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Typographic characters don’t always need to come from font files. Many of today’s brilliant designs manifest typographic characters through drawing, squiggling and doodling.
Meet Shigeo Fukuda, a master of manipulating lines into playful concepts. In the example to the left, Fukuda creates the words, “The Sun”, from a playful and winding doodle of a power cord emerging from behind a minimal rendition of the sun.
How would you create playful typography from an illustration or drawing? Think about ideas like creating words like “health” from illustrations of vegetables. Or create a rendering of a word like “summer” out of illustrations of melting ice cubes.
Get playful!...
Web design thrives on two things: innovation and imitation.
Unfortunately, there's often a lot more of the latter. We all like to seize upon the latest trends, use them until they’re ubiquitous, and then look desperately for the next big thing. Think about sliders. They were all the rage a couple years ago. Today, they feel dated. What to do? Stop chasing microtrends, and start looking at the big picture. Here, we've isolated six web design ideas that are here to stay....
While you might have shied away from image creation in the past, new tools have emerged putting the power of visual marketing in the palm of your hands.
In this article, I’m going to share seven of the best visual marketing tools and mobile apps that offer a simpler, leaner approach to creating compelling visual content....
Let’s be honest, is there anything better than free stuff? Not much. As an inbound marketer, there is nothing I like more than useful tools that are simple, easy to use, and help me reach my end goal.
There are many different aspects of campaigns that we need to check and re-check to make sure we’re hitting our marks, creating great content, and achieving goals for our clients. Since we are tech-savvy, internet lovers, what better way to do this than free online tools? It would be silly of you not to take advantage of these 10 free marketing tools to boost your inbound marketing campaigns....
Although most blog posts are primarily text, graphics and images can be extremely effective for holding the interest of your visitors and for improving your results with social media. With major social networks like Facebook and Twitter become more graphically-oriented, quality images can go a long way in helping your content to stand out, get shared more frequently, and attract more traffic.
And with Pinterest visual content is everything.But if you are not a designer you may be unsure of how you can get quality graphics for your blog without hiring a designer.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a designer in order to get effective images, and you don’t need to hire a designer or own Photoshop. Canva is a free web app that makes it possible for anyone to create graphics for a variety of purposes, including use with your blog posts.
In this post I want to highlight several tutorials that will help you to get more familiar with Canva, it’s tools, and what you can create with it....
Big or small, short or tall – the size and scale of elements within your designs will determine the overall balance and hierarchy of your composition.
Creating a harmonious design using scale is a clever way to approach your layout construction as it will allow tiers of information to speak for themselves.In this post we show you some skillful ways to tackle the application of scale to your designs, while creating beautiful and visually pleasing graphics...
Problem is, actually creating all these beautiful visuals isn't exactly every marketer's forte. Oh, another problem? Design software can cost an arm and a leg (plus all the classes you need to take to learn how to work the darn stuff).
But there's good news -- there are plenty of free and easy-to-use tools out there that can make you look like a master designer. This post will break down 21 of our favorites so you too can create visuals and images that'll make your marketing pop. Get ready to create visualizations, banners, infographics, and more like a total pro....
There’s quite a few reasons to integrate high-quality visual content in your blogs and social media posts. Not only is visual content processed much faster than the written word, but it’s much more memorable.
People retain only 20% of what they read and 10% of what they hear, but 80% of what they see.
Recent studies by the Content Marketing Institute reports that infographics and videos are still considered highly effective marketing tactics. As marketers increasingly embrace visual content, it’s become more than just a best practice to visually-stimulate your audience. It’s required to keep up, let alone stand out against your competition.
Make it your mission to ditch stock photos in the months to come, and choose to embrace custom images, collages, and high-quality creative commons-licensed pictures instead. Your blog marketing metrics will surely reflect your efforts:...
No design experience?
No problem! Let's start from scratch and get familiar with the basic Canva tools that will help you create amazing designs.
Design Essentials will guide you through simple tools and techniques that will help you create designs you can proudly share with the world.
Fonts bring your words to life. Learn how to easily choose fonts that emphasize your message and make your designs look beautiful.
Color can be used to convey moods and create emphasis in your designs. We show you how to build meaningful color relationships to create visually stunning graphics.
Whether you upload your own, or choose from our library of over a million, images are a vital component of eye-catching designs. Learn how to use simple Canva tools to compose and enhance your images for greater visual impact....
This lack of artistic ability poses a threat to my marketing career, especially now that visual content marketing is the ticket to success. Even though I have other creative traits, I'm worried I'll get left in the visual storytelling dust.
I know I'm not alone.
Luckily, we non-artists have a few tools to mask our lack of design talent.
These tools are free, but often have advanced paid features for when you're ready to step up your game. They don't replace a designer's expertise, but you can use them for smaller projects, like blogs, social media graphics, or Slideshare templates....
