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Technique is just a means
of arriving at your statement.

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You are what you say.
Say something that matters.

illustration

Art, like morality consists
of drawing the line somewhere.

Hints, Tips, Links & Info For Designers

Adobe Labs

Layers Magazine

The Stock Exchange:
Free Stock Photos/Images

Brands of the World:
Free Vector Logos

Everything Photoshop

This is a new page on our website, it's a work in progress for us, designers, no ads, just quality links. If you're a designer and you come across any useful tips, tricks, tutorials, videos etc. please feel free to drop me a line with the links and I'll include them on this page and please feel free to send me a link to your website and I'll add you to my links page, yes we all need a higher page ranking! If you have any design, Photoshop, Illustrator, SEO questions, problems, I'll post them here too and thanks for visiting.

Dan Rubin's thoughts on Usability and Design.

TYPOGRAPHY, Fonts On the Web:

The Font-as-Service.

Craving Typographic Control.

Typography continued...Cufon vs sIFR vs FLIR.

Web Design Digest:
Stephanie Sullivan and Dan Rubin on CSS and Typography.

PHOTOSHOP GURUS/EVANGELISTS:

The Russel Brown Show.

Bert Monroy Video Tutorials.

Adobe TV Video Tutorials.

SEO, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION:

Christopher Heng, Create a Search Engine Friendly Website.

MY QUIK TIPS:

Tip #1
Colour to Black & White (Greyscale) in Photoshop.

While working with RGB images, I've found about 10 different techniques in Photoshop to convert colour images to B&W, the best of these techniques is by far using adjustment layers.

The first adj. layer is Hue/Saturation, which is set to -100 on the Saturation slider.

The second adj. layer is Channel Mixer, which you set to Monochrome. You can sample anywhere within the image and adjust the red, green & blue channels until the areas of the image are to your liking.
(the source channels when added together, should not exceed 100)

You can make more adj. layers such as a Levels, Curves, Contrast & even more Hue/Saturation adj. layers etc. just by sampling inside your image to make it pop-off the page.

I then save my PSD, so that I can always come back & re-edit if needed, I then flatten the image, re-name it, and save in the required format.

Tip #2
Text in Photoshop & Illustrator.

This idea is so simple, yet has saved me hours of typing.
Before rasterizing text in Photoshop or converting text to outlines/curves in Illustrator, duplicate those text layers, turn off the duplicate layers visibility (eye icons), & if the client makes changes, you don't have to re-typset all the text again. All you have to do is make the changes to those duplicate text layers.