Happy Valentine’s Day! In celebration of the day of love (even corporate, over-sentimentalized love) here is an Adobe Illustrator tutorial in which we are going to look at how you can create your own Valentine’s Day heraldry Illustration.
Of course, if you’re not interested in the whole Valentine’s Day thing, that’s okay too. The techniques we are going to be learning here don’t necessarily have to be applied to just a mushy, sentimental illustration. You could easily take pretty much everything that I am going to outline below and use it create your own heraldry illustration with a completely different theme (Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up too!).
I should probably also note that this particular tutorial does require a certain degree of competence with pencil and paper, since several of our elements will start with some basic hand drawing. Now, let’s get started!
As many of you already know, me and Mason (FreelanceFolder) we’re working pretty hard on our new project, MediaLoot. We’re planning on launching in a couple weeks, but we are also releasing freebies regularly.
This time we got two corporate identity sets available as free downloads on MediaLoot!
Once you’ve built or designed a website, it’s absolutely vital that you perform some degree of usability testing to ensure that it’s functioning as it should. Analyzing conversion rates (the percentage of visitors to your site who perform a desired action) is also a must.
Usability and conversion rates are inextricably linked. If customers are confused, bored or unmotivated by any aspect of your site, you’re going to find it much more difficult to get them to do what you want, whether that’s buy a product, fill out a form or join a mailing list.
Usability and conversion analysis tools, such as the examples listed below, will help you design or redesign your site to make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to navigate around. Such tools can be expensive, but they needn’t be. Amongst the pricier ones below you’ll find many that are cheap or completely free to use.
Don’t feel as though you need to test on hundreds of people, running tests on just five participants can be enough to provide statistically sound results. It’s all about choosing the tools that are best suited to your specific needs and, of course, your budget.
Movie posters are a fantastic source of inspiration for artists and designers of all kinds. Different genres of film tend to have different techniques and trends – sci-fi posters tend to be dark, gloomy and atmospheric for example, whereas comedy posters (as showcased in this article) are quite minimal (especially posters designed in the more modern day such as the 90′s and 2000′s).
This compilation showcases a total of nintey-nine comedy posters, that’s one poster per year going all the way back to 1915. Throughout the decades and years we can see how movie poster design has developed from full-on painted works of art to incredible rendered posters and digitally textured photographs.
We ask for one thing in return for showcasing this awesome collection of posters: What are your favorite posters showcased in the article, and why? Be sure to let us know in the comments section at the bottom of the post!
You’re a creative person. We all are. That’s one of the reasons we are designers. But, how many of us have heard from someone that we have an over active mind and we come up with too many ideas? An over active mind can be both positive and negative. In today’s article we’ll explore both sides.
As a creative community, we want to believe that there are positive aspects of the creative minds we have but rarely do we look at the downside of it (or maybe we’re just too busy thinking of creative ideas that we don’t notice the down side?). So instead of just discussing the benefits of an over active creative mind (which I do below), I want to also discuss the drawbacks of the over thinking that we tend to do.
At the end of the article, feel free to weigh in with your opinions in the comments – I’d love to hear what others think.
Combining Illustrator and Photoshop can produce some dramatic and intense effects. Illustrator has the powers (and tools) to easily create abstract shapes, whereas in Photoshop, although possible, this can take up a lot more of your time.
In this tutorial we will be creating abstract shapes using the Pen Tool and Shape Tools in Illustrator and then using those shapes to produce an abstract wallpaper in Photoshop using various color blending techniques, textures and transformation tools. Let’s get going!
