As a print and web designer I use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign on a day-to-day basis. When you are using these programs so frequently it is hard not to get agitated at some of the knit-picking tasks you find yourself spending a lot of your precious time on. I always find myself asking: Don’t you wish there was a one-click tool to do this?

Here are 5 tools that would make a designers life so much easier!

1. Hair Mask tool

Lets face it, no matter how many tutorials you read or different techniques you try; masking out hair in Photoshop is tedious and very time consuming. The Hair Mask tool would allow you to open an image in Photoshop and automatically create a mask around hair. With this tool you don’t have to worry about how complex the background of your photo is, how curly and messy the hair you are dealing with is or having a drastic contrast between the color of the hair and the background color of your image! Imagine being able to press one button to mask out hair!

2. Image Upscale tool

I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many times I have been provided with images for a project that are no where near the size or quality they need to be for both print and web. The Image Upscale tool allows you to increase the size of an image to any desired DPI without losing image quality. There are plugins and techniques to upscale images and preserve the quality of them to an extent, but any image that has been scaled up will never look as good as it does at its original DPI. With the Image Upscale tool you will be able to scale images as seamlessly as scaling vector objects!

3. Digital-to-Print tool

Have you ever created an e-booklet, digital flyer or any other type of media that was only ever intended for the web and then your client decides they want print versions of them? It can be pretty frustrating to request images in a higher DPI (chances are they don’t even exist!) and finding CMYK colors that look nearly identical to the RGB colors you were using on screen. The Digital-to-Print tool allows you to instantly convert your document from digital to print by converting all RGB colors to the closest CMYK value and taking all of your images from 72DPI to 300DPI without loosing quality. The Digital-to-Print tool will also extend your document to your default bleed specifications and move all of your text into a desired print margin. (ahhh so unrealistic, but so good!)

4. Print Preview

When I am busy working away in InDesign my hand is always resting on the “W” key. I am frequently toggling between Preview and Normal mode to view my document with and without all of my guides, rules, text frames and hidden characters. But how cool would it be to toggle between Normal and Print Preview? The Print Preview tool gives you the ability to see what your document will look like printed. Granted all printers will print documents slightly different the Print Preview tool allows you to see any blemishes that are only picked up once your document is printed. I find myself printing multiple proofs of a document before I am even ready to send it off to a printer. No more wasting paper!

5. PSM Color Slider

Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. What do all of these programs have in common? It seems that each of these programs make you do an extra step when it comes to choosing a PMS color. Not only is it time consuming to find a good PMS color using Adobe’s color library it is also annoying that every color you want to play with has to be added to your swatch library. With the PMS slider you can easily apply different PMS colors to your document. You can also take advantage of the slider to mix colors to find your perfect PMS color. Easily sample CMYK or RGB colors from your document and convert them to PMS. (Seriously has anyone ever used the CMYK to PMS technique in Photoshop? It’s horrible!)

Even though the majority of these tools could never accurately accomplish what we are after, it is still nice to day dream about what it would be like to have such convenient and time-saving tools at our disposal! Being a skilled designer means that we should be able to effectively and efficiently accomplish all of the above tasks without having to use a one-click button, however it would be nice!

What are other tools that you wish existed and would make your workflow much faster?

I stumbled across this great website via twitter yesterday: Editions of 100. Unfortunately I can’t remember who tweeted it, but I am in love!

Editions of 100 is a collection of original limited edition works featuring art, design & photography. Each work is available in an edition of 100.

This site is an  online collection of amazing work created by fellow designers and photographers. The work is sold via editionsof100.com and is limited to only 100 editions per item.

Here are some of my favorite items from the site:

Editions of 100 tote bag

BUILD A2 poster

Forbidden Alphabet B2 poster

As designers we work in quite an ironic industry. Consumers want what they want and they want it NOW, but since we are designers the product we deliver is meant to be original and creative.

