#10243
Looking for Art in All the Right Places
Although this doesn't seem to be a Design and Publishing topic, it really is. Your visual experience should always be digesting new and different input. You need visual stimulation to maintain your creative edge. Looking at art is one way of doing this -- and the web offers an unlimited wealth of visual wonders. Pull out your daytimer, or your palm, and make an appointment with yourself. Take one or two hours each month and discover new visual landscapes. It will serve you well, and you'll come to look forward to those little jaunts into the visual web.
Showker, Fred. Design, Typography and Graphics (2000). Design>Graphic Design>Typography
#21964
How to get the most out of the Photoshop sharpening controls - complete with show-and-tell examples.
Blatner, David and Steve Roth. Adobe Magazine (1995). Design>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Photoshop
#20429
Magazine Typography: Designing for Browsers and Readers
Magazine typography is all about communicating, but magazines communicate in many different ways. One of those ways is through the text, the traditional meat of any publication. Other ways include photography, artwork, suggestive and allusive headlines, cartoons, and even the advertising. All of these require integrating words and images in imaginative ways.
Berry, John D. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography>Graphic Design
#18367
Make Maximum Use Of The Multiple Slide Master
Nearly every presenter knows the pain of having to merge presentations from different sources. In earlier versions of PowerPoint, such as 95, 97 and 2000, slides copied from another presentation were automatically reformatted by PowerPoint to reflect its current template design. This made it necessary to painstakingly reformat all the new slides, or to program links from one presentation to another, to make everything appear consistent. It was a time-wasting hassle. But with PowerPoint 2002 (also known as XP), the problem can now be easily solved. PowerPoint 2002 offers multiple slide masters, a feature that allows you to copy slides from different presentations and still retain their original formatting. Multiple slide masters also make it easy to design a variety of layouts within one template.
Terberg, Julie. Presentations (2002). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Microsoft PowerPoint
#32059
Admit it, effects are cool. Drop shadows, gradients, glows, bevels and the like can be a lot of fun and are ridiculously easy to apply to your designs. However, once you discover the powerful effects waiting inside today’s graphics suites, it’s easy to get carried away.
Praschan, Mark. ReEncoded (2008). Design>Graphic Design>Web Design
#27432
Some tips on how to improve photos that are taken at night.
Kloskowski, Matt. Planet Photoshop (2006). Design>Graphic Design>Photography>Adobe Photoshop
#21859
If you thought gradients were just a matter of getting two colors together, take a look at how sophisticated they've become.
Alspach, Ted. Adobe Magazine (1998). Design>Graphic Design>Software
#29539
Making the Strange Familiar: A Pedagogical Exploration of Visual Thinking 
Scholarly conversation within the field of professional communication increasingly has focused on the practice, research, and pedagogy of visual rhetoric. Yet, visual thinking has received relatively little attention within the field. If our programs produce students who can think verbally but not visually, they risk producing writers who are visual technicians but are unable to move fluidly between and within modes of communication. This article examines the literature and pedagogical practices of visually oriented disciplines to identify strategies for helping students develop the ambidexterity of thought needed for the communication tasks of today's workplace.
Brumberger, Eva R. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2007). Articles>Education>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric
#25967
Making Your Digital Camera See More
One of the challenges of photography is to capture the image that you see with your camera. With modern cameras performing all of the light measurement and changing the settings, in most cases when you press the shutter button, the image that you capture is an accurate representation of what you saw; that is, until you attempt to photograph a scene that has extremes in lighting. When you’re out shooting a sunset, for example, you can see both the foreground and the sunset quite clearly, but after taking the photograph, the sunset looks brilliant and the foreground is black as pitch.
Huss, Dave. Layers Magazine (2005). Design>Graphic Design>Photography
#19883
Managing Quality Graphic Design in a Documentation Project 
Supervising the design of documentation is challenging for documentation managers who have little or no educated knowledge of design. However, quality design that maintains ease of reading, accessibility, comprehension, retention, and aesthetics is vital to the usability and success of the documentation and should be carefully monitored by the documentation manager. Decisions must be made up front on four design areas -- packaging, layout, typography, and highlighting -- before the project is underway. In addition, audience analysis and a design style guide are two techniques that managers should embrace in supervising design.
Listeman, Amy J. STC Proceedings (1995). Careers>Graphic Design>Document Design>Documentation
#21257
Marketing design is the fastest moving area of visual design today. This paper is a high-level discussion about how to analyze the needs of your customer, maintain a consistent image across all pieces; and remain flexible, innovative, and positive throughout a cycle of constant change.
Creed, Lisa. STC Proceedings (1995). Design>Graphic Design>Marketing
#25890
Mastering Image Exposure Corrections in Photoshop
It's very important to always do your exposure corrections in Photoshop first, before any other corrections or effects. If you don’t, you’ll find that correcting exposure is extremely hard (if not impossible) to do.
