5 Great Ways to Improve Your Designs
Going in to the holiday weekend, I know I’m going to be spending at least some of my vacation trying to catch up on some of the many side projects I’ve got going on. So, I thought that I would leave you with some of the design-related links that I use everyday to help me to do my work more efficiently and professionally.
1. Get some great stock photos
Stock imagery used to cost hundreds of dollars. Now thanks to these sites you can pick up a great looking stock photo for less than ten bucks. Both sites have a fully searchable database that lets you pull up pictures from any keyword search.
Read my take on iStockphoto in “Finding the perfect picture”.
2. Find inspiration for your logo
Regular readers of the blog will remember I’m not that big a fan of most real estate logos (Why Do All Real Estate Logos Suck So Bad?) but these sites can help.
Brandsoftheworld.com - Downloadable vector art of all major brands. Great inspiration from some famous logos.
Bonus! Opinions on Corporate and Brand Identity
3. Develop a great color scheme
Poor use of color can sink even the most creative design. Learn how to avoid eye-searingly bad color combinations.
Daily Color Scheme - a new color scheme every day. Download and load the scheme into Photoshop or Illustrator.
Color Palette Generator - upload a photo and this site generates a whole color scheme based on that photo. Very helpful for designing eye catching flyers.
A crash course in color theory
4. Find some great fonts
Typography is one of the most challenging elements of design to get right, but the resources can put you on the right track.
Thinking With Type - Great site to get the basics down.
Typetester - This great site allows you to compare fonts for the screen
Looking for new fonts? Try these sites:
Bonus! Need some dummy text for your design? check out the Lorem Ipsum Generator
5. Get some great design tips
Before & After magazine - great advice on some of the basics of good design. Lots of examples - check out some of their free samples and consider a subscription.
This should give more than enough resources to explore over the long weekend… Have a great Thanksgiving!
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6 Comment(s)
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McFioso | Nov 23, 2006 | Reply
You can also get good (and free) stock photograpy searching in http://yotophoto.com/.
It worked for me in some projects.
REBlogGirl | Nov 24, 2006 | Reply
Well said, Joel. Must have been something in the air today. I also wrote on branding. Another easy color scheme tool is http://www.wellstyled.com
jf.sellsius | Nov 26, 2006 | Reply
Great tips/links Joel. Will check them out.
We tried Snap on our blog but some of the rollovers took too long to load –yours seem to load much faster. Did you have to tweak it?
Better fonts is excellent.
Jim Cronin | Nov 28, 2006 | Reply
JF-
It seems that after you install Snap, the first few times you ‘roll over’ the links, the preview pane takes a bit of time to load. From there is only gets faster. It also seems that not all previews are available right away, but once they are located, they seem to speed up as well. I have been trying it out, and decided that the ‘always preview’ option is a bit distracting, and have changed the settings so that I can manually activate when I want a preview pane to pop.
jf.sellsius | Nov 28, 2006 | Reply
Jim
Yes, it did get a little better but we too found it a bit distracting and deactivated it. We also thought it would cut down on page views and actual visits to the linked sites. We’ll just let Joel test it for us
Joel Burslem | Nov 28, 2006 | Reply
I’m guessing that Snap maintains a cache of all the URLs it images. If you submit a URL that’s not in their database, it seems it takes them some time to photograph it. Popular sites like CNN.com rollover almost immediately, others - especially deep links, take some time to show up.
I’ll be interesting to see if the rollovers do cut down on the actual visits to sites.
Will let you know what I find out.