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You the Designer - Graphic Design Blog

You the Designer is a graphic design blog dedicated to providing you with quality graphic design tips, graphic design resources, graphic design news and much more!

12 Wild Wine Label Design SamplesAugust 26

A wine store is a paradise for any graphic designer seeking inspiration. Most wine stores have thousands of bottles of wine, all of which are uniquely branded with a wine label. You could spend an entire weekend examining all the different wine label designs in a wine store and still not view them all.

The wine industry is massive and branding is extremely important to wine companies whom spend many thousands of dollars branding their wines. They all market to a certain audience and the designs must convey their message properly. After recently visiting a wine a local wine store, I was inspired to put together this wine label inspiration post, with the hopes of shedding some light on some of the spectacular custom labels graphic designers are creating in this industry.

One of the best parts of being a graphic designer is seeing your work actually printed and in use and I can imagine seeing your label design printed on hundreds of thousands of wine bottles sold world-wide would be a pretty exciting experience!

Wine Label Design Samples

We Are not Freelancers’ CompetitionAugust 25

We Are not Freelancers’ is hosting a fun little competition where you have to take an image provided by them and use it in a creative way. The contest is sponsored by UPrinting.com and there are some cool prizes being awarded.

To enter the contest all you have to do is Head on Over to the Contest Page so you can read the rules and download the source file which will be used by you in a creative way. Prizes will be awarded to the most creative or bravest applicants, but of course please don’t do anything illegal. =)

• 1st prize gets 500 Free business cards (courtesy of U Printing) and a Free We Are not Freelancers T-shirt.
• 2nd & 3rd Place each receive 250 Free B-Cards and a T-shirt.
• We are also going to award a Free T-Shirt to a random entrant.

Enter the Contest

To enter the contest please Go Here and have a look at the official rules.

How to Create Raining Clouds - Adobe TutorialAugust 20

Ok, in this tutorial I am going to help you create clouds with rain ( you can choose to add the rain ) in Photoshop. I am using Photoshop CS2 for this tutorial, but if you are using any other version I’m sure it’ll work just the same! This tutorial is pretty basic, yet highly effective!

Tutorial by Adam Woodhouse: www.adamwoodhouse.co.uk

Step 1 - New Document

Ok lets get started! First of all we need to create a new Photoshop document, so “File > New” from the menu bar, and I’m going to be using a canvas of 640 pixels wide by 300 pixels high. You can choose a different height but it’s probably easier to work out small first to you can get the detail right.

Step 1 - Making the selection

Ok, so now we have a new canvas set up, we are going to make the basic shape of our cloud. First of all we need to create a new layer, so from the top menu click ” Layer > New > Layer” and I am going to rename this layer ” Clouds “.

Top 15 DVD Cover Art Designs of 2008August 19

2008 has been an amazing year for movies with great hits such as Iron Man, The Dark Knight and The Pineapple Express. All of the movies we love are given a face by the graphic designers and art directors who work hard on the DVD cover art, posters, print ads and so on. Today we showcased DVD cover art from 30 of the top movies of 2008. Larger versions of the DVD cover art below can be found at www.freecovers.net

DVD Cover Art Designs of 2008

Top 5 Graphic Design ForumsAugust 11

Graphic Design Forums are a great way to really immerse yourself into the graphic design community. You can meet other designers, ask questions, talk about the latest design news, ask for critiques of your work and much more. Being active in a design community is also another great way to promote your own work and get your name out there. If you are an active member and you contribute quality posts most forums will let you add a signature after your posts linking to your portfolio.

Don’t spam forums with links to your site or most forum moderators will ban you right away. If you are going to join a forums, join with the intention of becoming part of a new community. Most forums tend to have their own unique environment, depending on the users, the layout and the forum categories, so be sure to explore each forum to see which fits you best!

Top Graphic Design Forums

1. GDF

GDF is one of the oldest and biggest graphic design forums around with over 20k members. The community is very active, very large and consists of a a variety of general categories.

2. HOWDesign

The HOWDesign forums are great for showcasing your work and getting constructive feedback from other designers. They