Blog Posts - Graphic Design

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

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.    

Presentation isn’t everything; but it’s certainly massively important. This is something I’ve picked up over my career by watching some of the best designers sell their work.  The issue came up recently when I wanted to demonstrate a brochure layout to a client who was uncommitted to a specific design. Everyone can immediately visualize a generic brochure, but there’s a surprising amount of directions to go– letter-fold, z-fold or gate-fold? Pocket or flap? Can it hold a business

Vintage badges – they’re as popular today as ever. In fact, I wonder if they should really be considered “vintage,” if they’ve never gone out of style? Badges can add authenticity, a level of trust, and an established feel to a brand. Designers have a number of tools in Adobe Illustrator to tackle the task of creating a badge. In this video tutorial, I’ll explain why my advice is to resist your instincts and never touch the star tool when you set off to create one.

At Texas Creative, we believe companies must evolve to remain relevant, so we sat down with Vice President and Creative Director, Josh Norman, to learn about his 18 year tenure here and how he's watched the company grow over the years. 1. What is your role at Texas Creative? I’m Executive Vice President and Creative Director, and my role is to help direct the creative team along with Brian, our President and Chief Creative Director; David, our VP/Creative Director, and Marcus; our Associa

A satirically cynical guide for coping with your next project.   There comes a time in every designer’s career when a dark cloud descends over our pastoral workspace and someone commissions an original design created in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. A dubious request, castrating our professional expertise, the Microsoft Office “Template” has the side-effect of sending any seasoned artist into an emotional, design-purgatory. Yet there is light at the end of the tunnel, and

I find myself surprised when I discover that various InDesign features that I use religiously are features unused by other graphic designers. Enter the preflight panel. Combing through your InDesign documents for errors used to be a long and tedious process, but the preflight panel can automate the entire process based on presets that you can create. Starting with InDesign CS4, there has been a somewhat secret, but powerful, preflight panel. It’s usually turned on automatically, (but I tend to

It has been obvious since the debut of Adobe Photoshop in 1990 that its possible uses would be endless, particularly since the introduction of layers in Photoshop way back in 1994. In 2013, Photoshop introduced Puppet Warp, a feature that lets you select areas of an image, add pivot points, and move parts of the image like a manikin figurine. (The feature has since been added to Illustrator, too, for editing vector shapes.) I recently used this feature to straighten an image of paper garland tha

I am told on a regular basis by a client or coworker that they are “not creative” as a way to casually dismiss the ideas they have come to me with. It is true that not all ideas work when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of design (i.e. Craft), but the process of sifting through your mental history to conjure an idea is creativity whether you realize it or not. The first two dictionary definitions of the adjective word creative are: 1. having the quality or power of creating 2. resulting fro

I want to get this out of the way— Adobe Indesign is a great program which I depend on daily. It’s the industry standard for page design, and for good reason: it’s reliable, easy to use, and incredibly robust in the features department. But I’m a world class complainer who can find fault in anything, so I thought I’d make this my new blog series: Michael Complains about (Design Program). All of the following items are minor issues I would love to see “fixed.” 1. Controlling Columns