Graphic design practice embraces a range of cognitive skills, aesthetics and crafts, including typography, visual arts and page layout. Like other forms of design, graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created and the products (designs) which are generated. It is usually viewed as a superset of technical illustration.
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How to Design a Logo of Letters 
Are you known by your initials? Turn those letters into a terrific signature!
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When your photo can't be changed, surround it with cool color.
Before and After (2008). Design>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Color
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It’s not a secret. We all use stock imagery in our day-to-day design work. So why doesn’t anybody ever talk about it? Just like the inventory of a grocery store, not everything you see on a stock photo site is an ingredient for a gourmet production. By far the worst mistake you can make when choosing stock is selecting stereotypical or clichéd images to convey a concept.My guess is that we’re all just a little ashamed. We want people to see our work as just that: ours. When you have to tell someone that you didn’t create that grungy texture, or you didn’t take that beautiful photo, it feels a lot like admitting that you’ve cheated on a test. But this is nonsense—as designers, it’s our job to put things together and deliver a composition that looks good.
Beaird, Jason. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design
#32641
Photoshop. Fireworks. If you’re a serious web designer (and not using the GIMP) you’re going to be using one or the other. But which is best?
Smith, Nathan. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop
#32653
Photoshop promises great power, but can be more than a little challenging when it comes to clarity and patience. New users can easily get frustrated at how daunting some of the challenges can be when it comes to getting the job done, and even those who are a bit more familiar with it still find points of frustration that impede both production and creativity. So for those who barely know Photoshop, but would like to become more familiar with it—find out what sort of things to look for when it comes to the palette system, layers, styles, effects, various tools, and saving or exporting their work—let’s look at the basics.
Peck, Anton. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Adobe Photoshop
#32706
Develop PHP applications with Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums offers Web application developers a REST-based Data API to manipulate the photos and albums stored on its servers. PHP's SimpleXML extension and Zend's GData Library are ideal to process the XML feeds generated by this API so you can customize PHP photo management and photo sharing applications. In this article, meet the Picasa Web Albums Data API and see how you can use it to retrieve photos and photo metadata; add, modify and delete photos; and perform keyword searches of Picasa's user-generated content.
Vaswani, Vikram. IBM (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>PHP
#32717
Forty Beautiful Grunge Photoshop Tutorials
In this collection, we present to you 40 excellent, high-quality grunge Photoshop tutorials. So fire up Photoshop and get ready to get your hands… dirty!
Gube, Jacob. Smashing (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Photoshop
#32719
Vintage and Retro Typography Showcase
In this article, we go retro, finding beautiful examples of vintage typography and the modern work they’ve inspired. Looking back, it’s easy to see why some of this type has stood the test of time and is still lingering in the design community today.
Smashing (2008). Design>Graphic Design>Typography
#32760
COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.
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Common Visual Design Misconceptions
Though visual designers might face different hurdles in particular product domains and at different points in their careers, there are three common misconceptions that surface quite frequently.
Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2008). Careers>Graphic Design
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There are always colorblind people among the audience and readers. There should be more than ten colorblinds in a room with 250 people (50% male and 50% female). There is a good chance that the paper you submit may go to colorblind reviewers. Supposing that your paper will be reviewed by three white males (which is not unlikely considering the current population in science), the probability that at least one of them is colorblind is whopping 22%!
Okabe, Masataka and Kei Ito. University of Tokyo (2002). Articles>Accessibility>Graphic Design>Color
#32965
The web design community thankfully seems to be wrapping up the "design vs. usability" argument. In case you missed it, the conclusion was: "Not either/or but both, and it depends."
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Usability
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Graphic Design can "hijack" usability efforts if the graphic design team is not "on board" with usability. This is probably why these days more and more graphic artists (like the students at the Art Institute of Portland where I am currently teaching a class) are learning about usability and have a sensitivity for its user-centered intentions.
Spillers, Frank. Demystifying Usability (2004). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Usability
#32971
Graphic Design Plays a Minor Role on the Web
The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don’t try and force the Web to be what it’s not.
McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2005). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design
#32972
Graphic designers are asked to perform the difficult task of being creative every single day. Often, our main priority is to feed our client's fascination for originality. We experiment with colors, composition, typography, and photography in order to deliver an original visual solution. This sort of free-ranging experimentation is often the expectation of graphic designers. However, this approach is becoming less and less effective.
Acosta, Maria. Thread Information Design (2003). Design>Graphic Design
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Successful visual designers well know the audiences they are designing for, and realize that their audiences exist at multiple levels.
Knemeyer, Dirk. Thread Information Design (2003). Design>Graphic Design>Audience Analysis>Rhetoric
#33127
Crop images contextually for faster downloads and higher impact. By cropping maximally and resizing you can convey meaning without slowing down your web pages.
Website Optimization (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing
#33130
CSS Overlays: Using CSS Positioning to Overlay Web Objects
An overlay is when one web object overlaps another. Overlays are often used to highlight or draw attention to important items on websites to raise conversion rates. This article shows how use CSS positioning to avoid slicing and dicing your overlays and assembling with tables. Along the way we'll look at the workarounds we used to make the technique work with different browsers (most importantly IE5.x Mac and Safari).
Website Optimization (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>CSS
#33144
Five Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems:
Aesthetics can be measured and more importantly can be constructed. If you want something to be aesthetically pleasing there are steps you can take to make sure it is going in the right direction. Now I'm not saying that 'follow these rules and you will create something beautiful'. What I am saying is that by following a few of these guidelines can go some way into creating something compositionally balanced, which will inherently be more aesthetically pleasing.
Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Document Design>Graphic Design>Methods
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The Design and Emotion Society
The Design and Emotion society raises issues and facilitates dialogue among practitioners, researchers, and industry, in order to integrate salient themes of emotional experience into the design profession. The Design and Emotion Society was established in 1999 as an international network of researchers, designers and companies sharing an interest in experience driven design. The network is used to exchange insights, research, tools and methods that support the involvement of emotional experience in product design.
Design and Emotion Society, The. Organizations>Graphic Design>Emotions
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Five proven techniques for powerful and effective marketing design.
Blum, Sandra J. Dynamic Graphics (2005). Articles>Graphic Design>Marketing>Persuasive Design
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Stepping into Oz: Managing and Delivering Successful Visual Design
How can design teams get to a successful visual design with their clients? Getting to the right visual design can be the trickiest part of a design project. One of the key reasons is that some clients have a hard time saying clearly what they want from the visual design.
Houck-Whitaker, Julia. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Management>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric
#33484
The Joy of Sketch: Explorations in Hand-Crafted Visuals
There’s always been a strong visual element to our work: architecture diagrams, interface wireframes, concept models, system and service models. And we’ve become adept at the computer applications that help us create these things. But there are other tools out there, such as the simple tools of pen, paper and sketching.
Rutter, Kate. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Graphic Design
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This article introduces the "Sphere of Design", which is a simple conceptual model that illustrates the relationship and trade-offs between 'looks' and 'works'.
Web Design From Scratch (2005). Articles>Graphic Design>Usability
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Graphic Thoughts: My Top 10 Photoshop Moves, Part 1
Almost every time I speak to an audience about graphics or Photoshop, I’m asked if I went to school to learn what I know about the application. The truth is that while I spent more than 3 years in an Advertising Art degree program, I ultimately switched gears and got a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in marketing (Mom and Dad were thrilled with this news!), and that was in the early ’90s—pretty much in the infant stages of Photoshop.
Gray, Lawrence. Event DV (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Photoshop
