I started my career as a graphic designer and I like to say that I cut my way into it with an exacto knife blade. Yup, it was that long ago with the hot wax and the knives so I guess that says a little about how long ago it was. I have experience laying out large publications, complex prepress work, designing large scale graphics for trade shows and bus billboards. I can help you with your brochures and rack cards as well as any other business identity you are trying to create. Please contact me if you have a project you would like to discuss.
Business cards and online galleries
Today I want to talk about two really cool sites – one for business cards and the other for online photo galleries. The fist is moo.com. Hmm well the name doesn’t really say it’s all but their product says the rest! I had never heard of them before until I attended a wacom webinar where they were talking about making “portfolio in your pocket” using photoshop tips, a wacom tablet and the printfinity pack from moo.com. They aren’t your average business cards where you have the same image on every...
read moreWork doodle
Kiss the Frog Contest I was asked to make a little graphic for the kiss the frog contest our honors program is putting on. I found a cute bullfrog off the creative commons search and attached a sticky note to his face. I then tried various attempts to write with my intuis 4 wacom tablet words on the sticky note. Ya can read it...
read moreEasy wordle fun!
Make your custom text cloud Today I stumbled on a fun little site called wordle and the concept is simple. You just paste in a bunch of text and hit generate. After that you can choose a color scheme, pick a font and delete words you don’t like. If you don’t like what it makes you can hit randomize and change settings for an infinite number of possibilities. Below I pasted in a list from our degrees and certificates page and got the tag cloud below. I took was generated and played around in photoshop with various inverse and...
read moreMetal up your type
The purpose of design is to communicate a message and therefore I believe special effects should be used only if there is a reason to use them. This means it’s probably rare that you’ll need to create metal type but as a designer you should know the concept of how to do it even if you’ll only do it once in your career. Above is an image of a banner I did for our college website to congratulate one of our star alumni who played in the Superbowl. To match the emblem for the Superbowl it called for some silver type. In addition...
read moreTangerine Tango Sunrise?
Apparently every year Pantone (the world authority on color) picks a color. For 2012 it’s Tangerine Tango (Pantone 17-1463). You can download the color palette from their website. I was a bit intrigued by the color choice for this year and realized they might be right. I have been leaning towards warm charged colors for a little while now. I wondered what would have happen if I did a little color overlay on a sunrise I recently took. Below is the that tangerine tango overlay and here is a link to the original. It’s a subtle...
read moreGoogle web font plugin for Photoshop by WebINK
A little while back I posted about free web fonts from Google and how I used them in a small project. I found a nifty free little plugin for plugin for Photoshop CS5 from WebINK that allows you design with Google web fonts right inside Photoshop CS5. First create an account with WebINK and download their plugin. Once downloaded you’ll activate it through Window > Extensions > Extensis. You will have to sign into your account. Once loaded you will get a list of all the premium WebINK fonts but you can switch and from the drop down...
read moreVehicle graphic detail
After 40+ years Chapman’s Dog Grooming of Antioch is going mobile! Here is a closeup of part of the graphics I am doing for the mobile grooming vehicle. The image of the dog is high resolution so it’s enough for printing on the door of the vehicle and the grass and bubbles were created in Adobe Illustrator so they could be scaled at various sizes. It’s not complete yet but I will be posting updates as the project moves along. I have to credit tutsplus for the wonderful tutorial on how to create realistic...
read more2012 EPS Adobe Illustrator Calendar
I thought I would share this 2012 calendar template I did for my parents dog grooming buisiness. After 40+ years they are now taking the business on the road and going mobile. This calendar was a handout in december and a way to alert existing customers of the change. If you have Adobe Illustrator or another program that reads EPS files feel free to download and reuse. 2012 EPS...
read moreHow to draw a vector-based jack o’lantern in Photoshop with shape layers
Happy Pumpkin! Since it’s season appropriate I thought I would share what I taught my photoshop class on how to make a Jack o’lantern using the pen tool and shape layers. Below is what the final image looks like that for the most part would scalable as a vector based graphic before I turned it into a bitmaped image for display purposes here. Download layered PSD Start with a outline of what you want to do. Below is the sketch I started with and took a picture with my cell phone to get it into Photoshop. Then select the pen tool...
read moreHow to draw a cute ladybug in Photoshop
Step by step When drawing from scratch I usually draw my little cartoons with a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop but I decided to not stick with what was familiar to me and try to do the whole drawing in just photoshop. I used mostly used shape layers tracing a drawing that I sketched out on paper. I will show you below the steps from inspiration to completion on how to create this bug on the right. Hopefully you can take these steps and create your own cute little creature using these techniques. Step 1 I still have...
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