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- 8 Strategies For Successful Relations With ClientsOctober 9
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By Jeff Gardner
Let’s face it. Some days, you want to just fire your clients. You go through one too many comps, iterations or edits and you’ve had enough. It has happened to everyone at least once and I’d be lying if I said it won’t happen again; you get to the end of a project and realize that you would have made more per hour flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Thankfully, as with most common problems, there are a few simple guidelines that you can follow to help make sure that you’re never working for below minimum wage.
Due Diligence
“Experts often possess more data than judgment.” -Colin Powell
Know your role
Remember that the client will always know more about their product or service than you do. They are the expert at what they do; their problem is usually that they don’t know how to explain it well. That is where you, as the designer, step in to help. You are a graphical communications ninja, but to effectively make your, and ultimately your client’s, point you must fully understand what needs to be said.
From the outset, make it a priority to get as much information as possible about the company, their product or service, the intended audience of your work and the reason that your work needs to exist. The better prepared you are and the more information yo - Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of: Part 2October 8
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It’s been about 7 months since the original Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of was published, and in that time there have been many more noteworthy tutorials released. With all of that new content , it’s only appropriate to put out a second edition of the best Illustrator tutorials. In this post you’ll find some basic tutorials on getting started with certain aspects of Illustrator and some of its specific tools. You’ll also find more advanced tutorials that deal with all of the potential that Illustrator brings to graphic design.
Many of these tutorials have been developed by some of the best in the business, so you’re sure to find plenty of new techniques and tricks to take your graphic design skills to a new level.
Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of
A Comprehensive Guide: Illustrator’s Paintbrush Tool and Brush Panel
Probably the most comprehensive tutorial or article on this subject. Everyone can learn something here that will improve their skills with brushes, and it’s especially useful for beginners with Illustrator. - Retro and Vintage In Modern Web DesignOctober 7
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Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale. When applying “old-style” elements to their works, designers produce creative and appealing designs that make their websites stand out and look really different. As a matter of fact, if executed carefully, such designs almost never look boring, although one might intuitively think that the opposite would be the case.
Retro and vintage designs exhibit graphic solutions that are strongly influenced by the time period that they are supposed to represent. While retro focuses on the style of the 1910s to 1930s, vintage recalls the time period between the 1950s and 1980s. In both cases, design elements reflect some old-fashioned motifs, trends, personalities and objects that had been an essential part of our lives in the past.
Such elements create a nostalgic atmosphere, awaken feelings and memories and attempt to communicate information effectively using emotions. Some such designs make use of so-called “classical conditioning” — a technique used to associate a stimulus with an unconscious physical or emotional response.
The Secrets Of Vintage and Retro Designs
What elements do designers use to create a genuine vintage or retro atmosphere
- 7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate DesignOctober 6
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It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.
This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.
For a good corporate design, we need to be aware of two main elements, which can be further broken down into a total of seven “ingredients”:
- design, as in artistic representation (logo, typography, colors), and
- design strategy (brand, quality, community, culture).
1. Logo
Typically, a logo is designed for immediate recognition. Users often identify a corporation by its logo. Just look at the above images: the names of the companies should immediately pop into your head.
But a logo is only one aspect of a company’s brand strategy. It helps, of course, to differentiate a company from its competitors, but a great logo doesn’t mean anything until the brand makes it worth something. If you’re given the task of creating a logo for an organization, create
- Celebration Of Smoke Photography and Smoke ArtOctober 5
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by Tim Mercer and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team
Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty.
In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. At the bottom of this post are some links to tutorials on creating your own smoke photographs, as well as other resources on the subject.
35 × Elegant Smoke Photographs
Magicnikon
Dry ice was put in the bottle to get this great image.
