< Playback Stop Play >

Pane 1 Pane 2 Pane 3

<< Previous | Next >>

Photoshop Time-Savers

Photo Photoshop Time-Savers: Creating Density Masks

Claudia McCue shows you how to refine density masks, how to work in channels, how to create composites, and many more valuable skills.

10 Criteria for Logo Design

Photo 10 Criteria for Logo Design

With over one million registered trademarks and new companies launching every day, how can your brand stand out? This tutorial explores 10 steps you can take to transform, or create, an identity that is strong and lasting.

InDesign Time-Savers

Photo InDesign Time-Savers: Creating and Using Styles

Character and paragraph styles in InDesign are a great cure for the painful process of manual formatting. You can quickly and easily establish consistency and legibility across any document.

NOW SHOWING:

1. Creating Density Masks 2. 10 Criteria for Logo Design 3. Create & Use Styles

Insights, Information and Inspiration You Can Use on Your Very Next Project


software tips Need a crash course on InDesign or Photoshop? View all our software tip tutorials.
Meet the Instructors Learn from the best - Graphics.com/Learning instructors have decades of practical design experience. Come meet them!
Contact Us Looking for a topic not listed? We are adding new videos every week - click here to find out what's coming up, or suggest new topics!
Most Recent Videos

Five Famous Logos Deconstructed

Designer/artist Lauren Kangas takes a fun approach to a software tutorial: demonstrating cool features and techniques in Adobe Illustrator by recreating five ubiquitous logos. Lauren shows how to turn back the clock on Courier, how to use Illustrator's pathfinder palette, how to create reflections, and a lot more cool tricks using the logos for Chase Manhattan, Target, Aveda, and Animal Planet as well as Milton Glaser's legendary I Heart NY.

Related Tags: Illustrator, Logo Design, Branding, Software Tips

Color Management Essentials for Creative Professionals

Adobe-certified technical trainer Rita Amladi provides a clear, helpful guide to the essentials of color management. The methods and software features she covers in this comprehensive tutorial will allow you to make sure colors are represented accurately across all output spaces. Converting to CMYK, managing colors for output to the web and e-mail, and dealing with those pesky "color profile needed" messages are just a few of the topics included.

Related Tags: Color, InDesign, Photoshop, Software Tips, Printing Tips, Creative Suite 3, Illustrator

Putting It Together: Achieving a Unified Design

In this tutorial, design professor and author Alex White explores a major aspect of what distinguishes great all-around design from something merely "attractive." Unity, he claims, is what happens when the three major elements of design — image, text, and space — are forced into strong, compelling relationships. Using examples from his actual university classes, Alex presents various methods designers can adopt to create relationships among the elements in their own work.

Related Tags: Creativity, Case Studies, Image Selection

Boosting Sales Through Effective Web Design

Designer and author Aliyah Marr answers the question, "How do you design a website that sells?" As Aliyah points out, it's all about how web design attracts, maintains, and directs the attention of the user. Pure aesthetics are less important than the effective anticipation of a potential consumer's questions and needs. Aliyah demonstrates that there's more than one path to successful retail website design with a broad range of surprising, engaging examples drawn from the web.

Related Tags: Web Design, Flash, Marketing, Client Relations

Photoshop Time-Savers: Leveraging Smart Objects

The use of smart objects in Photoshop allows the designer special freedoms such as the ability to edit filters at any stage of your workflow and the ability to resize multiple times without a significant loss of image quality. Helen Bradley demonstrates how to leverage smart objects to dramatically increase design efficiency. She also provides a real-world example of how this feature in CS3 can be applied to a design project.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Creative Suite 3

Project Management: Staying On Track

This lesson will help you avoid many of the most common and treacherous pitfalls of design project management. Renowned business consultant and author Shel Perkins explains how you can keep your design project on schedule, on budget, and within the intended parameters. Project tracking software, change orders, and the all-important "burn rate" are among the topics reviewed.

Related Tags: Project Management, Business Issues, Client Relations

Project Management: Planning and Staffing

A productive designer/client relationship begins before any actual design work is done. Shel Perkins, one of the design world's foremost business experts, demonstrates how thorough planning and clear communication with your client can set the stage for the smooth, professional completion of a project. This lesson covers topics such as creating Gantt charts, preparing written proposals, and common staffing challenges.

Related Tags: Project Management, Business Issues, Client Relations

Five Steps to Improve Your Design Process

Alex White guides you through five principles that you can apply to your design practice to ensure legible, memorable results. These are: relationships, contrast, hierarchy, structure, and color. Using actual examples from his design students, Alex shows how most any design can be improved by referring to these five basic ideas.

Related Tags: Color, Relationships, Case Studies

Using Specialty Printing Techniques to Improve Your Projects

Every client wants you to create pieces that stand out. Jonathan Gouthier explores several techniques—foil stamping, embossing, die cutting, laser cutting, thermography, and specialty inks—that can help designers achieve tactile, interactive results. Included are tips on how best to use these techniques, how to combine them for maximum effect, and how to fit these special processes into your timetable and budget.

