Design Resources: Typographic Toy Wordle
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 7, 2008 | Leave A Comment
This is currently my favourite toy on the web. I absolutely love this!
Wordle is a kind of cloud generator. You can lash in some text of your choosing, or the address to your website feed and it produces a nice typographic cloud. Once it’s made you can change fonts, colours and layout. Could be good for t-shirt ideas? Here’s two I made earlier - the first is “Don’t be cruel” by Elvis and the second is text from my web feed for Laughing Lion Design.
Photoshop Tip: Quick Tracking and Kerning of Text
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 1, 2008 | 2 Comments
If you want to change the Tracking (the space between each letter in a word or group of words), there are a couple of shortcuts that allow you to do it without going into the Character Palette.
To set the tracking looser i.e. put more space between each letter, highlight the text with the Type tool that you want to affect, then press Alt-Right Arrow (windows) or Option-Right Arrow (Mac).
To set the tracking tighter, highlight the text and then press Alt-Left Arrow or Option-Left Arrow.
To change the Kerning (the space between two individual letters), click with your cursor between the two letters and use the same keyboard shortcuts as above.
These shortcuts are the same in Illustrator.
Wednesday Design Digest
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 31, 2008 | Leave A Comment
Ok, it’s Thursday but I did start this post on Wednesday but called away to more pressing matters, like sleep. Anyhoooo, here’s some links to some design inspiration, design resources and some interesting visual oddbits!
Super duper post of 50 Movie Posters by Thomas at Sharebrain.
Same Photo Twenty Years Apart - This is pretty bizzare and cool.
The amazing body painting of Guido Daniele.
Create your own fonts online with Fontstruct. It’s free and the editor is pretty simple to use.
Six Move Tool Tips For Photoshop
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 29, 2008 | Leave A Comment
So naturally enough, the main function of the Move Tool in Photoshop is to move objects around the document window. It’s basically your index finger for pushing stuff around, but by combining it with some modifier keys you can add to it’s functionality. Here’s six MoveTool tips to speed up your workflow.
- With the Move tool selected, hold down the Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key to temporarily turn on the “Auto Select Layer” feature. Once Auto Select Layer is turned on, just click in the image area over the desired layer to select it, without having to go to the Layers palette. To select additional layers, add the Shift key while clicking.
- To quickly select the Move tool while another tool is selected, hold down the Ctrl (Win) / Cmd (Mac) key while another tool is selected. Releasing the key returns you to the previous tool.
This shortcut does NOT work for the Pen, Path and Direct Selection, Shape and Hand tools and the Slice and Slice select tools.
- Selecting multiple layers (or selecting linked layers) in the Layers panel using the Move Tool allows them be aligned and distributed by clicking the icons in the Options bar at the top of the screen.
- Holding down Alt (Win) /Option (Mac) makes a copy of a layer while moving it in the image area with the Move tool. The cursor will change to a double-arrow when you hold down the modifier keys.
- On an image with multiple layers, right mouse-click (Win) / Control (Mac) in the image area to select a layer from the context sensitive list.
- To easily find the centre of any layer (except the background layer), select the Move tool and click on the “Show Transform Controls” option in the Options bar.
Design Resources: iStockphoto Freebies
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 24, 2008 | Leave A Comment
A couple of nice freebies for your image library, courtesy of iStockphoto.
Design Resources : Vector Magic
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 23, 2008 | 4 Comments
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.
-
About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
Hire me for illustration work too!
view my portfolio:
coroflot.com/jennyrusks -
Connecting
