mikestickney.com

12 Useful Web Tools for Designers

Posted by Mike in Graphic design, Mike's Opinions, Print Design, Tools, Tutorials, resources on: January 16th, 2009

Came across a nice list of 12 Useful Web Tools for Designers on SixRevisions.com. A few of these I’ve used before.

Some of the ones that I’ve used include:

kuler Create is a nice tool to from Adobe that helps create color themes. You can select your own colors and see what are complimentary colors, or you can create custom themes (and browse user submitted custom themes) to see how colors look when used together. Neat little tool.

FontStruct is a neat little tool by font retailer FontShop for creating, editing and sharing fonts. While the tool is very user intuitive and pretty powerful for a free access application, creating a full font family is still a long, tedious job. But, if you have a nice font style in mind that you want to create, a great tool to allow you to do it.

Dummy Text Generator is an extremely useful tool (especially when doing print mockups or proof of concepts) that creates dummy text (i.e. “lorem ipsum plorem”) for placement in mockups. It allows you to select a number of words or characters as well as the number of paragraphs to create a simple block of copy. Great for comping jobs when you don’t have final writing. It also allows you to go back to a writer with information about how much copy is needed for a job.

I’ll have to explore some of the other listed resources when I have more time, but I’ve found some great stuff from on SixRevisions.com, so I trust that this is another great list.

Logo Inspiration

Posted by Mike in Graphic design, Mike's Opinions, Print Design, Web Design, logo design on: January 9th, 2009

Came across a  nice list of some Logo Design Resources from designcubicle.com.

Some of them on the list I use as my first stop when trying to get logo ideas (LogoPond, LogoSauce, LogoLounge) and others I’ve come across before, but not overly familiar with (LogoLog, SpoonFed, SpeckyBoy) but most are new to me, so definitely a lot of stuff here to check out.

A really great thing about these logo galleries is that they contain user submitted logos that are sometimes still in the design process, which other designers comment give feedback on. It’s a great way to get objective opinions from other professionals on logos you are working on to know if you are heading in the right direction. Even if you don’t submit your own logos, reading the comments on others can really teach you how to look at ALL logos.

Spitshine-design.com is LIVE (well, sort of…)

Posted by Mike in Print Design, Web Design on: February 23rd, 2008

Ok, so when I started this site about 3 weeks ago, I set myself a deadline of March for the simple reason being, I HATE missing deadlines, so I knew I’d force myself to get it done. And since I hate missing deadlines, I actually worked quite a bit these last few weeks, and I am very happy to say I am ahead of schedule (again, sort of…). Tonight, I launched the last piece of this Web site puzzle which was my graphic and Web design portfolio.

So what do I mean by “sort of”? Well, I say “sort of” because I just put up a handful of design projects, definitely not the full scope of my graphic design portfolio, or all of my Web design and Flash development projects. (more…)