Author Archive

GRAPHICS DESIGN & VISUAL COMMUNICATION

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Communication is the best and the only way to put out thoughts across. When there was no language people used to communicate by drawing pictures on the walls of the caves. These pictures were not only instrumental in their day to day life when they wanted to express their ideas, but at the same time these have been price less for the people who are trying to put things together to understand their history and culture.

There are many ways of communicating with each other – the written aids, the verbal talks and the Visual Communication as mentioned above. Depending upon what would suit the situation best, the mode of communication is picked. Like for example, commonly people would talk to say their head out. In case they are not face to face and they are using no aid like a telephone or like they could communicate through written means of communications like the letters. The idea of visual communication while we have a fully developed language is not digested by many people.

Visual Communication would include graphic designs primarily. As the mane suggests the idea is to have a visual, a picture that would help stating what you want to say. These are quite instrumental when you have a limited time window and there is too much to say and at the same time these could be more descriptive and simple to understand as compared to any other mode of communication. The visual communication could be aided by the other technological advancements to give a desired result. Like graphic designs – this is a perfect example of pictures used to communicate the idea and use of technology to enhance that visual communication. This is a very generic way of putting but graphic design is a complete field in itself.

As the scope of visual communication is increasing the potential and the spectrum for the graphic designers are also increasing. There are so many tools that they use for visual communication and there are many in the pipe line to be developed.

The need for graphic designs has increased extensively all across the globe especially, from the time when we have started to swear by globalization. These days the graphical designs are cutting the language barriers all across the world. If you look at the travel industry – it primarily involves crossing the boundaries and visiting various places. The language and the culture of these places would definitely be not the same as that of the traveller. Hence, for understanding the roots and other important instructions at least these graphic designs could be used. The important road signs, the hospital and energy signs etch all would come under the visual communication. Clearly, the visual communication frees the communicator from the boundaries of language and culture.

In fact the visual communication is quite evident even if you are in the same country or amongst the people who speak the same language as you do. In case you need to send a message across to the masses informing them regarding the same – visual communication is the best to execute it. All you need to do is to put together a banner or like that would be visible and could communicate your thoughts across.

There is no sect that would not get benefits of using visual communication in some way or the other. Most commonly you would see graphic representations in advertisements, magazines, web designs and product packaging. Through this there is a strong visual communication message that could be sent across. The elements like colours and the other attractive attributes that are used in graphics would make the visual communication even stronger. The idea is that when someone looks at the same he or she should be able to clearly interpret what the message sender is willing to communicate through the picture.

The importance visual communication in the business world is simply indispensable. In fact there would be no one facet of business that could do without the graphic design or visual communication of any other kind. Ways in which visual communication contribute to the business world is as below –

  • · Visual communication is integral while generating processional images like graph, curves and other pie charts & like. Rather than stating the profits and cost variables with the others in an essay for a chart or a graphical representation would send a clear message across, filtering all the less important information. This could be understood as translating the bare figures into a mode of visual communication which enables ease of understanding.
  • · Another way of using visual communication in the business world would be communicating the long lasting business strategies very clearly. As that this particular point of time the strategy is a mere thought that needs to be communicated to others. Only once that thought is clearly understood, then only people could work around the details of the same and then get it to an executable level.
  • · These graphics would be very helpful in visual communicating of the stance and performance of the company. Rather than saying that it has been growing, an upward rising graph with the name of the company would be enough to say the story.

Overall, the use of visual communication in business is to make the communication in terms of figures more effective and impressive. These would have a ready impact on the existing and the potential clients for your business.

Last but not the least the creativity which is involved in visual communication would make this mode more effective. When we talk about visual communication we are not saying that the picture or the graphical design that we have should be a picture perfect image. One should be able to target that thought that he is trying to communicate across through the graphic or a picture that he needs to send across to the receiver. Or else no matter how beautiful or technical a graphic design be – it is worthless.

All around the world graphic designs are been accepted as the most convenient and impactful mode of visual communication.

Welcome to Design for Quality!

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Good Design Practices

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarters of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

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Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies with web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Custard Media – Leading Company in Promoting your Online Business

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Custard Media is the best company to assist you if you want success in your online business. They offer promotion video, online pr contents, link building, and more. You will never regret choosing this company as your partner in promoting your business since it has experienced employees that are ever ready to do their best to promote your product and attract more potential customers.

Custard Media is also great in increasing web traffic on your site. And the more traffic you have to your site the more the potential customers that you have. content writing and online PR content are indeed the most common and effective way of promoting a product. But Custard Media does not stop with just these two ways, they keep on thinking for other ways on promoting your products, not to mention their very competitive price for their service. SO, be wise on choosing hiring promotional services for your online business, remember that the money you are spending for it comes from your hard work.

