Category Archives: design

graphic designer’s ‘get out of jail free’ card

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Capital One had a commercial for their new Venture card. I didn’t hear much of the commercial, but the image I saw on TV intrigued me. The card pictured had the name Lee N. Cardholder. At least I thought it was an ‘N’. If it was an ‘N’, that would be ‘lean’ or ‘lien’, which being a graphic designer, I can recognize a subliminal message faster than the average bear. I do it, all graphic designers do it. It’s creative and fun, a hobby of sorts for us. It’s like a designer’s secret language.

I also see that Jimmy Lee is one of the guys heading the national small business lending division of Capital One.  So is Jimmy Lee actually Lee M.? I have no idea, but I do know this.  This is the designer’s ‘get out of jail free’ card if some non-designer cracks the secret language code.  If you’re a designer, keep a few of these with your business cards.  ;)

See the full article on rethinkgood.com.

1st Photoshop Class 7/10/09

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I hope everyone will enjoy the Photoshop (PS) class tonight.  It will be basic and informal, but it will hopefully make people feel more comfortable about using PS.  Most of the questions I have received have been “How do I do this?” with a photo attached.  We will go over some simple photo editing techniques and design techniques that will get you started, or for PS intermediates, move you farther along.

As I was searching the web for some tools and tutorials, I quickly realized that I didn’t have time to search 180,000 results.  ;)  So here are a few links I found to some good basics (for FREE):  Continue reading →

are you a font junkie?

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I am.  Clearly.  You know you’re a font junkie when you see type on a print piece or on someone’s computer and you know the name of the fonts AND at least 2 similar ones as well.

I have over 1000 fonts on my machine and I download new ones at least once a month.  One of my favorite sites for free fonts is dafont.com.  I like this site because the fonts are well organized and grouped by style, as well as alphabetical.  Here’s my font tip of the day… ummm, one I seem to have to learn the hard way every so often.

tips1.  If you use a specific font in Photoshop or Illustrator and you convert it by releasing the compound path or rasterizing type, type in the font name on the layer title or in the image properties.  It’s not a fun process to find a font that you can’t remember.  

2.  If you’re using a series of fonts, copy the font files into a folder and keep if with your original layered files.  This also helps when you work on multiple compters.