Spot Design » Graphic Design

Cracked.com on Fonts

Candace — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:41:37 +0000

Cracked.com has a great article on font usage (or more like over-usage). This is something every beginner designer should read and learn from.

Here is an excerpt…

If graphic design was a religion, fonts are its priests – some are brilliant and enhance your understanding of the text and others are, well … best avoided.

and

In this modern day and age, a person’s choice of font is as important as their dress-sense, their taste in music or their level of pendantry. It is a rare thing now that a person can reach the age of 21 without an acute sense of the appropriatness and application of fonts.

How do you choose your design colors?

Candace — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:25:22 +0000

I get asked that question so often that I decided to answer it on my blog. Color inspiration comes from so many sources. It could be my favorite piece of clothing, a photo I like, pictures in magazines, artwork or anything that has color. When I am really stumped I often go to the COLOURlovers website.

COLOURlovers helps you find a color or even a color palette, to use when designing. The colors are created by the users of the site. You can also find articles about color and color trends.

Check out two color palettes that I have created on COLOURlovers…

Color by COLOURlovers

You might also want to check out ColorSchemer. This is a great software for creating colors and color palettes. They have a trial version so you can try it out.

Another website I use to make color palettes is Color Scheme Designer 3. I like to use it when I am considering using triad or tetrad color schemes. It makes it very easy to come up with colors using these techniques. Also you can also see what it would look like on a website.

Windows Media Player Skin

Candace — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:05:57 +0000

To make a WMP skin you have to wade through the very unclear written by Microsoft. That wasn’t very fun and it took me a week to make this rather simple skin. I also had problems with creating curved, smoothed edges. But I finally got something. I hope to get better at this, but after all this is my first skin:

This can be downloaded from my Doctor Who website: The Lonely Angel.