Typography can make or break a design. While visuals are important, many designs and graphics use text and a lot of information is still conveyed using text. That makes typography really important. From books that read while using the correct font, line-height, column width and margins (I can’t stand ill-formatted books), to websites that convert. If your content is really good, so must your typography be. It would be a waste if you have the best writing, but it does not convince others because of bad typography. In this brief article, I want to share five resources that help you […]
Free Stock photos are notorious and, in our visual culture, highly desired. While people may think that free stock images can have poor quality, there are many photos of great quality. In this article, I will share 4 websites where you can find the best free stock photos. But before I start with the actual content article, I must admit something. I felt into the trap of using something that has been widely popular. It concerns the topic of titles, titles that make you click more easily. It seems that titles using a certain number and description work particularly well. […]
Ever felt there is more to designing than creating nifty user interfaces and visually eye candy? Or felt the urge to explain what design actually is? Well, you are probably not the only designer unleashing his or her curiosity on the process and phenomenon of design itself. For myself, I just discovered something that my design education has not taught me yet. Oh yes, I learned about the methodology behind designing, the form that follows function, the processes that underlie good design. I learned about creative problem solving, defining and discovering the core of a problem and the importance of […]
Did you know you can become creative? In this article I want to propose some very basic design techniques which can help you to be creative during problem solving. Creativity is said to be composed of one’s expertise, motivation and creative thinking skills (as defined by Amabile). And it is in the latter area of thinking skills where creativity and design tricks come in. In other words, I believe you can train (some components of) creativity by applying the right techniques. The techniques are ordered into three categories: Knowing what to solve before starting to solve Generating ideas from internal […]
A while ago, I tend to use Adobe Photoshop a lot. This was in the era that Adobe Experience Design did not even exist, and Adobe Photoshop was used to create websites. I also used Adobe Photoshop to design various posters, such as the ones displayed here in my portfolio. Now for that, I was often on the hunt to take photographs of elements that I could use in my poster designs. And there we go. Some of these photographs had elements that were quite useful for creating Photoshop Brush sets. A brush set is a selection of brushes that […]
For computer graphics artists, our lovely world-wide-web is a great place to find quality content such as textures, which are used in 2D and 3D graphics applications. In this article, six great texture sites are discussed. Obviously, these websites offer their textures for free. What are textures? In visual art, a texture is the perceived surface quality of an artwork. We see something same with digital art, where textures can influence the surface enormously. Textures are in short images of (often) repeatable patterns as stones, bricks, wood, metal, etc. But remember, they are not always repeatable, as they also can […]
It is always a joy to play with a digital camera, shutter times and a fire. It is amazing to see what shapes fire can have. This little experiment ended into 60 fire textures which you can download and see here. These textures can be freely used, also in commercial context. However, they can not be redistributed or sold. They can be downloaded below as a zip file. Download Fire Textures
The harmony sketchtool is an online sketching tool which is just a bit different than many other sketching tools. Featuring brushes which react to each others proximity and to the speed of the cursor, it is a wonderful application to make artistic doodles and sketches. Harmony Sketchtool The harmony sketchtool is an very simple online sketchtool which means that you do not have to download anything. It has several brushes, but pity enough no eraser (there is a clear button though which clears everything in a single click). The background and brush color can be set up, and you can […]
As a Graphic Designer and Visual Artist, textures often come in handy. Also, if you are a 3d modeller or texturer and use programs such as Blender, Cinema4D or Maya, textures are often used. In this article I will share 19 free to use bunker textures. These can be used freely and even commercially, but may not be redistributed. These pictures were shot while having a photoshoot in a bunker. All the files are also available in a handy zip package: Download Textures
This tutorial describes in a few steps how to make a very minimalistic poster advert in Photoshop. It is assumed that you have some basic Photoshop knowledge. You’ll learn to apply some basic design principles, techniques on choosing the right fonts and masking photographs. This will be our final end-result. The total time of completing this tutorial will be around 1 hour. Clicking images will in many cases enlarge the image. As well I like to use as many shortkeys as possible, so they are always mentioned behind the action. The Braun logo and all its rights are property of […]
