Thought I can squeeze some time out for a post. Typography is a very important element to design and designers use them everyday for various logos, flyers, and such. So unsurprisingly choosing good fonts and making the right selections for your particular design is essential to your success in getting your point across. Below I am using the fonts, Gills Sans MT, Stencil, Eraser, and Impact, all of which are free and I personally find very useful for my projects and designs. Have fun messing around with them.

Textures are really cool stuff to mess around with. Textural patterns and layers can be used for many things and can fit the theme for many websites, logos, backgrounds, and designs in general. For example, if you wanted to design a site for a flooring company, you can use a hard wood pattern as the background. A lot of textures are available on blogs and places like Dribbble where designers share them for free. They are really cool and a nice element to differentiate your design from others.

A lot of design has to do with perspective. Always make sure you are designing in the perspective you want others to see. If you are unsure you should always ask a friend or two on what they think of you design. If you are able to think in three-dimension, perspective in design comes naturally after practice. If you have any questions or queries email me at zuhaz3@gmail.com.

Reflections add a sense of elegance and uniformity to your design and it is pretty useful to know how to create your very own reflection of a piece of text or image. To do so, go ahead and open up Photoshop and your design or piece of text. First of all you want to go ahead and rasterize your image. After that go ahead and duplicate it by right clicking it and then hitting “duplicate layer”. Once you have duplicated the image, go to “Edit” on the top menu and go down to “Transform” and from the list choose “Flip vertical”. Then nudge the image to a position right under your original layer. Now take the rectangular marquee tool and create a rectangle about one-fourth the way down from the top of your copied image that it is now flipped vertically all the way to the bottom. Then go ahead and right click on your selection and hit “Feather”. In the pop up menu enter in the number of pixels you want feathered (I usually enter 30). Now hit delete and you should have a slightly fading image. Finally adjust the opacity of this image in the layer menu to make it look subtle and natural. I set my opacity to 35%. Your end product should look similar to the image below. If you need any help or assistance email me at zuhaz3@gmail.com.

If you haven’t noticed, the logo for Overflow used above has an unusual amount of spacing between each character. This space which you can adjust is defined by the process of kerning. To kern in Photoshop, go to the Character Options (which you can get to by going to “Window” in the menu bar then “Character”) and the option third down on your right allows you to change the amount of space. This can be used for posters, banners, or just as stylistic effect. If you have any questions on anything on this blog, you can contact me at zuhaz3@gmail.com. 

Always try to include vector graphics in your design or logo as they are visually appealing. Curves and soft edges capture the audience and also exhibits natural beauty. Both Coca Cola and Pepsi’s logos incorporate vector curves and are therefore two of the most known brands in the world with Coca Cola being number one in brand value.

Just as a quick tip for today, using gradients as backgrounds gives a nice look and feel to PowerPoints, logos, or whatever you are designing. Take a look at the following radial gradient for example. To make something like this in Photoshop, just fill a blank layer and double click on it to open the style menu. Then click on gradient overlay and pick two colors of a similar hue. Finally in the drop down menu choose radial to get this desired effect.