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Guest Author: Huge Freebies Collections For Your Future Design Projects

Ari Krzyzek — Mon, 23 May 2011 18:58:20 +0000

Being an active web and graphic designer is excellent. However, there are times when you have too many projects to handle and wish you could save time with some graphic templates. Imagine if you have to finish a website design with a tight deadline and you spend to much time working on the graphic elements. You will most likely misspend your valuable time. This situation happens everyday to us.

In order to help you save more time, we have selected more than 100 free graphic resources for your future design projects. This collection ranges from web buttons, icons, swatches, text styles, to mock-ups.

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Guest Author Post: 20+ Inspirational And Informative Resources For Logo Creation

Ari Krzyzek — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 07:15:42 +0000

Being a logo designer and finding ideas to design a stunning yet effective logo is not an easy task. Sometimes we have to check out what logo trends are going on in the current year, and seek the inspiration sources as well.

Today, to find such informational and informative resources for logo is as easy as you snap your fingers. However, if you know which sites to go to, it will save more of your time rather than searching for them one by one on Google. See the 23 of best sites for you to look for logo creation ideas, here.

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Guest Author Post: 25+ Sites And Resources To Learn Typography

Ari Krzyzek — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:15:48 +0000

Typography has been practiced and used in our daily life. Range from handwriting in a pocket notebook to the big advertising billboard. It’s sometimes typed using Times New Roman in 12 points for newspaper. Others use Edwardian in 26 points for their wedding invitations. When a designer decide to use the right font for the right job, the typography itself become an art.

Learning typography seems to be easy at a glance, in order to achieve a great impact from typography for graphic and web designs isn’t so easy. Many designers found it as a complicated design aspects to practice. Read more about the 25+ sites and resources we have selected to help you understanding typography basics Here.

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Get Inspired By Your Desktop Using GeekTool & CandyBar

Ari Krzyzek — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:32:33 +0000

Inspiration comes from anywhere. With the technology we have today, it is only a matter of quality to feed your brain with selective inspirations to keep you going with new ideas. From browsing for inspiration on Google to reading people’s tweet of new inspiration post online. And if you notice, your desktop could also become one of the sources for it. How is it not? Many designers spent their time working on a wallpaper design with hope it will give them inspiration when they need it.

Your desktop is the closest inspiration source for you. Ever get bored with the ordinary look of your current desktop? Did you try using the most awesome wallpaper you could find to cheer up your desktop? Did it work? Well, for me it didn’t. For the past few years I changed my desktop wallpaper every once or twice in a month. But recently I changed it once or twice in a week. I just couldn’t figure out what I really want to be on my desktop that could also inspired me, until I saw one desktop screenshot from deviantArt. It was not the greatest desktop screenshot, but what he put on his desktop that interest me the most.

Ever heard GeekTool and CandyBar?

GeekTool

GeekTool is a PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Mac OS 10.5. It let you display on your desktop different kind of informations, provided 3 default plugins :

File plugin to monitor MacOS X activity with /var/log/system.log, or any file that you want to follow.Shell mode to launch custom scripts or commands like “df” to check space left on filesystems, “uptime” to monitor load of your machine… Finally, Image mode helps you monitor bandwith usage, CPU loads, memory availability of your server, via tools like MRTG or RRD.

Click here to download GeekTool.

I personally like this plugin. It allows me to put anything on my desktop, well not any anything, but most of things that I wanted. Say a board with some of my favorite pictures. Time, calendar, weather info, even add IP info or my Mac info on my desktop. How to do all that? Well, the image is simple, all you have to do is set the path or the image URL, then place it anywhere on your desktop. But others like calendar or weather info, those need some line of command. Below I have the links you can check for the command info.

http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/10/small-list-of-geektool-commands.html
http://www.keynote2keynote.com/2007/04/10/ultimate-geektool-setup-pimp-your-desktop-part-2/
http://www.macheist.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=12999
http://maketecheasier.com/geektool-turn-macs-desktop-into-information-center/2010/03/09
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/customize_your_desktop_geektool

Though, I still don’t know why I couldn’t get the weather image to show up on my desktop. I spent several hours working on this but I didn’t succeed. If you have this problem as well, then you know you’re not the only one :p

CandyBar

CandyBar allows you to change the system icons in Mac OS X that you normally can’t, including including the trash can, volumes, default folder, and more!
CandyBar 3 also now includes a full-featured icon organizer (formerly called Pixadex) that acts like an iPhoto for your icons: collect and store your icons in the same application you use to change them!

Click here to download CandyBar

Now that you have CandyBar installed on your Mac, you should begin your search for icons or icon sets that you like. Here are few links where you could get great quality icons.

http://weloveicons.com/
http://iconfactory.com/freeware/icon
http://frespiration.com/icon-index/

If you prefer to use your artwork, pictures or your own icon but kinda disappointed that it wasn’t the right type of file, go to iConverticons to convert your files to Mac or Windows icons.

Still need more inspiration for your desktop? Check out some of these beautiful screenshots using GeekTool and CandyBar.

