Adobe Illustrator is my favourite tool for creating fun and cute character designs. With just a few simple shapes, a mix of gradient colours and a few shadows here and there you can build some great looking illustrations

There’s nothing more unique to your creative talent than a series of your own doodles and sketches. Let’s use the good old doodle to represent our design services by combining quick and fun doodles with a print ready business card design.

If you’re looking to develop your Illustrator skills, here’s a tutorial for you! Follow this walkthrough to see the how adding layer after layer of vector shapes, along with a range of gradients and a spot of texture can quickly create a great looking icon-style clock graphic. The main ingredient we’ll be adding to this design, other than a bunch of circles to build up the overall shape, is a range of gradient fills. These gradients are what really adds that extra touch of depth, and combined with an extra shadow or two, results in a fairly realistic looking graphic. Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. I personally use the CMYK colour mode, simply because I find it easier to manage the level of black in each colour, but you may certainly use the RGB for a wider spectrum of colours. Draw a circle on the artboard. Hold Shift to maintain a perfect circle and fill with an angled linear gradient from dark to light blue. Press CMD+C to copy the shape, and CMD+B to paste behind. Grab the corner with the Selection Tool and scale up very slightly. Remember to hold Shift to keep the shape proportional.

In this week’s roundup of creative goodness, we have a great tutorial covering the process of creating an abstract poster design; a rare tutorial topic showing you how to block a printed poster; some super useful hints and tips for Photoshop; an excellent icon design tutorial; and a roundup of cool curvy brush script fonts for reference. Tutorial9 This great tutorial from Tutorial9 takes you through the process of building an awesome abstract poster design that boasts that retro-futuristic style. View the article CreativeOverflow Most design tutorials on the web are digital based, so it’s great to see a rare topic such as this from Creative Overflow cropping up every now and again. This post covers the process of blocking a freshly printed poster; a great insight into some non-computer based design related tasks. View the article Smashing Magazine No matter how much of a Photoshop veteran you are, there’s always new tips and tricks to be learnt. I personally picked up some useful little shortcuts from this handy post from Smashing Magazine .

If you’re confident with your CSS and HTML, it’s not hard at all to step up to the challenge of building a custom Wordpress theme. This overview shows the process of how my latest custom Wordpress theme was built from design concept through to completed theme. See how the static design is split up into the various Wordpress theme files, and discover how the simple PHP snippets can add that dynamic functionality of a blog. The design concept The theme I’m working on is named Sticky. The main feature of the design is its sticky sidebar (hence the name Sticky!), which stays in place while the main content scrolls past it. There’s also a few fancy effects such as the shadows and inset text appearance that I’ll be building with the help of CSS3. With the post focusing on the production of the theme, I won’t go into too many details on how the design was built, but you can see from the Photoshop previews that it uses a 16 column grid with 24px baseline; a fairly muted colour palette of a beige and grey, with a dark red as a highlighting colour for links; typography is set to serif font throughout for that touch of class!; and the whole design uses very subtle textures to give a more realistic and tactile feel. Anatomy of a Wordpress theme Before getting stuck into the build process, it’s important to know how Wordpress themes work. If you’ve looked at any prebuilt theme, you’ll notice that it’s all contained in a folder, and there’s around 12 core files. Some themes, including the Default Wordpress theme, include more files which allow extra customisation, but aren’t mandatory additions

Managing the marketing and creative process is essential and for many, it is a headache. It doesn’t have to be and in this post we conclude our hints and advice for managing a project successfully, through to completion and beyond. Sketches Work Always do a rough draft of what you think the finished piece ought to look like. Usually it is the most appropriate version and with refinement ends up as the finished product. Once you have drawn up initial drafts, leave them for a couple of days and come back to them – this gives you a good perspective on the proposal and you can focus on the design rather than the content. Don’t underestimate the power of a rough visual or draft for everyone involved.

Graphic design is the art of visual communication, using both imagery and words. Graphic designers use these two elements in a variety of media including print, television, web, packaging, advertizing and a long list of others. Probably the only medium within which graphic design is not utilized is radio! Common design elements include photographs, type (font), illustrations, shapes, different colors and texture. By combining these design elements, a graphic designer will produce the finished design, however they are frequently assisted in the design process by powerful tools, usually in the form of software programs such as Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Shapes are at the root of design and have been historically from cave paintings to ancient writing to the modern period.

Turning a print project around quickly is sometimes an urgent necessity, but whether you are under strict deadline or not, everyone likes to have a job go through the print production process smoothly and without a hitch. You can help to make the process go faster and without excess hassle by considering these two “fast” tips: Don’t Submit Print Design Files as PDFs Adobe Acrobat PDFs should not be used to submit your design files – they are great for making sure the content within is not changed but Adobe will automatically set the control defaults for web presentation and not for printing to paper. This will require your print partner to work around the default settings so true reproduction is achieved when the design files are used to print out the content. There are a large number of design applications – PhotoShop, Quark, CorelDraw and so on – which are far better for creating and storing your design files. If in doubt, speak with yoru print partner for what is the fastest and best method for your particular print project. Avoid Taking the Design Close to the Edge of the Paper If your content runs close to the edge of the paper being used to print it out with, then there is a risk that the ink will not completely covering the full sheet of paper and parts of the content either being poorly printed or missed altogether. The “bleed” is the space around the edge of the sheet of paper which is used to bound the content you are printing out.

Calendars are a great promotional tool for use with clients and prospects – they follow one very important sales rule – they are in front of the client all of the time! If you print calendars up for use with your clients and prospects there are some simple rules to follow when putting the design together. Use Good Quality Materials You need to have a superior print finish for a calendar to be used by a customer. They are not going to hang something on the wall if it made from poor quality paper or has a poor print finish. Do not skimp on the cost of the materials and work with your print partner to deliver the best result for your budget. It is better to reduce the print run and be more selective in handing the calendars out to people than have a larger print run of poor quality (as many will never be used). Include an Appointment Book Making sure there is adequate space to include appointments and key dates is a good tip – make sure you include all the key dates that you can think of

Transparency effects in logo design help bring to life a digital mark, adding that extra level of depth and color. This showcase of examples provides some great design inspiration and shows how designers have creatively used transparency and overlaying effects to build unique logo designs.