Blog Posts - Graphic Design

As a designer, I’m a master at the Adobe suite of creative apps. I firmly believe that the key to mastery is knowing your tools. Part of that, however, is understanding when tools could be improved or extended for your particular workflow. This can mean simple tools for the Mac OS Finder, command line tools, creating standalone apps, or simply choosing a better tool to accomplish a task. Here’s a look at some of the tools and apps I’ve developed to enhance my productivity in my daily creat

Being a TXCer means I like to sit front row, and for me that means subscribing to some cool design substacks. Recently, I stumbled across a post by Carly Ayres – a writer and design strategist at Figma – that spoke to the importance of junior designers. My first thought was, “Hey, that’s me! How nice of you to say!” After reading more, I think she’s totally right about emerging AI, the declining rate of junior roles, and what both could do to our industry. Some AI tools can do things

I have been around print and art for as long as I can remember, it’s definitely shaped my life and ultimately my career. My dad worked at a print shop, and my mom is a fine artist – I am the ultimate combination of both worlds. Print is something I was always drawn to, whether that was seeing the presses at my dads work running large sheets of paper full of text and design or seeing my moms old hippy poster designs full of swirling and dancing text. And now, in my career, I have found myself

Hello aspiring InDesigners! Let’s talk paragraph styles. When laying out a text-heavy document, not only will these bad boys keep your type consistent across multiple page layouts (and multiple projects), but it’ll also make editing so much easier across the entire document. If the options are overwhelming, check out this quick cheat sheet for starters: Basic Character Formats This is the traditional formatting of font, weight, size, leading, etc. If you’re going to underline or bold only

It wasn’t long ago that designers deeply entrenched in Adobe’s Creative Cloud ecosystem were PUMPED. Sketch was nice but it was standalone. Figma seemed promising. But Adobe XD had the promise of being the Harry Potter of web design – the chosen one. XD was built from the ground up with built-in prototyping, animations and transitions, repeat grids, scroll groups, and a plugin library to help collaborate with developers, test for accessibility, import placeholder images and text, and at le

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 f

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.

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