Printing & Print Design (Topic) - Blog Posts

In case you haven't noticed, we're pretty keen on Adobe Photoshop; we've even shared a ton of our favorite Photoshop tutorials. But even a great program like Photoshop can be improved upon. If you don't believe us, here are 108 reasons why you're wrong. This enormous collection of the best Photoshop plugins for print designers takes something good and makes it even better by giving you more control, more power and more options than what's available in your standard Photoshop toolkit. Plugin … [Read more...]

A Swiss Army knife allows you to do a lot of different things at once (like remove a screw or open a wine bottle), but sometimes what you really need is a strong pair of scissors—a tool that only does one thing, but does it much more simply and elegantly. It's the same way when working with typography in print design. The Adobe suite is powerful and multifaceted, but when you need to create a new font from scratch or identify the name of a particular typeface, it pays to have a few more specific … [Read more...]

You've already posted all of your graphic design work online, so who really needs a print portfolio, anyway? As a matter of fact, investing the time to create an outstanding printed portfolio can pay off in a big way—even if your work is strictly digital. Unlike online portfolios, physical portfolios cannot be clicked away. Since they're physical objects that take up space, clients can rediscover them even after putting them in storage (long after they've deleted your web portfolio from their … [Read more...]

Why do so many graphic artists still fumble horribly when it comes to promoting social media with print ads? It's not like they haven't had plenty of time to get on the ball. Social media's been around for over a decade now, and you'll be hard pressed to find a company that doesn't have some sort of presence on Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter. There's really no giant, hidden secret to learning how to advertise social media, nothing that makes it more difficult to work with than a website … [Read more...]

Nobody wants to be the one person to miss out on the latest trends, but keeping up with fads isn't always an indication of quality. If it were, people would still be dancing the Macarena and playing pogs. Likewise, many of the popular print design trends of the past just end up making artwork look dated and unprofessional by modern standards. But not every printing trend is a relic from the Clinton era. Some are relatively new fads that are so widespread and standard that nobody really stops to … [Read more...]

Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign represent the “big three” of the Adobe Creative Suite—but never assume that one is interchangeable with another. Use the wrong design program to create a certain element of your artwork, and you might end up with blurry text, sloppy layouts, or a logo that you can never resize without turning it into a pixelated nightmare. Using all three programs together, however, turns them into the ultimate dream team. You can maximize the strengths of each Adobe product … [Read more...]

Some would say that finding the best fonts for your print media project is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it's actually more like trying to find a needle in a stack of other needles. Just when you think you've conquered this herculean task and discovered the one font that seems to perfectly encapsulate your vision, you'll find that the font is outside your budget range, unsuitable for print, or not safe for commercial use. To help out, we've written reviews of the best free font … [Read more...]

Fonts are like celebrities—some are famous, while others can be downright infamous. When an audience sees a font in your print media design that they just can't stand (be it overused, ugly or unreadable), you can lose their attention in a heartbeat. We've already discussed how to properly use typography in your print media project, but there's one more rule that print designers should take to heart: avoid using notoriously bad fonts in your designs. To that end, we've provided you with a … [Read more...]