Design Festival 
Icons can be a pain when it comes to web design. Designers who haven’t been in the game for long might not have picked up the basic illustration skills that more experienced designers use to create their own icons suited to a project. Similarly, more experienced designers just might not have the time to create a new icon set for…
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Having already written a few articles on typography (here) and (here), I thought I would continue the discussion, focusing on the basic principles of typesetting. When it comes to setting type, text entered straight into Illustrator or Indesign does not cut it. There are a few techniques that designers are meticulously taught that help them implement readable, flowing text that’s…
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All of Adobe’s flagship programs have undergone upgrades, and Illustrator is no exception. Illustrator CS6 has gone above and beyond its previous versions with a many major features that long-time Illustrator users have been requesting for a years. While there have been countless enhancements and upgrades in Illustrator CS6, here are the most noteworthy new additions. The Interface Just like…
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Jessica Greenwalt is a freelance designer based in California. She has over 10 years of design experience, and she’s landed a variety of well-known clients, including LinkedIn, SmugMug, and Marvel Comics. Jessica’s work includes a variety of mediums: print, web, mobile, illustration, and even crafting. Earlier this year, Jessica founded Pixelkeet, her own design firm. You can see more of her…
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Designers often view negative space (or “white space”) as a sign of an incomplete design, or space that needs to be filled with… something. Your simple design work can look stellar already, but if you notice a substantial amount of empty space left, you may be compelled to put in peripheral embellishments that don’t really enhance the design. While the…
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Facebook has finally rolled out their version of a timeline page for brands, so it’s time for a template! With this template, you can quickly create a well-composed Facebook presence for your brand that uses the cover photo and the profile pic together for a stunning effect. Unfortunately, Facebook makes aligning the design a serious pain. The profile pic gets…
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Thousands of today’s websites share a very similar look and feel. Apart from unique logos and color schemes, many of these “standard” websites are largely indistinguishable from their peers. Because of the uniformity found on the web, adding some illustrated elements to your design is a great opportunity make it stand out from the crowd. Today, I’d like to share…
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Photoshop is obviously a great tool for editing images, but Photoshop’s extensive color capabilities are often underutilized. Depending on your purposes, certain color modes in Photoshop can transform your work from “properly edited” to dazzling, vibrant, highly colorful images. It doesn’t matter if you are a graphic designer, a web designer, or a photographer; you have to be able to…
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My past article on finding the right font for any design was met with some great feedback, so I thought I would divulge a bit further and talk about different kinds of “message appropriateness” issues that can pop up while working in the lovely and subtle art of typography. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of different…
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Several weeks ago, I wrote an article defining the ten essential elements of a great resource library. I heard that folks were interested in seeing how one goes about managing and organizing their ever-growing library of resources and inspiration. My answer to this problem is Adobe Bridge. I’m sure that — just like the majority of Adobe programs out there — there…
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