Have you ever waited in the McDonalds drive-thru and gotten fed up for waiting more than 5 minutes?
I know I have.
Have you ever received a completed design brief and the due date field read ‘ASAP’?
I know I have.

With such high demand and crucial deadlines it sometimes seems impossible to fit good ol’ creativity into your design process. To distinguish where creativity comes from and how to find it plays a key roll in any designers process. For many designers as well as myself I find creativity in the early stages of my research, not on my blank canvas. I find that my creativity is what I get when I decipher my notes and doodles. I think the biggest mistake designers make is missing their window of opportunity that comes with research. Instead, they spend valuable time focusing on the development of a design and creating 5-6 drafts of rubbish that they can’t deliver to their client because it “doesn’t work”. Creativity if often missed and seen as a miscommunication for designers who don’t use an outlined process.

Is your process creativity proof?

Here are some examples of great design processes.

David Airey – My brand identity design process
Jacob Cass – Logo design process of top logo designers
Stop design – A design process revealed
Selene Bowlby – 6 phases of the web design and development process
Smashing magazine – 6 steps for building successful websites

Every year I like to take my personal brand and spruce it up a bit, and that’s what I have done. What better way to kick off the year than with a facelift. If you are reading this through your RSS reader please drop by the site and have a look around. I am very pleased with the new site and I hope all of you enjoy it as well.

The VelvetAnt blog had it’s one year birthday January 16th. Even though I am late giving the blog a present I hope this spruce up makes my belated blog birthday a little sweeter. Here’s to a new year for the VelvetAnt blog and many new articles to come!

Here are some of my favorite articles from the past year:

1. Helvetica Love, my tribute to Helvetica
2. Establishing a positive relationship with your printer, a must know for all print designers
3. Stay motivated while freelancing, 7 tips to keep freelancers going
4. Influential female designers, a round-up of 19 awesome female designers
5. Ghosts of design work past, 18 designers share some of their first designs with the public
6. 45 logos that utilize negative space effectively
7. 13 examples of new retro and vintage packaging

Even though designers don’t have traditional degrees like journalism or business it is still important for us to be able to spot grammatical and commonsense mistakes. It is truly up to us to be 110% positive that we deliver flawless final projects to our clients. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always the best speller and I don’t always use proper punctuation, and that’s why I am spell checks #1 fan.

I’ve compiled a list of 5 quick tips to makes sure you tie up all your lose ends before finishing your design projects up when working in InDesign.

Extra spaces can cost you
Find/Change is truly one of the simplest InDesign features. There are ways to utitlize Find/ Change so that it benefits you every time you are finishing up a design project. It is very easy to accidentally add extra and unwanted spaces to your document. So, what I like to do is open Find/ Change and tap the spacebar twice into the find field and type one space into the replace field. InDesign will automatically pick up any double spaces that you’ve mistakenly keyed into your document and replace it with a single space.

Hidden characters
It can get a little distracting working with your hidden characters turned on but it is good to give your document a couple of final proof reads with them turned on. Hidden characters will help you locate and unwanted paragraph breaks, spaces, tabs, etc.

Colors
Before I even think of starting my design project I take the liberty of deleting all of the default color swatches from my library. By doing this I don’t allow myself to mistakenly use any colors besides the ones I manual create. A big no no is sampling colors from other images or elements using the eyedropper tool. When you sample color in InDesign and then use that sampled color it usually samples in RGB and is never an exact match of a chosen color swatch.

Image PPI and color space
Another handy little feature InDesign offers is Preflight. By going to File > Preflight you are presented with a column of preferences to click through. You can check your fonts, links, colors, and a few other elements that are present in your document. By clicking on Links and Images you will be able to scroll through all of the links and images in your document and view what type of element they are, what their effective ppi is (effective ppi is what’s important here not actual ppi) and what color space they are using. This is a fast way to make sure all of your elements are the proper size, type, and using the right color space. (Usually if you’re working in InDesign you want all of your images to be in CMYK given that you are using InDesign for its print purpose.)

