A Graphic Design Blog

Today’s post will be about the design principle of alignment. New designers often violate this design principle by putting text and graphics on the page wherever there happens to be room. Often this can leave a layout looking unorganized and unprofessional. By aligning objects, you can give your pages and designs a feeling of harmonious visual appeal.The principle of alignment states that nothing should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Everything...

Today’s post will be the first in a series on four basic principals of good design. I call these the “Basic Principles” because they are the foundation of how all good designs should look. These four foundational principles are: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. Although I will be talking about each principle separately, keep in mind that each are interconnected, and no single one holds more weight than the others.First, I must caution...

There are many aspects of being a graphic designer/artist that I must deal with every day. Consistently, however, it always seems like the simplest details become the things I dread so much. Today’s post I will talk about one aspect that really sets me off – The naming of colors!When I was young, colors were simple. I was never one of the kids with the 64+ box of crayons. No, my color palette was usually limited to the 24, well named,...

Here’s a common problem recently faced by one of my friends while using PowerPoint. In the image below, there are two pictures on one slide. The one of the left has a white boarder around it, while the other is transparent. How do you get the transparency?It turns out that not all images are made the same. The image on the left is a common “.Jpeg” file. Though it’s a complex process, a Jpeg file manages to save almost all colors visible to...

Here is another hopefully beneficial tutorial for those who have ever used Photoshop. Today I’m going to show you how to create your own brushes and brush effects in Photoshop. You can do a quick Google search for “Photoshop Brushes” and get thousands of websites that allow you to download (for free or pay) various brush sets. Hopefully, by the end of this blog, you’ll be able to save yourself some money by being able to make your own brushes.First...

What’s the difference between CMYK and RGB color modes?This is a common question faced by new digital designers and those that have ever worked with a printing company. Though there’s a lot of science involved, I’m primarily going to stick with a general answer.First, let me flex my art-nerd muscles…When you were in school, you probably learned that mixing colors like Red and Blue will give you a different color (Purple). Artists have known this...

So to kick things off, I wanted to start with a little tutorial of something I’ve had to do a lot of as a graphic designer – color separations.This process will show you how to color separate vector art using only Adobe Illustrator. It’s a quick and easy process that has always given me great results for screen printing. You can use this process for as many colors as you like. Just be sure to follow each step closely.To begin, I want to note that...