By Michael Garmahis on February 18, 2008
Logo design is probably most simple and at the same times most difficult area of design. While a quality logo design combining with a good brand strategy could boost companies’ business the bad one could ruin it. A logo does not sell, it identifies. Many people think that a logo is just a nice picture and forget about creating a meaningful symbol that depicts the main ideas of the customer business through the use of shape, fonts and color. Creating something simple but meaningful at the same time is the real challenge about logo design. Continue Reading →
Posted in Tips
By Michael Garmahis on February 13, 2008
ReviewBasics is a nice online service from SharpStyle Labs, that provides free and amazingly easy way to have your design work reviewed. It could be a website, a photo, flash video or a document. Built-in conersion utilities allows to import a bunch of file formats including DOC, PPT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PDF, FLV, WMV, AVI and MPEG. Invited users can apply callouts, highlighters, arrows, stamps and emoticons to particular areas of your design work using sticky notes. You just need to upload your work (not limited in a quantity but up to 25 mb in space) and invite reviewers. Continue Reading →
Posted in Reviews
By Michael Garmahis on February 11, 2008
If you were always dreaming of being on a cover of the Time magazine, now after many years of trying to hit the stars you can fulfill your dream. MagMyPic.com is a fun application that let you create your own custom magazine covers featuring your photo, photos of your friends or even pets. You can upload any photo you like and turn it into a fake magazine cover.
There a number of popular magazines you can choose from such as Fortune, GQ, National Geographic, People, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Time and more. Update I guess that due to copyright issues you can only make fake covers with face magazine names. After creating your cover you can send it to whoever you want and post it on your blog or social network. Continue Reading →
Posted in Reviews
By Michael Garmahis on February 5, 2008
Corel Corporation recently released a new version of its flagship product CorelDraw X4 (frankly speaking, other parts of Corel Graphics Suite have almost no value) which still have thousands of users around the world. Most Corel admirers like it partly because of mythic easier learning curve, partly because of lower price in comparison with its main competitor Adobe Illustrator. Some Corel users find invaluable multipage files and use this feature for layout purpose like InDesign (total headache for every designer, especially for people in print shops). Continue Reading →
Posted in Reviews
By Michael Garmahis on February 4, 2008
Adjust your monitor for right brightness, contrast and saturation with web site Screen Check. This site displays two bars, one grey for adjusting brightness and contrast and the other for adjusting color. Though it isn’t professional calibration which is required to have image look the same on any screen and in the print (usually made using special hardware or software at least), following the Screen Check instructions you should have a monitor displaying colors in photos and pictures more naturally than when you adjust settings relying on your own taste only.
Posted in Tips
By Michael Garmahis on January 31, 2008
Sometimes wind, vibration, or shaky hand, make taken photo blurry and there is no possibility to retake it. You can remove shake and blur from your photos and make them rather sharpen. Unshake cleans up pictures in all of these cases, usually making the resolution of a blurred picture much better than that of the original. Unshake can also remove dithering and rasters, and it can work through the lines found on magazine pictures. While there are both free and paid similar filters which produce alike results, the real point of Unshake is that it does it automatically. Continue Reading →
Posted in Tutorials
By Michael Garmahis on January 29, 2008
Ruth Kedar is an artist and designer who designed Google’s Official Logo and Registered US Trademark which became later famous around the world. Since Google didn’t have money to pay a designer at first, the first version was created in 1998 by Sergey Brin using GIMP.
Born in Brazil, Ruth Kedar received in Israel a degree in Architecture and moved to USA to attend the Stanford University Masters Program in Design resulting in master thesis on Playing cards design. Ruth Kedar was introduced to Larry Page and Sergei Brin in 1999 at Stanford. She presented them with some preliminary design ideas which they liked and she was hired to design Google logo. Continue Reading →
Posted in News