Last, but not least, Spell Check
Spell check is very important. Of course spell check doesn’t always offer the right word to change a misspelled word to (if it is even misspelled) nor does it always offer you the correct grammatical suggestions and that is why it is important for you to read over your document as well and not to 100% rely on spell check. Spell check will catch all of your misspelled words and perhaps offer proper grammatical suggestions, but it is up to you to make sure that you use your knowledge to catch anything spell check doesn’t.

Here are 20 sites and blog posts I’d like to share with you. I keep these resources in my Delicious Bookmarks and often refer to them whenever I need design help, inspiration, or just in the mood to look at something pretty. The internet is such a great way to keep designers of any skill level current in the industry and it’s chuck full of inspiration. If you have any articles that you feel all designers should give a read that you’d like to share, or perhaps a site that always has that special spark to ignite your design sense please leave a comment linking to the site. Enjoy!

1. Minimal Exhibit
2. TYPEInspire
3. Dieter Rams and his 10 Design Commandments
4. How To Improve Your Branding With Your Content
5. 37 Places To Get Free Stock Images
6. 30 Artistic and Creative Résumés
7. 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts
8. Do You Want Fries With That Logo?
9. Ten logo design tips from the field
10. 100 New and Beautiful Seamless Patterns
11. 15 Typography Books To Help You Learn and Love Typography
12. 25+ Inspirational Folded Brochures
13. 30 Interesting Brochure Layout Ideas
14. How to Read the Mind of a Client in 3 Easy Steps
15. Ways and Links to improve the Typography of your WordPress site
16. 26 Professional Photoshop Retouching Tutorials
17. 10 Ways to Beat the Hell Out of Creative Block
18. Typographic Elegance Letterpress Wedding Cards
19. Hiring a designer: a client’s perspective
20. 20 Retro Wallpapers to Spark Inspiration

Like any business, it takes time to build a strong and trustworthy clientele. So where does someone new to freelancing find new clients willing to pay for their services? The easiest way to find clients is through family, friends, and word of mouth. The downfall of this method comes when these new clients expect discounts and think that your work method is customizable to fit into their schedule just because you are acquaintances.

Design is a very new and unknown territory to many of the clients you will accumulate over your professional design career and new things scare people. Expensive services make people runaway as well. It is important to establish from the very beginning that you are a professional and just because you happen to work from home doesn’t make it ok for these types of clients to take advantage of your craft and your services.

Example: Your mom has been getting her hair cut at the same salon for the past 10 years and her stylist mentions that the salon is in desperate need of a website redesign. Being the amazing mother she is, she tells her stylist that her son/daughter does web design for a living and leaves a business card with the salon.

You now have a new client who has a long-lasting relationship of 10 years with your mother and because of that relationship they assume it will reflect in the price that you quote them for their redesign. Not to mention your payment plan doesn’t work for them!

So, how do you maintain a balance between business and pleasure while keeping both parties happy?

First impression means everything!
Chances are your new client contacted you by either being directed to your email through your business card or website. These two mediums are your first impression. Even though you are a freelancer it is important that your marketing material look professional. This lets your client know immediately that you mean business.

Keep the casual conversation to a minimum.
Even though your client was introduced or referred to you in a casual setting the last thing you want to do is devalue your professionalism by allowing your client to have ongoing casual conversations with you. By keeping the majority of your client conversations on a professional level they will realize that you are serious about your job and their project.

Bind them to a written agreement and contract.
Paperwork sometimes makes people feel like you can’t trust them, and the last thing you want is for your client to feel like you can’t trust them, especially when they are a family friend or a friend of a friend. Let it be known that paperwork is part of your workflow and design process and that you provide it for the protection of their business.