Choosing the Right Layout in Web Design for Your Own Website

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Two options of perfect layout that you may select from for your web design Manchester would be, first is the fixed web designing layout and then the other is the liquid layout. 

The fixed width layouts are those who’s web pages are fixed with particular numerical value while liquid layouts signify to the web pages that the width is flexible and depends upon the widths of the user’s browser. 

Both kinds of layout can be applied to whatever purpose of your website is, however you need to know deeply each of those in order to apply the right one for your web design Preston

On the Internet, you as the designer do not have the power to manage various factors such as the size of the user’s window, the kind of web browser, hardware and other per-user settings that are applied on the user’s computer.  

That is why, if you want to have not only a decent web site but a successful one, you need to cleverly select the right layout for your web design Leeds.

Moo Creations for all your Branding needs in Preston

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Moo Creations is a specialist graphic design Preston agency and branding preston studio, creating a range of materials for new, small and medium sized businesses across Lancashire and the UK.

We work directly with our clients whether we’re catering for marketing needs, exhibition work or full branding solutions.

A freelance design service is also available to creative agencies requiring them.

Our clients also benefit from our project management and print liaison service should they require.

We also offer online solutions alongside our tailored design for print services including the design and delivery of brochures, catalogues, direct mail and other marketing solutions, folders, stationery or calendars… But our specialty is the provision of logo and branding solutions for businesses of all types.

If it needs printing, it needs designing and our all-inclusive prices help our clients save money on every project.

moo creations, keeping our clients ahead of the herd.

Creating A ‘Hollywood’ Spotlight Effect

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

This tutorial will guide you how to create a hollywood style, spotlight effect, and i believe is very fitting with us being in the current time of year where we can’t avoid the bright lights of Hollywood with all the awards ceremonies which are currently taking place. This effect will show you how to make beams of light and realistic looking spotlights. 

1.) Begin with a new document. You can either use a photo, or create one yourself, you can just use a block gradient of colour too, once you have created your document choose the polygon lasso tool – hold down your mouse on the lasso tool to reveal the polygon one.

2.) The polygon lasso tool doesn’t work with dragging like most tools, to work the Polygon Lasso, you click at the origin. As you move your cursor, a line will follow it and you then have to click again to create a line.

3.) Keep clicking in the shape of a triangle, this doesn’t have to be exact, but try to be as accurate as you can. To complete the selection, hover your mouse over the origin – this is the first place you clicked. You will see little circle. This circle means that you will complete the selection if you click on the start point – so click on the point! 

4.) As soon as you click on the start point, you will notice the marching ants selection. Now, we are ready to fill with color. Reset your foreground/background colours by pressing the ‘D’ key. Press the ‘X’ key to swap the color. White should now be the foreground color.

5.) Choose the Gradient tool and you then need to go to the options bar at the top and choose two things, click the gradient to open the options, select the foreground to transparent option and make sure that you choose the linear gradient option. Finally, make sure that the transparent option is turned on in the options bar at the top and reverse is off.

6.) Create a new layer and select it, so we don’t add pixels to the background. Click at the bottom of the selection. Drag the gradient along the selection, but not past the selection.

7.) Release the mouse and you now have a gradient. Turn off the selection by pressing CTRL/CMD+D or clicking away with the selection tool. Change the shape by pressing CTRL/CMD+T for the free transform tool. Right click for additional options such as perspective. Change the shape to suit your needs by dragging any of the little squares – these are known as adjustment handles.

8.) You should now have a spotlight, but it lacks realism because the beams have hard edges. To soften the beams, choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. 

9.) To add more beams, Duplicate the layers and use free transform to change the angles.

10.) Add words so you can see the transparency effects and try adding the effect to different backgrounds and you can drop the opacity if you want to lesson the effect. 

Creating A Spotlight Effect

Monday, February 9th, 2009

The photoshop effect of adding alternative lightening to your photographs will add depth to your natural lighting and emphisis to your subject, it is a great way of touching up your montages and collages. 

This effect works well with a photograph which is underexposed and could be touched up with just a little bit of levels or curves. Instead of just brightening the image which would be our natural instant, an interesting effect is to create the look of a spotlight.

1.) Begin by creating a selection with the elliptical marquee tool, Choose Select > Transform Selection and a bounding box will appear, this will give you the ability to rotate, scale and resize the selected area. 

2.) Press enter/return to apply the transformation to the selection, the next step is to create a curves adjustment layer, choose a new adjustment layer from the bottom of the layers palette and select curves.

3.) This will then open a dialog box, which is for curves, move the mouse from the box and over to the image, the cursor will then change into an eyedropper tool. 

4.) Click and drag and a circle will appear on the diagonal line of the curve. This is the tonal range of the area that you are moving the mouse over. Take a note of where the range is on the curve.

