Posts Tagged ‘Design Resources’
My Top 10 Computer Arts Magazine Covers
There is one thing that is guaranteed to make me smile and that’s hearing a thud as my favourite design magazine Computer Arts hits the door mat. Every month I am amazed at the beautiful cover art that stares back at me from the floor. I neatly file away all my magazines after a thorough read as they are always a constant source of inspiration.
I was flicking through them the other day and once again I was taken back by the fantastically designed covers. So I thought I’d post my top 10, here we go in no particular order:
Are you loyal to a particular design mag? We’d love to know, there’s always room for good quality literature on our shelves!
Tags: computer arts, cover art, design, Design Inspiration, design magazines, Design Resources, Graphic Design
Posted in Design Inspiration, Design Resources | 6 Comments »
Graphic design resources
Whether it’s for design inspiration or stock photography, there are a great deal of online resources out there for graphic designers. Here I list a few of the best online graphic design resources we have found:
Faveup.com - graphic design inspiration gallery
A great website for design inspiration. Categories are broken down into Logos, Business Cards, Flash Websites and CSS Websites with a voting system to highlight the very best designs. You can also submit your own designs to gain feedback from fellow designers.
PSDTuts.com - photoshop tutorials and tips
Have you ever seen an effect and wondered how you would use photoshop to achieve it? Well it’s probably listed on PSDTUTS. The website features very in depth tutorials on a wide range of photoshop processes and is also great for inspiration.
ColorBlender.com features a very intuitive user interface to help you choose colour palettes. Simply enter the RGB values of the first colour and ColorBlender will offer you a full colour scheme with up to six colours. Once you have perfected your colour scheme, you can save it and send it to yourself by email. You can also download the palette in a .ACT file for use in Photoshop or an .eps for use in Illustrator.
Or, if you’re not in the mood for designing your own colour cheme, you can choose from the many schemes already saved by other users.
Go Media - Professional Graphic Design Weaponry
Go Media’s wide range of what they call ‘design weaponry’ has to be some of the best available. Featuring stock vectors, stock motion graphics, fonts, textures, icons and photoshop brushes. All at reasonable prices. You can download the packs individually or buy them in bulk for a discount. They also have a very impressive and inspirational portfolio.
Like Go Media, YouWorkForThem.com features an impressive range of stock vectors, motion graphics, typefaces, stock imagery, stock video and photoshop brushes. They also sell a vast range of graphic design books, DVD’s and some awesome t-shirts.
What are the best design resources you have found on the web?
Tags: Design Resources, Graphic Design
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The Design Police
You’ve heard of the fashion police, why shouldn’t there be such a thing as the design police? Is there such a thing as bad design or is it all a matter of opinion?
I think it’s fair to say that different types of design appeals to different types of markets. A flyer full of colour and vector images may be applicable for a 70’s night at your local night club, however it could be considered bad design as a flyer for your local solicitors. So first point covered - design is relative to the market place.
So is there such thing as bad design? Say I have picked up my brightly coloured flyer promoting a themed evening at the local social dwelling, if I can’t read the opening times due to small font, bad colour choice, ridiculous positioning, that surely constitutes bad design. So, point number two, there is such a thing as bad design, however I feel that there maybe some grey areas…
The design-police.org have created a range of stickers for you to cut out and stick onto bad designs. Judging by the stickers it is clear that there are some obvious faux pas when it comes to design:
1. Clip Art and Word Art - Microsoft’s answer to Photoshop for the office wannabe designer. Clip Art is a lazy way of adding images to documents to try and lift their heavy content. But it’s when Clip Art ventures into the world of logo design and corporate identity where us graphic designers and illustrators stand back in horror as words and images have no meaning and are launched into utter obscurity.
2. Low Resolution Images - There is no reason for pixilated images unless they are there for an artistic reason. Images should never be made bigger than they are, this looses impact of the image and just looks plain poor.
3. Stretched Images - Same as above if you have a rectangle space and needs a rectangle images, choose a rectangle one, don’t try and change the dimensions of the image. Squashed faces and fat bodies look ridiculous.
4. Cliche Images - Consumers are becoming increasingly numb when it comes to the image of the girl with the headphones on waiting for your call, or the image of a piggy bank with coins falling into it. These types of images are now becoming redundant and are being thought of as bad design.
5. OTT Design - We all know that you can use every filter and layer effect in photoshop, but is that any reason to include them all in one design? Sometimes the message is lost due to OTT use of design elements that are simply not needed.
I’m sure we could easily quadruple this list with examples of bad design or at least our opinion of what is bad design. But this merely touches the surface of bad design. For example, bad web design…wc3 compliancy….typography….etc…etc….
Tags: Design Resources, Graphic Design
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