Blog Posts - Author: Marcus Romero

Audio nerd alert! Let’s talk loudness. Mastering to loudness specs may sound like an overly technical endeavor, but it’s essential to deliver usable, high-quality audio. Whether your track is streaming on Spotify, airing on the radio, or playing on YouTube, achieving the right loudness ensures your audio sounds clear, consistent, and professional across all platforms. Loudness is not just volume. It’s all about perception. It’s how much sound pressure a source emits at any given moment ?

Tell me if you’ve ever been in this situation…you’ve worked your heart out creating a one-off animation, it’s been eased within an inch of its life, and every aspect of the animation has been considered. Now, say, for example, the composition in question is a lower-third for video and, you’ve got a dozen or more unique variations to make for on-screen talent. Maybe lowers aren’t your thing, and you’re making animated banners with unique copy elements for each version. Whichever the

Over the past 35 years, Texas Creative has partnered with a very lengthy and impressive list of clients to successfully market a large variety of products and services. Consistently achieving an elevated level of success requires an understanding of each client’s business on both a macro and a micro level. The process invariably involves a plethora of charts and graphs, statistics, Google Analytics, year-over-year-same-store-sales, industry benchmarks, executive summaries, KPI dashboards, and

In this first installment of my 3 part series “Breaking Code: A Designers Guide”. We’ll be going over GREP Find and Replace and GREP styles in InDesign and how you can use them to take control of text with automatic styling. Every designer worth a damn realizes the power behind setting up and leveraging the power of Paragraph and Character styles. Not everyone realizes though that there is a second tier of power built into Paragraph styles that is mostly unused and underutilized. Understan

Let’s speak about creativity. Perhaps I’m an anomaly in my field, but my relationship with the word “creative” is dubious, and weighted with baggage. Creativity, like art, is never decoration. Creativity will not “jazz up” a layout or ever make anything “pop.” Creativity should appear efficient, never seeming to employ more touch than is absolutely necessary. Discovering a creative execution though is an exhaustive task. People often conflate creativity with being removed from ra

It’s 2016, a new year — new opportunities and a chance to reflect on our successes of the previous year. Brought to mind during these moments we spend in observance of the passage of time are the tools and processes in which I spend the majority of mine. 2015 was a year of great progress for TXC. All of it for the better. In an effort to continue to embrace change that has served us so well, what follows is a set of considerations for the designer in the New Year. 1) Make Adoption Routine Pr

I think I'm finally ready to admit it. I've known for quite a while and it’s time to lay it out there. I'm a hoarder. Thankfully, not a hoarder of the frightening danger to oneself and others variety, but a pack rat nonetheless — always stashing away a digital amassment to use in my creative development. To create great things, a designer's mind must be fed. My hoard is a massive bricolage of the bits and pieces I've culled from collective consciousness of the age. I index this digital ephem