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Photography Vs Graphic Design

Ari Krzyzek — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:03:41 +0000

Being a part of graphic design community and get involved with the creative mind and creations within it is enjoyable. The more creative artworks I see, the more blurry and difficult for me to differentiate one artwork to another. But when my friends and I were discussing about Frespiration! contents and artwork category, some of us disagree to include Photography category to the lists. They believe that photography is not part of graphic design, but part of cinematography, while others believe the opposite. This makes me think twice whether photography could be categorized under graphic design or not.

I read related article “art Vs. design” written by Craig A Elimeliah on AIGA Website. It explains the differences between the two of them and here’s what it defines for design:

A designer is similar to an engineer in that respect and must not only have an eye for color and style but must adhere to very intricate functional details that will meet the objectives of the project. The word “design” lends itself to a hint that someone or something has carefully created this “thing” and much planning and thought has been executed to produce the imagery or materials used for the project.

Bacio January 2009 Booklet Design

...in love Photography by Oprisco

Some reasons of why it’s blurry for us to see the difference between Photography and Design, that both of them created to aesthetically please the eyes and sometimes entertains the viewers. So, why can’t photography be categorized under graphic design? Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe wrote three views of photography and whether photography is beneficial to art or whether it is art at all.

The first view is that photography is not an art because it is produced with a mechanical device and by chemical and physical phenomenon not by hand and inspiration. The second view is that photographs would be useful to art but should not be equal in creativeness to painting and drawing. The final theory is that because photography is so similar to lithography and etching then it would be beneficial to the arts as well as culture.

The functions of graphic design are to solve the problem, to help visualizing information, to attract viewers’ attention/interest, and to make it a memorable artwork. For photography, the function are to documenting, to capture the moment, expose reality condition or expressions. This function become beneficial to graphic design in order to help designers to visualize the related information on the design. I do not say that I’m proficient on both of photography and design, but we now noticed that photography is part of graphic design, but still it is not categorized under graphic design. Photography artworks that have been edited or not will always be categorized under photography, whereas photography artworks which is combined with text and to support visualizing informations will always be categorized under graphic design.

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T-SHIRT Round-up

Ari Krzyzek — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:58:49 +0000

Who doesn’t love tees? Or the usual name; T-Shirt? Everybody loves T-shirts! This type of clothes has been survive from the late of 1800′s to the 19th century, and even till now. With many variation images, or typography or both, for any purposes, it’s always attract us to wear them, of course it is also depends on how attractive the design on the t-shirts themselves.

For designers, sometimes the limited color become a problem, but for today, I think that’s an old problem which has been solved by the technology on the garment industry. So, I provide you a link to these Ultimate T-shirt Round-up article from smashing magazine. There are tutorials on how to design the t-shirt design for the printing method or technique, also some useful resources you can use for free. ;)

Hit the link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/16/the-ultimate-round-up-of-t-shirt-design-tutorials/

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Selling logo on IstockPhoto

Ari Krzyzek — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:15:02 +0000

Various stock photos and illustration are sold on the net, everything you need for your project and saving more budgets for most freelancers. After releasing the audio stocks at the beginning of this year, now Istockphoto announcing the Istock Logos. This new product will come in few months ahead, while IstockPhoto is still preparing for the Logo Training Manual for the Istock logo designers. Even though it’s a stock logo, there are few differences use for the Istock logos; Isstock Logos will be exclusive file, high price, and only for one time use. Read more about it on the “Logos come to iStock” forum to find the details, and start thinking for some new ideas for your new logo for sell.

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=119471

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Be Awesome at Work?

Ari Krzyzek — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:02:20 +0000

Most designers nowadays are split into two categories; one prefer to go freelancing, and other prefer to work for a company. Despite those two categories, we all want to be great on our work. We learn tutorials and news from many sources on the net to upgrade our skill, thousands of design blogs also become our inspiration to improve our design knowledge in term of handling clients, time or project management, or others.

One famous site on this, is Envato. In case you’re not too familiar with this name, you may have heard psdtuts+, vectortuts+ and other tuts+ series, freelance switch (a very useful website for freelancers). Now they publish their new website for people who prefer to work for company and want to be awesome at their work. From how to make an effective to-do list, to how to gain respect in your workplace. You can find them and other resources about it here:
http://workawesome.com/

So, who says that the employee can’t be awesome at work? ;)

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$29.95 Book from SitePoint now FREE for ONLY 10 days!!

Ari Krzyzek — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 15:35:24 +0000

Yup, I’m not joking. What you read is F-R-E-E.
SitePoint is one successful Web portal business. This Australian web development service company also publishes top-selling educational books. Over 50,000 books are sold across 135 countries. Those books are used by web developers and designers; many of them are also endorsed by universities and educational institutions around the world.

This month, only until 14th September 2009, SitePoint is giving “The Principles of Successful Freelancing” book for free. This book is all about what you need to think, prepare and to do as a beginner in freelancing. It’s a handy guide to be your own boss and starting to grown your own business as internet freelancer. No matter what type of profession you are, this book will guide you to be a better prepared freelancer. So if you started to think to work away from the office or you just wanna learn more and getting advices before deciding to go freelancing, grab the book while it’s free just for 10 more days.

Go to this link to find more about the free book:
http://twitaway.sitepoint.com/

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