Laughing Lion Design

Two Free eBooks For Creative Folk

The Creative Group have a number of free ebooks on their site. Two that might be of interest for the creative crew out there are the “Books Smart”, with tips on how to put together a portfolio and “Creativity On A Dime”, with creativity boosters.

Creativity On A Dime
This guide features 20 cost-effective ways to help in-house design teams stay creatively focused and inspired. There are ideas for boosting team morale, creating a more stimulating work environment and keeping your personal spark alive.
Download here.

Book Smarts Booklet
As a creative professional, your portfolio is your primary branding vehicle and should accurately capture your particular strengths and qualifications. This guide is designed to serve as a reference as you create a portfolio that showcases your talents.
Inside, you’ll find tips for selecting samples, organizing items, creating an online portfolio, presenting your books to clients, and more.
Download here.

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Free Female Stock Photos from Photoshop Daily

Photoshop Daily have a number of high resolution pictures of women to download. It can be difficult to get professional model type photographs at high resolution, so this is a useful pack to download, and practice your photoshopping. There are nine pics altogether.

Writing For The Sitepoint Design Blog

I’m very happy to announce that I am now writing a daily post for the Sitepoint Design blog. The posts will cover many aspects of web design including fonts, layout, design resources, as well as short photoshop and illustrator tips and tutorials. This blog here isn’t going to change, if anything I hope I’ll be a bit more focused and become a better writer.

In the meantime, here are two recent posts – would really love feedback and comments on them if you have time and find them useful.

5 Slick Alternatives To Google Image Search

How To Create Your Own Twitter Background

I’m looking for a plugin to set up a sideblog where I can show the links to the latest Sitepoint posts. Does anyone have a recommendation?

Issue 15 of PhotographyBB Magazine Out Now

Issue 15 of PhotographyBB Magazine – the absolute best, free photography and digital imaging magazine is available for download now.

Editor in Chief, Dave Seeram had these comments regarding this recent release:

“Issue 15 has just become one of my favourite releases to date. This month the contributing authors have gone above and beyond the call of duty to put together a really informative issue. Not only do we have some great Photoshop® and Lightroom™ tutorials this month, but we also tackle some of the issues facing photographers in the world today. We have an Urban Landscapes shooting techniques segment in our Photography 101 column, and a look at the recent 2009 Photoshop World convention held in Boston last month, from our insider John Ogden.

We also have two guest contributors from our Twitter following, along with some new reader image galleries from our Flickr group. In our Photography Around the World column we are taken on a magical photographic journey to Belize for a look at the life, culture, and the Mayan ruins. This is truly an issue you don’t want to miss!”

I’m delighted to also be involved with this edition of the magazine and have contributed an article showing you how to use clipping masks in Photoshop to achieve a popular artistic effect.

You can download the latest edition of PhotographyBB here.

Stefan Sagmeister TED Talk

Another brilliant TED talk – it’s like going to a design college where you can pick really interesting lectures without having to do all the dud stuff you hate. Anyway, this is Stefan Sagmeister talking about “Yes, Design can make you happy”. It makes me happy, most of the time.

This talk took place in 2004 and he talks, very wittily, about how good design makes people happy. I’m not sure if “things” can make people happy but this man is such a master and he shares his knowledge simply and honestly. Well worth a viewing.

Make big savings at the Adobe Education Store

Design Inspiration: 1920’s Posters From Chicago

I stumbled upon a beautiful collection of posters which were illustrated in the 1920’s and thought you might be interested for inspiration purposes. I love design and illustration from this era and the craftsmanship is lovely. The images and text below are from the Chicago L.org website, where you can find lots more examples.

Designed by Rocco D. Navigato. Navigato presents Wacker Drive in a similar manner as his earlier “Boul Mich” poster.

Designed by Ervine Metzl, this poster, designed in 1923, depicts the Grosse Point Lighthouse in northern Evanston, a landmark in the north Chicago suburb.

Designed by Arthur A. Johnson, “Avoid Street Congestion” was the only poster that actually depicted the “L” itself. The posters made in this program for the elevated, North Shore Line, and South Shore Line rarely showed the trains of the carriers, except on a few posters. The version of the poster shown here is a reprint done for the Loop Centennial and Chicago Transit Authority by Poster Plus. The original, of course, did not mention the CTA®; The bottom originally read “Rapid Transit Lines, Fast…Reliable”.

What do you think? Is this an era of design that you find appealing?

Moodstream by Getty Images

I came across Moodstream yesterday (via the Photoshop Support blog) and was really impressed with it. The site is owned by Getty images and is a really imaginative way to showcase their images and videos.

The idea is that you select a mood and the “machine” will return suggestions which you can save to a mood board. Images and footage are displayed full-screen size and are grainy but almost seem to look cooler for the grain.

On the mood interface you can choose Excite, Simplify, Inspire and fine tune with sliders for Warm/Cool, Happy/Sad, Nostalgic/Contemporary and more. I spent quite a bit of time on the site and enjoyed playing with it and saved images that I liked. A very nice site.

Have any of you used this Moodstream? What did you think?

Laughing Lion Design Now On Tutsearch

The Photoshop tutorials I’ve written and posted here are now also on the Tutsearch.net website. Tutsearch is a kind of search engine for tutorials on web and graphic design, development. It’s a handy way to search for tutorials from over 100 hand-picked tutorial sites and I’m delighted to be included.

New Issue of Candy Magazine

Issue 11 of Candy magazine is available for free download. Entitled “For All Intents & Purposes”, it features 90 pages of design, photography and illustration goodness, including the following. Philip Toledano. Chris Doyle. Jen Stark. Alex Trochut. Kim Holtermand. Chris Ro. Makeitwork. Aidan Kelly V. Maser. Mos Def. Hvass & Hanibal. Matt W. Moore. Alex Gross. Samantha ZaZa. Kiersten Essenpreis.

Image copyright Samantha ZaZa

Free Adobe Postage Stamp Icons

I made these icons for this website, to go on the Training Page, actually only needed a few icons but made some extras which you can see below, to form a set. They cover Adobe software from AIR to Photoshop to Captivate. They are transparent png files – the background only appears white here and are free to download and use.

You can download the full set of icons as a zip file here.