Design Resources: iStockphoto Freebies
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 24, 2008
A couple of nice freebies for your image library, courtesy of iStockphoto.
Design Resources : Vector Magic
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 23, 2008
If you haven’t come across the Vector Magic website before, and you’re interested in creating vector graphics, then go and visit it now! You can upload your rasterised images to the site and they will be converted to a good quality vector. It’s particularly useful if you have a logo in jpg or gif format and you need to get it into a vector form. It saves you quite a bit of time over trying to reproduce the same thing in Illustrator.
In the example below you can see a scanned image of a monkey (yes that’s supposed to be a monkey!) I drew on a piece of paper. On the right hand side is the vector created on the vector magic website.
When you upload your image you’ll find there are several settings you can choose from to get the best quality vector. There are various price plans available for using the service and there is also a desktop version available. If you find you’re converting a lot of bitmaps to vector, I think it would be worth paying for this service.
Photoshop Tutorial: Type Effects with a transparent overlay
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 22, 2008
This is a quick tutorial to show you how to use a Layer Effect in Photoshop with a little bit of a spin. As you might know, the Layer Effects allow you to easily add things like drop shadows, glows, strokes and more. This method uses the same layer effects but plays around with blending modes and the Fill Opacity.
- Open a file and add some type. I’m using a font called Base02 – quite a grungy font here. It doesn’t matter what colour you choose because we’re getting rid of the colour anyway.
- Double-click on the name of the Type Layer in the Layers palette. This opens up the Layer Style dialog box. I’ve added a drop shadow and a red stroke to the text.
- And now for the magic bit…. Click on the Blending Options Default option while still in the Layer Styles dialog box. Under Advanced Blending, reduce the Fill Opacity to 0 – this removes the colour of the text completely while holding onto any effects you’ve applied. Pretty cool.
This technique is not just for Type layers either. It works with all layers. The joy of making the fill transparent is that you don’t have to worry about background colours. Here’s a few more examples created using the steps above.
Wednesday Design Digest
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 16, 2008
Here’s a collection of articles and blog posts that I found interesting/funny/inspiring/useful. All are related to design in some shape or form and are not necessarily new.
Designers Tell How Music Influences Creativity from HOW magazine.
It’s, ehm, art, apparently. Minimilist Design Packaging on the Dieline blog.
Inspirational Eye Candy on the Best of Phirebrush 2005 website. There’s also links to the best of 06 and 07.
A List Apart has tons of good articles, including this one. Designing Through The Storm.
A short article on the use of the hyphen. Using Dashes in Typography
Design Inspiration : Illustration Class and Von Glitschka
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 11, 2008
Illustration Class is a superb site for anyone interested in illustration and design. It’s written by Von Glitschka, a very experienced designer and illustrator and includes tutorials, tips and pdf downloads.
Von spoke at the HOW Design Conference about his design process and gave many tips and pointers about things to do and things to avoid. Even if you’re not interested specifically in illustration, I think this talk is invaluable for anyone who works or is interested in any creative field. You can download the entire session as an mp3 and also the presentation, so it’s almost like being there!
Illustrative Design Session - HOW Design Conference with Von Glitschka.
Von also has a blog called Artbackwash.
Photoshop Tutorial: Easy Arrowheads
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 10, 2008
Photoshop has tools that allows you to quickly create an arrowhead, you just use the line tool and some options from the Options Bar. Here’s how to make an arrow;
- On the toolbar, select the the line tool. It’s may be hidden under the rectangle tool.
- Up in the Options Bar, select either a shape layer, a path or “fill pixels”. In this case, I chose fill pixels.
- Farther along the Options Bar, you’ll see icons for the six shape tools. Click on the down facing triangle beside the “gooey” star shape.
- The drop down box gives you options to click a checkbox to add arrowheads to either the beginning or end of your line, and you can choose the Width, Length, the Concavity (fancy!).
- To vary the chunky-ness of your arrow, you can set a value for the weight on the Options Bar. For this example I set the weight to 20. Then you simply click and drag out to draw whatever size arrow you need.
All of the shapes below were created using this method and by varying the width, length and concavity values. Because you’re drawing with vector tools you get lovely clean, smooth edges.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