Do you tire of using illustrative patterns as backgrounds in your designs, but not sure where to start with using an image instead? With the array of photographs available, combined with fantastic filters - the versatility that the image offers is quickly making it the competing gladiator to vector backgrounds of yesteryear! Here we show you some of the awesome ways you can use images as a background in your design....
Building your brand online takes work. Every image that you associate your business with needs to represent your brand in some way. You certainly don’t want to cut corners in this area. This infographic by Turn Around Design covers 7 images you need to build your brand online:
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Today, music festivals number in the thousands, taking place around the globe and embracing all kinds of popular music. Here, we’ll look back at some of the biggest music festivals, from the mid 1950s to the present, and focus on an essential part of their culture: festival posters.
Indeed, from the very beginning, graphic design and (especially) festival posters have been an integral way to shape each festival’s unique brand and echo their creative spirit. It’s fascinating to look back and see how modern music festival poster design evolved from historical precedents. Let’s dive in....
Designing newspapers, magazines and books has become particularly challenging as digital takes over most of our communications. While we must learn to adapt our concepts to various screen sizes, paper will always be an essential medium for creative expression.
Throughout this article, I’ll introduce 50 incredible newspaper designs (and the design lessons they bestow) to inspire your work....
Engagement-grabbing social media images might be the closest thing we have to a magic wand on social media. And to make it even easier to design these images in a snap, we’ve whipped up a new, free tool we’d love to share with you.
Meet Pablo, the easiest way to create engaging social media images....
The latest design tool from Serif, best known for itsAffinity Designer tool, Affinity Photo is a Mac-only alternative to Adobe Photoshop. After the February 9 launch of Affinity Photo, it may turn out to be at least as well-received as Affinity Designer, maybe more so.Releasing Affinity Photo as a free, beta version should help spread the word about it faster than usual, as will the fact that this app isn’t merely trying to be a dumbed-down alternative to Photoshop or just mimic its already well-known features. Serif isn’t shy about its intentions of taking Photoshop market share away from Adobe.
In fact, the software maker is downright bold about what it says are several features of Affinity Photo that outclass Photoshop in every way. That’s a value proposition worth listening to, for sure....
From the days of hand cut letterforms, through the wave of digital technology and into current day, logo design has wonderfully transformed, adapted and shape-shifted. What logo design trends lie ahead in 2015?Here are 10 predictions based on logo designs of recent times....
Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, almost three billion people are active social media users. So how can you leverage them to your business? The answer is simple – by creating interesting and engaging social media graphics.
It’s proven that people are wired to respond to visuals better – did you know that Facebook posts with images get at least 53 percent more engagement, while posts with videos get a boost of a massive 104 percent?If you’re a new brand starting out or an existing one looking to improve your visual strategy – let this article guide you through the basics of social media design. If you’re keen to put these skills into practice, don’t forget to complete the interactive design tutorial at the end of this article!...
Website design process takes a lot of time and consists of a number of steps: starting from the search of inspiration and information gathering to prototyping, testing and even content filling. As a result, having the right tools simplifying some of these steps can make your work more efficient and enjoyable.
Google Chrome has a robust extension platform featuring lots of useful tools, which web designers can benefit from. For this reason, I decided to gather and review the best Chrome extensions that can provide shortcuts on various routine, but sometimes really time-consuming steps in website design.Below is a compilation of top 15 Chrome extensions I’ve discovered....
Whether you’re a creating graphics for social media or designing an invitation for an upcoming event, the application of graphic design is vast and versatile.
From font pairing and scale, to alignment and white space, the facets of the design world are complex. Let these twenty five epic design tips help you through the pits and the peaks of the creative process.
Click on the images throughout this post to create your own designs with a remix link. Happy designing!
Design is hot. Design executives are being tasked with being design driven, but don't have the tools or processes to sustain this effort.
... In some ways, designers and design managers have shot themselves in the foot — design thinking neither negates nor replaces the need for smart designers doing the work. And because design thinking has many paths through parallel phases, it seems fuzzy compared to the process of creating code. Compared to analytical thinking or science, our industry still doesn't have a consensus on what design thinking means. Most designers couldn't tell you what it means
.It's been 20 years since I was ingrained with the concept that the designer mind could think much differently than a marketer, engineer or the guy in a suit-and-tie. Yet, for all its power and inspiration, I still don't completely understand the meaning of design thinking.
Should we abandon the concept? Absolutely not. I use the methods and ideas that it espouses daily. I believe we just lack some of the tools necessary for the practical application of these methods to stick within organizations....
Do you want to present visual messages in new ways? This article shows eight design resources and tools to create visual content quickly and easily.
We all know it can be tough to perform when the creative juices are not flowing. This is especially true when you are doing the same thing over and over and over again and having to come up with creative eye-popping solutions every single time.
That’s why I curated this list. I pulled from various websites & forums and just .. put it all together. Hope you enjoy, and most of all never have an excuse to be in a creative slump.. ever again....
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Get a burst of design creativity from these fun fonts..