Educate your client.
Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of potential clients haven’t the slightest idea as to what a logo, website, or a brochure costs and why it costs what it does. It is your job to enlighten your client to every reason why you have quoted them at the price you did. It is unethical for anyone to pay someone else a large amount of money and not to know why. It makes your client feel 1000% better about paying you your desired fee once they know why.

When is it ok to give a discount?
Discounts are tricky because designers aren’t mind readers. Do I give my new client a discount on their first design project because they are an acquaintance, or should they understand that I am running a professional business and charge them full price? If I give them a discount the first time will they expect one every time? Or do I not even consider a discount at all until they are proven to be a trustworthy client and quote them for my services and risk the chance of being too expensive and potentially lose a new client?

Discounts depend solely on the information you have gathered from your client before quoting them. If you have assessed your client and let your professionalism shine through, then hopefully you have learned enough about them to make the decision to offer them a discount or not to. Discounts also are determined by your affordability. Can you financially afford to cut the price for this person? Do you see promise of them using your services in the future?

Giving someone a discount is 100% up to you. I wouldn’t recommend giving discounts out to one-time clients. Discounts should be something earned, and if you are only doing one project for someone with nothing lined up in the future for them they don’t really deserve a discount unless they have brought other paying clients to you.

I have made every mistake in the book when it comes to freelancing. I hope that these few areas of concern enlighten you and help you make the right decisions. It is important for all designers new to freelancing know the power of saying NO. You are not obligated to provide your services to anyone who isn’t willing to pay for their appropriate price or to someone who takes advantage of you just because they are paying you. You will encounter all kinds of clients throughout your freelance career and you should always stay in control of your own work. Jeremy Jaymes of Papertree Design has an excellent article about the types of clients he has encountered over his time of being a freelancer. I’d suggest reading his article: It Takes All Kinds, Be Cautious before jumping into any design project with a new client.

Lately many products have been releasing new retro/vintage packaging or reverting back to packaging from way back when. Retro designs and bright colors have been the latest trend in fashion as well as design for some time now and it seems to be leaking into packaging design as well. Most of the retro/vintage packaging in this post is limited edition or only available in certain states, stores, or countries. Nonetheless,  it is still awesome and refreshing to see some of your favorite products packaged differently. Here is a small collection products that have recently given us a blast from the past.

Going green seems to be the latest trend sweeping the planet. It is unfortunate that this is a trend and not a permanent lifestyle change for everyone because trends fade with time. It is truly disheartening to see McDonald’s cups and plastic Coke bottles littering our streets and our water sources. It is also shocking to know that litter is a free and shameful way of advertising. I know I’ve seen a candy wrapper lying in the grass and later went and purchased that candy. It is sad, but it is true.

Now more than ever our planet needs all of the help it can get to reduce our human footprint. I know this may sounds pretty blunt and harsh, but our work is trash! The marketing and advertising material that we are so proud of is literally ending up in the dirt! In a way, all litter and garbage starts with us. Unrecycled printed materials aren’t the only downfall of design. Have you ever considered how much electricity it takes to power multiple computers and printers? Of course you have! You think about it every time you get your electricity bill.

What can we do as designers to give back to our environment? What can designers do to keep our planet beautiful and please our clients at the same time? A simple solution to help our planet is to educate ourselves so we can educate our clients. By educating our clients we are able to teach them environmentally friendly ways to be successful.

Here are a few environmentally friendly tips for designers to share with their clients. These tips will not only help shrink the carbon footprint created by designers, but some of these tips will also help save you and your clients money!

Going green with print

Find an eco friendly printer.

1. Ideally we would like to find printers who use post-consumer recycled materials and 100% chlorine free paper. The word ‘recycled’ has somehow adopted the meaning ‘cheap’ is some people’s eyes. Many consumers think that all recycled paper is dull, grey, and not as white as virgin paper. Recycled paper that appears off-white hasn’t been de-inked. For bright white recycled paper use de-inked paper. The ink that is taken out of the recycled paper can be burned to create energy to power the paper mill or outsourced for other usages. Ironically, recycled paper is just as good, if not better than virgin paper.
2. Find a printer that uses soy and vegetable-based inks opposed to petroleum based inks.