Related Tags: Printing Tips, Creativity, Alternative Materials

InDesign Time-Savers: Creating and Using Styles

Character and paragraph styles in InDesign are a great cure for the painful process of manual formatting. By using styles, you can quickly and easily establish consistency and legibility across any document. The use of styles also allows for more efficient revisions of a document. Claudia McCue shows you how simple and helpful this InDesign feature can be.

Related Tags: InDesign, Layout, Software Tips

Photoshop Time-Savers: Creating Density Masks

Density masks can be a powerful tool for the designer: They're great for creating natural, organic edges (such as in fur, hair or foliage) and are often easier to manipulate than the Pen Tool. Claudia McCue shows you how to refine density masks, how to work in channels, how to create composites, and many more valuable skills.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Masks

The Designer's Role in Bringing a Brand to Life

In this tutorial, instructor Jonathan Gouthier highlights each of the three roles a designer can expect to play in today's market: strategist, researcher, and visual communicator. Jonathan explains the importance of each of these design phases and demonstrates how to best fulfill and integrate them to address clients' needs.

Related Tags: Branding, Case Studies, Logo Design

InDesign Time-Savers: Text-on-Path Tricks

This video helps you master a slew of text-on-path tasks in Adobe InDesign, including starting with the ideal path, positioning text exactly where you want it (not where InDesign wants you to put it), threading text between paths, and many more...

Related Tags: InDesign, Layout, Software Tips

Creating the Unexpected

Almost everything you design has a set of expectations attached to it. If you're not careful, you can follow these expectations too closely and create cliched design. This video shows how you can make your work stand out by defying expectations without disorienting the viewer or user.

Related Tags: Creativity, Case Studies, Book Design

Design for Nonprofits: Special Events

Designing for nonprofit special events is an often overlooked sector for graphic designers. This video provides an overview on nonprofits and their special events, and what the designer needs to consider before creating promotional materials for these events.

Related Tags: Marketing, Promotion, Alternative Materials

Preparing Art for Silk Screen

Silk-screen printing, especially for T-shirts is more popular than ever. Screen printing is defined and art preparation for basic screen printing is explained in this tutorial. In addition, a brief history of the medium accompanied by visual examples provides a fun, fast crash course in how this technique has been used in art for centuries.

Related Tags: Creativity, Alternative Materials, Logo Design

The Human Touch: How to Not Work on the Computer

In today's digital world a hyper-reliance on computer technology often leads to the mundane and expected. Many of the traditional techniques for creation are being lost. Yet it is the role of the graphic designer to present work that is unexpected and individual. Here, we explore some of the pitfalls of working directly on the computer and the freedom gained by working by hand. Several possibilities are discussed.

Related Tags: Creativity, Case Studies, Book Design

Sick, Lost, Broken Brands: Symptoms and Recovery

What do you currently do when your brand seems to be stagnant or unresponsive? Throw up your hands or do nothing? In this tutorial, Jonathan Gouthier will highlight problematic areas for brands and offer some advice with case studies of larger more prominent brands that can help you jump start your brand when it's feeling down.

Related Tags: Branding, Case Studies, Logo Design

Effective Newsletter Design

In this tutorial you'll learn how to create an effective newsletter. You'll look at logo design, choosing and combining photos and art for maximum visual impact, selecting typefaces, building a dynamic page structure, and creating templates, master pages and style sheets to make repetitive formatting tasks a snap.

Related Tags: InDesign, Photoshop, Layout

Storytelling Through Dynamic Layouts

The late, great Tibor Kalman once said the three elements of a good story are clarity, forward motion and suspense. In this tutorial, you'll cover the visual storytelling of a feature layout, consider the overall pacing and structure of a story, select and present the best possible images to tell the tale and find out how to give the feature good narrative flow and visual impact. You'll also learn options for creating original dynamic type treatments for the opening spread, and how this will set the tone of the design and carry it through the entire feature.

Related Tags: InDesign, Layout, Image Selection

Identity Development Through Marketing, Sales and Investor Relations Departments

From past experiences with clients, it is presumed that a strong brand image is made through the redundancy of logo, color and type placement. While corporate standards are needed so each person involved in corporate communications can carry the organization's image appropriately, it is more important that creativity is continually interjected into every part of an identity system. In this video, discover how to bring consistency, flexibility and authenticity to a full-scope identity campaign.

Related Tags: Logo Design, Branding, Color

10 Criteria for Logo Design

There are over one million registered trademarks, and if you add to this the number of small businesses that are launched with a logo every year, the amount is staggering. Yet the basic question is, what makes one identity better than another and why? In every instance, a responsible creative process categorizes the designs of the best marks. This process encompasses 10 criteria. Let's look at these 10 items and examples that can help you transform, or create, an identity that is strong and lasting.

Related Tags: Logo Design, Branding, Color

More Videos:

Videos 1-8 | Videos 9-16 | Videos 17-24 |  Show All Videos