to.

5- Select a nice foreground color that will be used to fill our circular selection, you can use #F29653 which is the foreground color used in this example.

6- Go to Pain Bucket Tool , select it and fill the selection.

7- Now, we will just add a simple blending option to make our shape looks thicker, so we will just double-click our layer or simply go to Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options , this will show up Layer Style & Blending Options window, we will select Bevel & Emboss , and set it as shown below, actually, you may not need to edit anything.

8- Use the Eliptical Marquee Tool again to create a small circle selection on our big circle.

9- Hit your Delete key to delete the small circle selection, see below.

10- Use your imagination to create more selections using the Marquee Tool and delete them, so that you can reach an attractive shape like the one below, we just made 2 rectangular cuts using Rectangular Marquee Tool , this will bring you to a simple attractive shape like this which can be used as an element in your logo design.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials

The loneliness of the long distance blogger

Posted by Jennifer Farley | February 11, 2008

Things have been insanely busy over the last two weeks or so and I’ve been neglecting my blog duties. Anyhoo, had a nice time on Saturday night when I went out to meet some like-minded folk at the Irish Webmaster Forum meetup in Dublin. It was great to put some faces to names (or avatars) and very nice to feel included. It’s quite easy to isolate yourself in this business called Web but I was delighted to have a few chats with other designers, SEO heads and all kinds of web people. Got tons of great info too.

So a big shout out to Dave B, Dave D, James, Ken, Simona, Barry, Robert, Jason, Dave (with beard), Cormac, Ciaran, Michael and Louie

As I’m a complete oul one, I left fairly early before getting a chance to talk to everyone but did enjoy a couple of drinkipoohs courtesy of the very kind Blacknight. Much appreciated.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Miscellaneous

Guest Photoshop Tutorial : Stylish Metal Text Effect With Layer Blending

Posted by Jennifer Farley | February 4, 2008

I’m delighted to feature a guest Photoshop tutorial today. Here’s a few words from the author of the tutorial Sherif Salah;

“Hi, I’m Sherif Salah,
I’ve always had a love of arts & illustrations, I love designing web pages,ad posters and logos as well, i like designs that blend colors and images together smoothly in an elegant style, I totally agree with Jennifer that sometimes it is something as simple as a dotted line that can really add to a design I’ve done few different designs over the years, but I’m still learning and looking for ways to expand my skills especially in doing illustrations. “

1. Start out with a new document.

2- Set foreground color to #4F4343 & the background color to white.

3- Type any text within your canvas, choose whatever font style and size you want.

4- Go to Layer > Layer Style > Blending options or doubleclick your text layer in your layer pallete to open the Layer Style settings window.

a- Select Bevel and Emboss and set it as shown below

b- Select Gradient Overlay and set it as shown below, Click on the gradient color to set your gradient color stops as #000000 and #FFFFFF for the first and last color stops, then click OK.