Graphic Design Tips

I've long thought about traditional graphic design vs the current wave of digital new media graphic designers. As with other fields of expertise it comes down to experience and application. I see graphic design like playing the piano. You find people who have never had the formal training, yet they are absolute wizards with all graphic design applications and 'being creative' in general. It's like playing by ear vs classical training. 

Then you would find the 'classically' trained group, who ads their own specific spice to the design mix, bringing the theory of past styles and design technique.

Personally I think that traditionally(classically ) trained graphic designers would be stronger. Being from a web design (and not trained in graphic design) background and being fully computer literate, I find it easy to adapt from some programs to others. Yet as in any industry it will always be experience that counts the most. Different setups work to bring different results.

I'd like to hear opinions (use the comments) of past experience from the graphic design community...

Resizing images almost always causes pixelation (when you see coarse-looking jagged edges in your picture), whether you make the image smaller or enlarge it.  JPEG images are especially unfriendly towards the idea of resizing.  There are few things that graphic designers hate as much as pixelated images! So how do we make it bearable?

There are different ways to resize your image in Photoshop.

• Dragging : You can select the free transform tool and simply drag the corners until the image is the right size. This isn’t the greatest idea, though.  Even if you make it smaller, you’ll probably still notice that the image seems more blurred and fuzzy. Dragging it much larger causes serious pixelation - dragging it into a new file with a higher resolution might help a little.
  


• Changing Image Size :  You can alter the image size (Image > Image Size), just as long as you remember to constrain proportions (else your image may appear all weird and stretched out). A good tip is to use the Bicubic resampling style for enlarging, and the Bilinear style for reducing the image’s dimensions.  After you have resized the image, it might need a bit of sharpening. 
  Use the Filter > Sharpen or Unsharp Mask tool.

If you think about it, resizing images basically comes down to spreading pixel information over a greater (or lesser) number of pixels.  It doesn’t give more detail to the image!  So my best advice for resampling images would be to re-scan the picture at the desired resolution.

Recently I had major battles with calibrating my screen to produce near print colour. New designers often neglect to calibrate their screens and many don't even know what it means.

Well, let's explain. To calibrate your screen means to tweak the colour, brightness and other settings of your screens and drivers to match print quality colour as close as possible.

Luckily some tech heads out there thought of some tools to make colour calibrating your monitor a breeze. You get hardware calibration tools that plugs into your PC/Mac and then matches colours on your screen with a little device that you put on your screen.

First though, try out these following links to try and calibrate your monitor online (just through proper colour/gamma & brightness/contrast  matching).

EpaperPress.com Monitor Calibration

Easy RGB dot Com Colour Calibration

Let me know if it was helpful!! Sure helped me out!

Many graphic design artists find inspiration in different things. Being from a web design background, I tend to look at well designed websites to find new inspiration. Especially at flash websites. Have a look at www.ultrashock.com and head to the bomb shock awards section in the forum. There are some truely amazing works of art there and it's really inspiring. Flash (which is vector based animation software for those who don't know and much more actually) has the added benefit of sounds, so it makes an even bigger impact since using more senses.

If you're walking down the street and you see something which you think is well designed, whether a building, a statue or a dustbin for what it's worth, try and think why it made an impact on you. Try and seperate colour from layout design (ok obviously the potplant won't work) and analyse why it appeals to your visual senses.

Just a few tips on things that inspire me. Happy hunting!