Here are a few eco friendly printers you should considering checking out (some may even be cheaper than who you are currently printing with)

• Moo
• Greener Printer
• Print Pelican
• Green Printer Online
• pixxlz
• a local printer
• clientel systems

Going green in web

1. Use XHTML and CSS. The less code you use on a web page lowers the transfer rate over the network, which in return lessens the amount of electricity used. Learning and using XHTML and CSS will also make you a better web developer.
2. Recycle your code. By using php and javascript you can call certain images and media that appear on multiple pages of your website only one time  instead of over and over again. You can also recycle code by calling certain scripts for multiple sites that are on your server that may be using the same code.
3. Create single page websites when possible. Once again, this reduces transfer rates which reduce the amount of energy being used.
4. Find hosting services with carbon-neutral companies. Carbon-neutral companies are businesses who have measured all of the carbon dioxide they are using and then alter their work ethic to remove as much of it as possible.

Dreamhost has gone carbon-neutral. If you are currently looking for a new host or thinking about switching your hosting services you can google ‘Dreamhost coupons’ and get amazing hosting services for an insanely cheap price!

A few environmentally friendly ways to save some extra cash

1. Power your computers down nightly.
2. Replace light bulbs around your office with energy-efficient light bulbs, which also last longer.
3. Keep a recycling bin near the printer. Lets face it, we run a lot of proofs to make sure our design looks right. If you aren’t able to decrease the amount of proofs you run per project, the least you can do is recycle them!
4. Stop faxing, start emailing! I know we have a lot of old school clients who still prefer faxing opposed to emailing. Using email as an alternative to faxing will save you the cost of paper, ink, and the cost of electricity it takes to keep a fax machine running 24/7.

If you are looking for a way to slowly wean your client off of faxing I’d suggest investing in an eFax account.

How have you reduced your carbon footprint?

Do you remember your very first school project? How about the first website  you ever made a profit off of? It is a real treat to see a designer transform and evolve into a professional by taking at look back at where they started. Our early work isn’t something we should be ashamed of. It should be used as a visual timeline to monitor our continues growth and gain in our profession.

The following 18 designer’s took a trip down memory lane to dig up old design projects from their archives and were kind enough to share them. The following showcase of design work was created by designers I feel have grown tremendously from their early days and are living proof that time and experience will only better you as a designer and as a professional.

Antonea Nabors, VelvetAnt (@antonea)

This was the 3rd project I ever made in college. It was my 2nd time ever using Illustrator. I drew all of the elements in this project, but clearly had total disregard for typography and readability. By the way, the bolted border is not uneven on purpose.

Colin Wright (@colinismyname)

This was the very first magazine spread I put together, I believe in one of my intro design courses. As you can see, I was very interested in mixing scanned illustration work and computer-based design from early on in my education!

Anthony Sanders, Freelance Designer (@anthonydsanders)

This was (and is STILL live) a website for a record label I did for very cheap about 6-7 years ago.

Rob MacKay (@svgrob)

This was a site I “designed” for a friend a good few years now, who was setting up a monthly bands event for showcasing new talent within churches in the Northwest of England – I’m very, very sorry.

Lauren “LaurenMarie” Krause, Creative Curio (@creativecurio)

Type specimen poster for my Intermediate Graphic Design class, 3rd quarter

Chris Spooner, Spoon Graphics (@chrisspooner)

This magazine page mockup was created back when I worked at a local design studio while studying for my degree. Looking back the design itself isn’t too bad, but there are a few mistakes around the grid layout, margins and typography that I can point out now.