5.) Click and drag on the curve. Move the point up and notice that the image will be lightened. Looking at the layers palette, you will see the adjustment layer with a layer mask applied. Notice that the area of the mask where the selection was present is now white, click the mask to make it active. 

6.) The light edge needs to be softened, do this by choosing the options, Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur 

7.) Remove the effect from the areas that would be in shadow and not illuminated in real life, e.g. such as the air, choose black for the foreground color and select the brush tool, click and drag the paintbrush and you will paint away the adjustment from the regions you desire because you are painting on a mask 

8.) And that should be it! This is a great effect and you can lower the opacity of the adjustment layer if you desire to tone down the effect a little, a great way to draw attention to certain areas of an image.

How To Create A Photoshop Zoom Effect

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Zoom effects can be done through using a camera, but you can also get some interesting results when you use certain filters in Photoshop. This effect works great when used on photographs of moving objects, especially motor-sport photographs, but the effect can be just as stunning when used on still images.

1.) The first step is to choose your image you would like to work with, and then choose the elliptical marquee tool from the toolbox. Once you have chosen the tool you need to make a selection on your image, you can also hold down the spacebar to reposition the selection as you are drawing it.

2.) Now, it’s important to feather the selection. If you don’t the effect will be too harsh and obvious. The feather creates a soft edge and a smooth transition to the blurred areas. So you need to choose the options Select > Modify > Feather. Change the size of the feather radius depending on the resolution.

3.) Right now you have a selection around the center of the image, and you want to select everything but the center. Choose Select > Inverse and you should see the selection go around the edge of your page now.

4.) Next choose the options Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and choose Zoom as the method, select good for quality. Choose your amount to suit. For a heavier blur use 100. You might have to test it and undo a few times to get exactly what looks best on your image.

5.) Changing the feather and the blur amount will change the effect. Experiment with different shaped selections and different amounts of blur. In some cases you may want to apply the blur more than once.

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

This is a list of my favorite and most used Photoshop keyboard shortcuts and there’s nothing more damaging to your productivity than doing everything the long way round when using a programme. Searching for tools or buttons is a task that can easily be bypassed with some quick memorization of shortcuts.

Undo, Multiple Times – (Ctrl + Alt + Z)

Most programs allow you to press (Ctrl + Z) multiple times to perform multiple Undo’s, but Photoshop requires (Alt), otherwise you’ll just keep undoing then re-doing then undoing then re-doing then undoing then re-doing.

Hand/Move Tool – (Spacebar)

Holding the spacebar will turn your cursor into the hand in almost any situation… when using different tools, with dialog boxes open, etc… allowing you to quickly navigate your document no matter what you’re doing.

Switch Document Windows – (Ctrl + Tab)

Your Photoshop workspace can become a mess when working on multiple files, so being able to switch windows quickly is a must.

New Layer – (Ctrl + Shift + N) – with dialog?(Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N) – without dialog

Layers are the greatest thing(s) ever invented in any (design) program and being able to manage your layers properly is important.

Duplicate Layer – (Ctrl + J) – without dialog?(Ctrl + Alt + J) – with dialog

You can duplicate an entire layer, or, if you have a selection, the selection will be duplicated to it’s own layer. This is great when trying different techniques or effects without having to worry about errors.

Re-run Filter/ Fade Filter -  (Ctrl + F) – run filter again?(Ctrl + Alt + F) – run filter again, with dialog?(Ctrl + Shift + F) – fade filter

Even though Photoshop provides preview windows in the dialog box for most filters, there’s still no true way of telling whether you’ve achieved your desired effect until you see the full image. If something goes wrong, you can quickly undo, then go back to your filter and try again without having to go through the hassle of moving your cursor. 

Creating A Clipping Path

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

This tutorial will teach you how to create a simple clipping path, so you can add and background or colour to an element of a image in a few easy steps. 

1.) First you need to open up the image you want to work with in Photoshop to start you clipping path. Clipping paths are a vector-based version of a layer mask, a clipping path performs the same function as a layer mask, but contain smooth, hard, edges that do not allow for any shading. To create a clipping path, begin by drawing a path on your image with the pen tool. 

2.) Click the Paths tab on the Layers palette. Then select on Shape 1 Vector Mask path – the Save Path tab will pop up when you click on it. The default path name for the new path is “Path 1″.

3.) Then click on the upper right arrow button and select the option ‘clipping path’. 

4.) In the dialog, choose which path layer to assign a flatness value. Flatness value determines how closely the path conforms to the curves. The lower the number, the more closely the path will conform to the curves. Enter a value and click “OK”

5.) Delete background by pressing the ctrl key + select the path layer and press delete. And then fill with a new background colour, pattern or image you would like as your background!