Learn from a variety of tutorials and interviews about how you can improve your design skills today.
The Power of Keep Options It’s good form to keep your headings directly on top of your paragraph text, but if you’re using columns, you may have a situation where a heading falls at the bottom of a column with its correlating text falling to the next column or page. […]
A Checklist for Taking the Perfect Photo Nowadays you can take top quality imagery with your phone without the need for expensive lenses or heavy DSLR cameras. The convenience alone of mobile photography is enough to warrant learning a few tips and tricks to improve your photography. Below are a […]
Remove Rivers in Paragraphs InDesign has the built in functionality to show you if your kerning is too squashed or if your rivers (gaps between you words) are too large and interfering with the look of your paragraphs. This is especially handy if you justify your paragraphs which may lead […]
Making Your Headers Fancy Would you like to know how to create responsive header designs and pull quote designs like these, that expand and contract according to the length of your text? There are some neat styling options available in the Paragraph and Border Shading dialogue box, but these options […]
Auto-Size Your Text Boxes Typically when you create a text frame, the frame size is set to the height and width you initially created it at. When you paste in text or type text in a text frame that exceeds the size of the frame, you get one of those […]
Sharpening Your Images the Old-School Way Using the High Pass to sharpen images is an old-school method to sharpen your images. The benefit of sharpening your images this way, instead of using an unsharp mask or a smart sharpen or one of the other sharpening filters, is that a high […]
Balance Your Black and White Values When printing images it’s important to make sure your blacks don’t contain too much ink, and it’s also important that your white areas aren’t blown out so the CMYK ink value is 0-0-0-0. To ensure this, you can set the white and black values […]
Taking photos of high contrast subjects and post a variety of issues, something these include heavy noise in the shadows and blown-out highlights. Here’s a quick tutorial about how to separate these out so you can adjust them independently.
If you come across a font you really like, but don’t know the name of, there are several ways you can go about finding this information. Here are four ways: Photoshop Open up a photo of your font in Photoshop. Drag a selection around the letters you’re interested in finding […]
Remove Active Hyphenation as Default Option Permanently Open InDesign, but do not open any documents. Any changes made to your preferences while a document is open will only affect those documents. For any changes to stick, you need to make adjustments to your panels and preferences while there are no […]
Not all black colours are created equal… But if they look equal, like the image below… …then you need to go to View > Proof Colors in InDesign/Photoshop/Illustrator to witness the true horror that will be your final printed black. The difference between these previews is […]
Tap on the Colour Picker icon in the top right corner of the screen. At the bottom of the panel that appears, you’ll see 4 icons at the bottom, the one on the right says “palette”. Select that one. Tap the + icon in the top right of the popup, […]
Set up the Grid Open a new document (command + n for Mac or ctrl + n for Windows). In the New Document window, decide if you want facing pages on or off, how many columns you want, what the gutter and margins should be. These setting will depend on […]
Adding texture to a design is a simple and easy way to make it more interesting looking. While this is a pretty straightforward thing to do in Photoshop, in InDesign this is another story. Adding patterns and texture doesn’t come built into the native InDesign package and 3rd party plugins are usually […]
Sometimes when working with lots of paths in Illustrator, and you’re copying them, using the scissors tool to cut them, and so on, there can be a tendency for stray anchor points to appear. These points are arbitrary points left on your artwork that have no stoke or fill associated with them so […]
Ever wanted to use a colour from somewhere else on your screen, maybe from a photo or website, while designing something in Photoshop? Well, instead of doing a screen grab and pasting it into Photoshop to select the colour that way, Photoshop has a neat little trick that makes things […]
Mandala’s are beautiful. There’s something cathartic about creating them. They herald from Hindu and Buddhist symbolism representing the universe, and Jung believed they were a dream symbol, representing the dreamer’s search for completeness and self-unity. There is a neat app called Amaziograph that lays out the star grid for you and […]