Milburn, Ken. Graphics.com (2005). Design>Graphic Design>Prepress>Color
#21447
When working with technical illustrations, you must consider perspective. The following article will provide you with some useful information on working with both parallel and true perspective.
ITEDO Software (2002). Articles>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Isometric
#29528
Medical Tables, Graphics and Photographs: How They Work
An examination of a random sample of four medical journals--The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine--reveals that one-fifth of the space of articles in medical science is devoted to an average of three tables and three flow charts, graphs, or photographs. Given these figures, the absence of discussion of visuals in the literature on medical communication may seem puzzling. But the puzzle is easily solved: our basic education gives us a coherent vocabulary for talking about prose, but no coherent vocabulary for talking about tables and visuals. Once we have this vocabulary in hand, we make another step in the direction of an explanation of the nature of communication in the medical sciences. We may note that understanding the meaning of a medical article is not just a consequence of understanding its texts; it is a consequence of understanding all its meaningful components working together--verbal, tabular, visual.
Gross, Alan G. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Biomedical
#25184
When merging a layer with the layer below John lost all of the effects applied to that upper layer. Answer: Don't merge?
Photoshop 911 (2004). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop
#20197
By using Layer Styles, this effect can be created in two simple steps. Scott Kelby shows you how to look like a professional at a beginner's level.
Kelby, Scott. Mac Design Magazine (2003). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop
#22494
Up goes that hand and out pops that dreaded can-opener of a question: 'Why aren't we learning programming in this class?' A litany of responses begins to unfold in my now Prozac-pleading brain: Because it's not graphic design; because it's too specialized; because graphic designers won't be doing it or shouldn't be doing it because they'll end up as hacks if they do it and the profession will go to hell; or because it's another program - maybe even a department-unto itself. I'm feeling queasy. It used to be so simple, so clear: We knew what graphic design was and what it wasn't.
Sandhaus, Louise. AIGA (2004). Articles>Education>Graphic Design
#24790
My Brain's Not Like Yours: Individual Differences in Visual Processing Styles
The principles of graphic design 'work' for viewers for several reasons. One reason is that well-designed graphics perform significant information-processing functions for viewers. This workshop looks at individual differences in several dimensions of information-processing style (including visual/haptic,field independent/dependent, high/low detail analysis, high/low visual distractibility, and leveling/sharpening in visual memory). It then examines the ability of graphic designs to 'supplant' processing skills for viewers by either captializing on viewer strengths or compensating for their weaknesses.
Ausburn, Floyd B. and Lynna J. Ausburn. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Graphic Design>Visual>Cognitive Psychology
#25907
National Association of Photoshop Professionals
The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) is a trade association and resource for Adobe® Photoshop® education, training, and news.
#29801
In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning potentials which underpin different visual resources; (c) a critical analysis links these decisions of design and branding to the political and cultural economies of globalism and the airline industry. Specifically, we show how airlines are able to service national identity concerns through the use of highly localized visual meanings while also appealing to the meaning systems of the international market in their pursuit of symbolic and economic capital. One key semiotic resource is the balancing of cultural symbolism and perceptual iconicity in the form of abstracted stylizations of kinetic effects. Although positioned unfairly in the global semioscape, airlines may resist straightforward cultural homogenization by strategically reworking existing design structures and exploiting possibly universal semiotic meaning potentials.
Thurlow, Crispin. Visual Communication (2007). Design>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric
#21393
Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design
The web is awash with sterile design solutions. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and countless others are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Though one might say this makes browsing easier by virtue of a standardized interface, in reality such sites create mundane experiences for their users and fail to make a positive connection with their audience.
Wroblewski, Luke. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Design>Web Design>Graphic Design>Color
#21919
An overview of the new - and explosively growing - world of royalty-free photographs.
Soberanis, Pat. Adobe Magazine (1996). Design>Graphic Design>Photography
#14161
One of the most frequent problem areas I encounter in the publishing field is when editors, writers and, yes even business people are expected to turn out a good newsletter. If my car isn't running right, I take it to the mechanic. I don't expect the car wash to fix the motor any more than I expect the mechanic to give it a wash and wax. Rare are the instances where the writer or editor is also a good designer and/or typographer. Yet they're almost always restricted by the software they use, the availability of good clip art or images, and the time to think about the details. I'm going to restrict myself to just the initial visual and organizational points in this critique. We could spend days talking about minutiae and the array of options involved in a full scale makeover. What I'll do is share some quick and easy areas where a simple fix will make a big difference.
Showker, Fred. Design, Typography and Graphics (2002). Design>Document Design>Graphic Design>Newsletters
#30858
Newspaper Design as Cultural Change
his article describes the (re-)design of newspapers and magazines as a process of cultural change which goes beyond designing a publication's layout, typography and use of colour, and includes designing the processes and structures of its production.
de Vries, James. Visual Communication (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Publishing>Visual Rhetoric
#20672
The infographics weblog is a running collection of links to infographics found on the web through my own research and the submissions of many individuals.
Nixlog. Resources>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Blogs
