Design live

I was unpleasantly surprised by Windows Live Writer 2008 installation. While with other blog clients ( BlogDesk, BlogJet, W.bloggar etc.) I had no problems at all, every time I got a couple of errors installing Windows Live Writer.  Most of the time I get error ‘It looks like you’re offline’ though it was everything ok with internet. Even if I managed to go further I get errors 0×80070641 or 0×80070643.

After number of unsuccessful attempts I contact Microsoft support and was amazed by quick and polite answer. (more…)

Self promotion is not the last thing in the career of a graphic designer. Sometimes it happens that professional with a good self promotion have more chances than those who have more skills. It is no surprise. For example, when you choose some goods and don’t know anything about them what do you choose? More attractive packing, of course. Let’s the clients and hire managers hunt for you but not the other way. Certainly it is difficult to gather 120 serious useful tips to graphic designer self promotion, so some of them are more funny than actually useful. (more…)

Creativity is one of the most important things for a graphic designer. If you don’t like to be a machine, software addition or design copypaster you have to be creative. Sometimes it is rather difficult to be creative, especially if you have nothing in your head in this particular moment. I call it creative constipation Really, I don’t pay much attention to it, everything goes by. And when you are not in creative flow you can make some organizational or paperwork or just relax. If every designer will be able to manage his or her creativity it would be great. Maybe these recommendations will help you.  (more…)

I made this Photoshop sharpen actions (link to download) to save time and get better result in sharpening photos without a lot of efforts. Photoshop sharpen actions set includes individual Unsharp mask filter presets for Flowers, Sky, Portrait, Landscape. There are also Strong Sharpness, Sharpen for Web and More contrast action which actually use Unsharp mask to increase contrast in photos. High pass sharpen action in this set use another algorithm than Unsharp mask and sometimes give better results. This actions will sharpen photos without halos and unwanted effects. (more…)

Web 2.0 design gains popularity not only among startup guys and geeks but being accepted by non-web businesses.  Surprising story about land trade site  adopting  web 2.0 traditions prove that in the near future web 2.0 design trends will come from Internet to our everyday life. (more…)

MyFonts is a very handy service to find fonts, identify unknown fonts and to buy fonts. There is choice of more than 56,000 fonts.

If you need to use certain font seen in publications or ad campaigns, but you didn’t know its name, you can identify unknown font with MyFonts recognition system. You can also submit image of your font to Forum where experienced font enthusiasts will help you out. (more…)

How to make GIF banner quickly in Photoshop CS3 I’ll show you in this tutorial. Probably this banner will be not as eye catching as those made with special software for making banner ads such as Adobe Flash or Koolmoves but it will be light and attractive. Though ImageReady is abandoned in CS3, all its features are now available in Photoshop. In Photoshop CS3 Extended besides traditional Frame animation workflow there is also Timeline view. (more…)