David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, was famous for spending an inordinate amount of time on headlines.
Back then, social media didn’t exist. If it did, Ogilvy would probably give equal time to creating the perfect complementary image.
The Buffer.com blog has some great tips for creating social media graphics. The article is meant for non-designers, but if you’re new to social media marketing, it’s worth the read.
There is no perfect set of tools for graphic designers. We’re all unique, we all work in different ways, and budgets always come in to play. I’ve put together a breakdown of major factors when building the best graphic design hardware and software toolbox based on my experience. Consider the following as a guide, rather than a set of absolute rules.
I’ve been a graphic designer for 30 years, using the Macintosh the entire time to produce work for some great clients. I’ve worked for ad agencies large and small, a design firm, printing companies, and I’ve freelanced full and part time. Over the years I’ve learned a few short rules as it pertains to building my design toolbox and getting things done—and it has held true everywhere I’ve worked. Those rules are: keep it simple no matter the cost, don’t get caught up in software trends and gimmicks, buy a little more than you think you need, because you will grow into it. The following is more specific advice for building your design toolbox. (more…)
A set of Photoshop actions for exporting graphics that are iOS or Retina-display -ready.
There are two actions in the package: one for slicing selected layer/group only, the second for slicing selected layer/group + it’s scaled by 200%.
You can grab the free Retinize It Photoshop Action here.
Patently Apple reports on recent Apple patent filings that indicate Apple is working on a graphics application with a new fancy-pants GUI. Now I don’t doubt that Apple is (or was) working on a graphics package. But I HIGHLY doubt that this graphics app was meant to compete with Photoshop – unless you feel like iWork actually competes with MS Office. That being said, a fourth app added to iWork would be nice, no?
Very interesting patent filing, nonetheless.
Google’s Chrome browser has been updated to take advantage of Retina MacBook Pros. But the more interesting thing is that Chrome can now access your Mac’s camera and microphone natively. Previously, only plugins like Flash were able to do it. I’m not sure this is the best thing for user security, but it’s one more step in a Flash-free world.
I can’t stress enough the importance of saving your Photoshop and Illustrator files as native .psd and .ai files, rather than the old standby .tif and .eps. While these older formats will work just fine for most uses, when you place native files you get the advantage of full transparency support and most times, smaller file sizes. Let’s say you have applied a drop shadow to an object in Illustrator. If you save it as an .ai file, the shadow will appropriately darken whatever color or object that is underneath it in your InDesign document. If you save the same Illustrator file as an .eps you get unexpected results – usually a white bounding box behind the shadow either on screen, when printed, or both.
When using small text in web graphics in Photoshop, you may notice that your text looks blurry at small point sizes (usually, anything below 12 to 14 points). Running a sharpening filter over rasterized text only serves to make it look worse. To clean up the blurry text, try increasing the tracking (kerning)amount of the text using the Character palette. By increasing the tracking amount it lowers the effects of anti-aliasing, thus making the letters appear sharper/cleaner.
