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Photoshop Time-Savers

Photoshop Time-Savers: Leveraging Smart Objects

Helen Bradley demonstrates how to leverage smart objects to dramatically increase design efficiency.

5 Steps to Improve Your Design Process

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.

Boosting Sales Through Effective Web Design

Designer and author Aliyah Marr answers the question, "How do you design a website that sells?"

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1. Leveraging Smart Objects 2. Improve Your Design Process 3. Boosting Sales

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software tips

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Preparing an E-mail Design for Coding Using Adobe ImageReady

In her first tutorial, Paulina Tracz (aka "Simple Pea") covered Designing an Effective Marketing E-mail Using Adobe Photoshop. The next phase of her e-mail protocol involves using Adobe ImageReady to break down the design into digestible coding components. This crucial intermediate step ensures a smooth, simple transition from finished design to effective e-mail. Paulina provides design do's and don'ts to keep in mind, an in-depth look at the slicing process, a demonstration of the best way to save a file in order to prepare it for coding, and more.

Related Tags: Software Tips, ImageReady, Slicing, Guides, Layout, Marketing, Promotion

InDesign Time-Savers: Variables & Data Merge

Adobe-certified trainer Alison Cattelona explores two features—variables and data merge—that can help you customize data instantly in InDesign. Variables allow you to create running headers and footers, quickly update document information, and perform a number of other fast feats not achievable otherwise. Using data merge, you can make mini-layouts with information from an external data source at the touch of a button. After viewing this tutorial, you'll know not only how to use these features, but also how to apply them to any project you might be working on.

Color-Managed Workflows

Picking up where her previous tutorial, Color Management Essentials for Creative Professionals, left off, Rita Amladi provides a comprehensive set of core practices to make your color-managed design workflow successful and efficient. After presenting separate workflows for print, web, and digital photography projects, she gives expert advice on softproofing, matching what appears on your monitor to how it will appear in print, sharing and creating color palettes, creating custom profiles, and optimizing PDFs. This tutorial will show you how to achieve total control over the appearance of your work across print and digital media.

Designing Your Own Magazine

Angela Riechers, design lecturer and former art director of Harper's Magazine as well as other major publications, guides you through the process of creating the "design voice" of a brand-new publication from start to finish. Working within Adobe InDesign, she demonstrates how typeface, layout, color palette, photographs/illustrations, and other visual elements can be fused into a multilayered yet organic sensibility. She also reveals her personal post-design protocol, including spot-checking as well as preparing files for printing and/or uploading.

Related Tags: Magazine Design, Logo Design, Color, InDesign, Layout, Image Selection

Self-Promotion for Designers

Self-promotion is a necessity for designers contending with today's challenging economic climate. Unfortunately, designers often view self-promotion as an impossibly complex, expensive, and competitive endeavor. To Aliyah Marr, however, the process of self-branding is as simple and natural as falling in love. She offers strategies that will help you develop your own personal design brand and communicate it to potential clients and employers. Aliyah also showcases unconventional websites, digital movies, and business cards that make a powerful impression, often with a very small budget.

Related Tags: Promotion, Client Relations, Flash, Creativity, Marketing

Designing an Effective Marketing E-mail Using Adobe Photoshop

Paulina Tracz (aka "Simple Pea") brings her years of experience creating great marketing e-mails to this highly informative tutorial. She addresses how to design e-mails with the coding process in mind; document, grid, and basic layout setup; importing images into a document (plus modifying image dimensions using layer masks); settings for graphic vs. HTML type; and adding dimension to make designs really pop. Whether you're making marketing e-mails for your client/employer or creating a promotional piece for your own design practice, this tutorial will decrease your turnaround time and get your work noticed.

Related Tags: Software Tips, Photoshop, Layout, Marketing, Promotion

How to Send a Message with Color

Color is one of the most important tools a designer has in conveying a message, but how can you be sure that your color choices are telling the story that you and your client want told? In this eye-opening tutorial, designer/blogger Nancy Hoffmann takes you for a spin through the color wheel... from a designer's perspective. Using movie posters, costumes from musical theater, and famous paintings as examples, she points out how colors communicate with the eye and with each other. A consideration of how colors resonate differently in different cultures rounds out this provocative, practical lesson.

Related Tags: Color, Image Selection, Creativity, Branding

Laying the Groundwork for Web Layouts in CS4

Designer/presenter Geoff Blake takes you inside his CS4 workflow in this practical tutorial on bringing a web layout design from Illustrator into Dreamweaver. You'll learn how to build a <div> layout from scratch in Dreamweaver, how to use class styles to control layout, how to create background images for use in a web layout, and a lot more. If you're unfamiliar with <div> elements, this tutorial is a must-see.

Related Tags: Adobe Creative Suite 4, Photoshop, Layout, Illustrator, Dreamweaver

Repeat & Align: Spacing Tips & Techniques in Photoshop

In this tutorial, Helen Bradley supplies tips for using the Repeat & Align tools in Photoshop. You'll discover quick ways of aligning images relative both to a grid and to one another as well as using the rotate and transform tools to make perfect patterns such as starbursts and spirals. In addition, Helen guides you through the creation of 3D patterns with the vanishing point tool.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Software Tips, Creative Suite 3, Logo Design

Fundamentals of Retouching in Photoshop

Adobe specialist Mara Sachs provides a handy overview of basic retouching techniques in Photoshop. Even if you are familiar with the clone stamp, healing brush, spot healing brush, patch tool, and other methods of reshaping and finessing an image, you may still find Mara's refresher course quite helpful. In addition to introducing each of these features and showing how to use them, this tutorial offers many practical hints to help you employ retouching tools most effectively and efficiently.

Related Tags: Photoshop, Image Selection, Software Tips, Stock Photography

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.

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

Photoshop Time-Savers

5 Steps to Improve Your Design Process

Boosting Sales Through Effective Web Design

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