Blog Posts - Graphic Design

Rolling out new corporate branding is a lot of things to a lot of stakeholders. For an agency like Texas Creative, it’s a unique opportunity to help refresh and reshape a client’s core identity. However, for most companies it’s an expensive endeavor and carries the fear of losing brand equity, indicating that something is or was wrong with their brand and requires a new narrative, and it carries the added work and costs involved with planning a rollout that leverages the newsworthiness of

As mentioned in a previous blog by art director Michael Streubert, we’ve been exploring Adobe XD recently as an alternative to Sketch for UI design work. While I agree with much of Michael’s Sketch vs. XD showdown, I find myself more on Team XD than Michael (and won’t even hold it against him much), primarily because of XD’s built-in prototyping and animation tools. So, let’s do something today in XD that’s not possible using Sketch alone: design, prototype, and animate a mobile menu

When it comes to color, context is everything. A pinch of a particular color could produce an appealing composition, while too much of the identical color could disrupt it.  Here is an overview of basic color meanings: White: The use of white color in business signifies cleanliness and hygiene. It indicates calmness, simplicity, and organization. White has been elected as a symbol of goodness, spirituality, purity, balance, perfection, hope, and honesty. You may find this color used a lot for i

I’ve been designing websites in Sketch for the last 5 years, and I’ll admit that removing the process from Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator felt like the most powerful software revolution in the design ecosystem since we abandoned Quarkxpress.  But recently it has come to my attention that Adobe XD may be making enough headway to usurp Sketch from atop the UI/UX throne. So for my last web project I decided to dust off my Udemy account and fire up some YouTube videos and learn more about XD. Whil

Ask any designer which program is their least favorite to work in, and chances are it’s one of the Microsoft 365 apps (see Michael’s blog here). But, given that it’s a program that our clients probably use, it is one we are destined to have to deal with. Now that we have that disclaimer out of the way, just because it is yet another PowerPoint presentation does not mean it has to look like just another PowerPoint presentation. Here are some tips on how we can help you dress up your PowerPo

A little GIF history The animated GIF: Thrust into common lexicon with the dancing baby in the 1990s, but with a lifespan now approaching its mid-30s, its surprising staying power has been further fueled by its use on social media, Slack, Discord, and texting. The format also remains a very common form of advertising, though often plagued by silly limitations of 60K or smaller file sizes, 15 seconds in length, and no more than 3x loops.  Smartphones were the stuff of sci-fi thrillers when the

If you’re like me, then you love when new technology allows for easier and uncomplicated ways to improve workflow in the workplace. Earlier this year, InDesign released Share for Review which is a new workflow for collaborative feedback on PDFs created in InDesign that is all web-based and can be shared with just a link. There is no need to download software for the end user. I will take you through the process from beginning to end, including what the end user sees. Begin with opening your do

We all fall into ruts in our daily lives. As responsibilities pile up, we become machines of routine that eventually can lead to monotony. It is hard to be creative within monotony. I get it, I have three kids and there are plenty of days where efficiency is the only goal of the day, so when I read an article telling me to “break routine” in order to be more creative, I just laugh. But, there are some tips I can offer that I find helpful. Not all of them are pandemic-proof, but we can possib

Over the last few years, I’ve become a massive proponent of Paragraph Styles, even to the point where I’m happy to set up a unique style for all repeatable type treatments in any InDesign document that crosses my desk.  Paragraph styles are a powerful feature in InDesign that often go overlooked and underutilized. While they can seem clunky to set up, their efficiency in making global changes should always offset the initial time investment.  While most designers should be familiar with th

If you’ve ever wanted to randomly assign colors from a set color palette to multiple objects in an Illustrator file quickly, the solution is lurking in the “Edit” menu: Recolor Artwork. In this video, I’ll show you my workflow for creating a randomly-colored collection of objects that will hopefully save you both time and a little sanity.