Provided by some of the well known tutorial blogs I collected a few great tuts: some interactive, some print related, and some branding related. Enjoy.
Content provided by some of the well known tutorial blogs, designers, and designer tool sites. I collected a few great tuts: some interactive, some print related, and some branding related. Enjoy.
Flash Interactive motion Layer Masking: 
This Tutorial is fantastic, it provides you with an excellent ability to do a motion later masks. I personally was trying to figure out how to do this for a spec interactive ad connected to my illustration work. I didn’t realize how easy it was at the time because I was trying to do everything with one object layer mask, well this shows you that you need to do all it with individual stroked rounded edged lines, it looks more professional and you have more control over the image area your showing. Fantastic, if I had known about this when I made my prior flash interactive spec ad maybe I would have sold it.
Illustrator Trendy rounded edged lines: 
If your a fan of the 70s or if you are fan of creating linear patterns in the backgrounds of your design this tutorial is an excellent one, it’ll also you teach just something simple about making rounded eges altogether for your layout design.
Illustrator Seamless Pattern for just about any illustration:
In the past I created a simple pattern creator for 4 or 5 vector objects to be repeated, it was pretty standard but this tutorial allows you to create patterns that could be any kind of illustration. Quite cool. So dig it the author did a decent job at showing how to do one pattern change but I’d say he kind of over simplified the longer process of making a seamless pattern this way. it might take you a half hour to an hour to do a good one here. But it is quite cool.
Designer Templates for Standard Print Design Courtesy of Designers Toolbox:
OK I may sound a little redundant because I’ve always been a fan of designers toolbox but this site kicks ass. It literally has a ton of free design templates that all of us need to use inside of USA if your a print designer. They everything from mailers, to layouts for web design, to templates for posters, business cards, cd boxes you name it. Also if your interested I’d recommend buying their standard contract template its like 15 dollars and it is a great outline for you when you need to write up a contract for a project.
Writing a Design Brief by David Airey:
If your starting a design studio or if your working with a team of designers a design brief is a nice thing to have. It helps keeps the project on focus, for me at school it was hammered home as really the only way to be able to stay on track through a professional creative process. Truthfully as I progressed in my design career you just begin to ‘know’ certain things but if your working in a team everyone needs to be in the know, and frankly a creative brief will keep the team illuminated. It is professional and even the most professional people can miss a detail that is crucial to hitting the target objective(s) for your client. And if your a designer and you have a design brief you should have all of the insight needed to create work that you can justify and even sell to the client. David also has a great FAQ Resource, and a detailed outline of his design process its his way of telling clients about how he does business, it effectively filters his audience to proper clientele/budgeted projects. If I could give one critique it might be too much information he’s giving out and his recommended talent if he’s busy or cannot take on a job is ironically legends in our industry, some have even passed away already.
I hope you enjoyed the content theirs some good stuff here, I am going to enjoy this beautiful sunny day and catch the latest Harry Potter film this evening. * Update the film was great, still the second in the series was my favorite.*
Sincerely,
Joseph Maguire | elephantik.com
3 Responses
Thanks for the critique. Always appreciated.
You’re right, I shouldn’t link to those “iconic logo designers” as a recommendation. It’s kind of like placing myself alongside them, which I don’t want to do (that’s arrogant).
I’ll remove that from my FAQ page now.
I’d appreciate you saying how else you think I’m giving too much info away. What would you change?
Thanks very much, Joseph.
Other than the mentioned piece, I was regarding to that it might be too much info at once, an information overload. But that critique wasn’t meant for your site but that to make this work successfully you have to be you. And really other people shouldn’t try to pull this off.
But one of the concerns I had on just the FAQ page that leads me to think too much info is when your answering what to expect from your logo designer you shoot them to another page with a full blog post about 10 things to expect from your designer, I think in essence you could have just wrote down the synaptic things on the FAQ page but I understand why you want them to read the info and move around the site. It’s like this your promoting something bigger than your design services, your promoting a knowledge of the field which in return filters your audience.
Overall I do like your News story approach to portfolio design it works, it is educated and clean. And In essence any identity designer should read through your site you have rich content on there and some day you should write a book on identity design and identity design marketing. Thanks for responding to the post and I hope that you enjoyed the linking to your content!
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