Blog Posts - Graphic Design

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

The average agency can be a hectic place, with multiple teams working on everything from media plans, social media posts, creative strategies, website builds, to page layouts. A Traffic Manager ensures that all work from the account service team flows efficiently to the creative and production departments, then back to the account service team and out for an agency’s clients to review (and hopefully love). A Traffic Manager’s job centers around three primary responsibilities: Deadlines Wh

If you’ve spent any time with Adobe InDesign, you know essentially every element you place or draw on a page is a frame of some sort. Those frames can contain anything including a color, a color gradient, an image, text, or  table. Your collection of frames and their content make up your entire page’s design. Frames can be rectangles, ovals, hexagons – even a freehand shape. You can create advanced visual effects in a frame by using InDesign’s “paste into” feature, which allows

Over the years I’ve noticed most people in our industry know how to “speak designer.” With that said there are a handful of terms or issues that routinely come up that seem to cause confusion. Here’s a short list of some of the most common offenders and how they’re defined by a designer. TYPE: Distressed: Essentially type that looks worn – think of old painted letters on the side of a 50 year old exterior wall. Typeface: A specific style of alphanumeric characters. E.g. Times New Rom

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

With increasing efforts to go paperless, forms for almost anything can easily be turned into interactive PDFs. Whether you start with a form made with a number of applications (Word, Excel, InDesign) or a scanned paper form, Adobe Acrobat can turn it into a useable PDF form. Here are a few advantages: The form can be used with any free version of Acrobat Reader. PDF forms can be printed, saved or automatically sent by email, significantly reducing paper consumption. Easier to read: Non-legible

It’s been noted before by my previous blog that I am an obsessive font fiend, but I have never delved into the world of font creation (though I have edited fonts here and there when a character pestered my design). As a “creative” my brain naturally gravitates towards learning new skills, new programs, and new ways to be creative, so it was inevitable that I would find my way to trying my hand at designing a font eventually, and then here we are... In approaching font design, I discovered

There’s nothing more exciting to a designer than being given the chance to create or recreate a brand, and all that comes with it: from the logomark and logotype to the brand voice, design hallmarks, grids, font families, and colors. It’s a rare opportunity to mold a brand from the ground up and to create a personality that fits a company’s beliefs and values. Once the long road of research, exploratory, presentation, revisions and approval has reached its end (and congratulations if the r