Jacob Cass, Just Creative Design (@justcreative)

Anno Domini Logo & website designed back in 2004 when I was 15 years old for a heavy metal rock band. This was my second ever logo design and the third ever website design

Shannon Farrell (@dolceshan)

This was something I made for Package Design class. We had to create a unique container for an item of our choice. I find this completely laughable now with the shiny cinnamon, horrible shadows, and the fact that the round container looks very flat

Lee Munroe (@leemunroe)

Did this site about 6 years ago (when I was 18) for a local cinema, featuring tables and even a marquee. It’s still going too. www.iveagh.com

Matt Fouty (@mattfouty)

This logo was created in Adobe Illustrator 10 on an old crappy Dell PC laptop. I’m not real proud of it, but it really reminds me of how much I’ve learned since then!

Andy Sowards (@andysowards)

Wow, This post brings back a lot of memories. This is one of the earliest things I can remember creating in Photoshop.I believe I was using Photoshop CS, and I think I was 18 or 19 and in college when this was done. The image was mostly created using Brushes(some of my first attempts at using these) and some crude and simple layering effects with some hue/saturation modifications. I remember this was the first year that I had decided that I wanted to be a web designer/developer as I created many other images similar to this. Although my early work in those days revolved around pictures of myself taken on my camera phone, and sadly most just ended up in my myspace, where I also began showing interest in HTML/CSS. So I guess as much as I hate myspace now (for many reasons) It helped me realize a lot about my interests back in the day when it was still popular . Thanks for the opportunity Antonea, and Thanks to the visitors for reading, hope you found this flashback into my life insightful and interesting and learned a little about where I came from professionally!

Liz Andrade, CMD+Shift Design (@cmdshiftdesign)

Magazine cover for fictitious magazine, Voice. There just seems to be no regard to typography or grid on this, the only thing I actually like is the image concept – but that’s about it.

Andrew Kelsall (@andrewkelsall)

This was a Billboard Design I created back at University, about 9 years ago (when I was 21). The design was part of a D&AD brief, whereby all the students in my class were to create an advertising campaign for a company called “Breeze”—an organisation set in the future who took passengers on holiday to Mars.

I still think that this Billboard Design has a good concept, however, there are many elements I would change. Firstly, I would change the font, I feel it just doesn’t fit well. Secondly, I have no idea why I had chosen to enclose the logo in a white box—and that “exclamation mark” in the top right corner…what’s that all about? Thirdly, I would take away that dire purple border. I now see that it serves no real purpose.

If I were to produce this same design knowing what I know now about design with years of experience, needless to say it would look more professional and straight to the point. I would do-away with the clutter and produce a sleeker, more coherent design.

Jeremy Jaymes, Papertree Design (@jeremyjaymes)

On the left is a drawing from a 9th Grade Art class project in which we had to use grids to recreate a photograph to scale. I believe the photograph I choose came from a National Geographic but I am not 100% sure on that. On the right is a sketch of my hand taken from a sketchbook I have save for years. I would date this sketch sometime during my college years. On a side note I never actually completed a degree. Most of what I studied while attending either fell outside of the Art department or in the areas of Art History and Film.

Kawsar Ali, Desizn Tech (@desizntech)

This the first background I created for my portfolio site http://i-exist.co.cc I just had learned how to use photoshop brush and patterns. I kind “Od’ed ” with the patterns and brush. However, still I was so happy that I created something. I struggled for days just for creating that. I am still learning from all great web designer I meet online and I still feel like I  do not know anything about web design.

Stuart Thursby (@sthursby)

My degree was in history, and one class was so mind-numbingly boring that I did almost anything except pay attention. In one class, I was playing around in Photoshop and came up with this. Pretty garbage now, but hey, that’s the point, right!

Niamh Redmond (@nredmond)

A perspective on being Irish – Digital Imaging project. This was one of the first photographs that I experimented with in PhotoShop when I was 18.

Chad Engle (@chadengle)

An awesome school piece for a newspaper ad.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to participate. I am sure many of you were blowing the dust off of your old external hard drives to dig up some of your outdated work!