Over the years, Adobe Illustrator has become one of the top applications for creating vector illustrations. There is almost nothing you can’t make in Illustrator. It is a powerful tool for creating vectors for all kind of logos, websites, icons, business cards, print materials, etc. One of the best features of the vector format is its ability to scale up or down to any size without any loss in quality (unlike raster illustrations). But let’s not forget that Adobe Illustrator is complex software. Despite all of its advantages, Illustrator demands a lot of...

   It didn’t work out as you expected, did it? The freelance life was supposed to give you more time with the family and free you from that incompetent boss. You even thought you might be better off financially. Instead, you’re working longer hours and under constant stress, worrying about various aspects of your business. To relieve the pressure of entrepreneurial life and avoid burning out, freelancers and business owners need strategies. In this post, I’ll share some tactics that have helped me be more in control of my business, my projects and...

   It has been a big year for WordPress. If there were still some lingering doubts about its potency as a full-fledged content management system, then the full support for custom taxonomies and custom post types in WordPress 3.0 core should have put them to rest. WordPress 3.1 took those leaps one step further, polishing custom taxonomies with multi-taxonomy query support, polishing custom post types with native template support for archives and feeds, and introducing features (like the “admin bar”) that make it easier to quickly edit and add content from the front end. In the...

   Two weeks ago we published the first part of Photoshop tips and tricks for photo retouching. Today, we’ll be presenting the rest of the article. We hope that these techniques will be quite useful for your workflow. You may know some of them, but hopefully not all of them. We have had articles on various tools in Adobe Photoshop but this one is focused more on the techniques rather than the tools provided. Please note that all images used in this article were purchased and are used according to their licenses. Here is a short overview of the techniques we’ll be covering...

   When it comes to designing in Photoshop, there is a myriad of ways one could use to achieve a certain result, especially when it comes to photo retouching. Designers use technique they are most confident as well as comfortable with, which is great because it’s always useful to peek into the workflow of our colleagues and learn new design approaches. We have had articles on cloning, compositing, masks and obscure Photoshop time-savers in the past. This article is different. I’ll be covering some of the useful techniques and tricks which I’ve learned from my...

   Typography is not only an all-important aspect of design, it is also an art form in and of itself. Choosing the right font, the perfect spacing and even the correct shape of text can be an important factor as to whether a project fails or succeeds. Although Illustrator is not really used for multiple-paged projects, many would agree that it is one of the most powerful applications for creating vector graphics, such as logos, and it is also often used for one-page documents, such as business cards, posters, or postcards. Since we can easily transfer graphics from...

   Making a great presentation is not easy. It’s something that requires hard work, thought and practice. And did I mention practice? As the saying goes, “Practice makes perfect!” So in other words: You won’t turn into Steve Jobs over night from reading this article. He has developed his amazing presentation skills over years and years of practice. Presentation is Not an Art Art is something created without a specific target audience in mind. Something that reflects the emotions of the artist. A presentation is something completely different....

   When it comes to design projects, logo designs tend to be some of the trickiest to work with, simply because of their purpose. All design tends to be conveying a message, this is true, but most designs get to use so much more to make their points accessible to the viewer. Not to mention that the message being conveyed through most design gets to be a bit more focused or general as well. This is not always true with a logo. Logos usually have much more to convey with a much simpler vehicle to make their message land. It is with that in mind that this post came to...