Our friends at www.thehungryjpeg.com have just released an amazing font pack filled with over 40 great fonts to download. Checkout this font bundle you just can’t miss out on! To see the full font bundle head over to TheHungryJPEG.com The Hungry JPEG font bundle So, whats included? For just you will get over 40 premium fonts […]
The post 40 premium fonts for just appeared first on Free PSD Web Design Templates.
Grungy textures are versatile resources that can be used as backgrounds and overlays in your designs to add dirty distressed effects. Broken photocopiers produce some of the best textures around, combining black and white tones with heavy grain which is perfect for retrofying your designs with aged looks. I’ll let you in on a little secret, these textures were actually created by abusing my scanner, but they contain all the characteristics of photocopy toner malfunctions.
This pack of grungy photocopy textures contains 13 high resolution scans full of grainy tonal gradients. Use them as backgrounds to your designs, apply them as layer masks, or paste one in as an overlay and change the blending mode to produce cool texturing effects. Each texture also looks great when inverted to black on white, providing loads more ways to use these resources in your projects.
Download the Grungy Photocopy Textures 47mb
The post 13 Free High Resolution Grungy Photocopy Textures appeared first on Blog.SpoonGraphics.
The Nice and Serious is a set including 60 free outline icons designed with Adobe Illustrator. Designed and released by Nice and Serious.
The post 60 free outline icons – AI appeared first on Freebiesbug.
Have you been thinking about starting a design business? With all the outstanding reasons to do so, we can certainly see why. You might be drawn by the independence, the market opportunity, the creative possibilities, the enjoyment you get from it, or any combination of these and other motivators.
The cost of self-employment in design is not too prohibitive. Money is, of course, a consideration, but your biggest investment will be the time you spend promoting yourself.
The first step to be taken seriously for your design skills is to show that you take your own skills seriously. Personal branding should be a high priority for you. Thanks to your graphic design expertise, you should have no trouble coming up with a personal logo, font, and color palette to use in all of your promotional efforts.
Next, join every online community where you have a chance of getting your name out in the market, such as news websites with active discussion boards. Use your logo as the avatar picture for your social media accounts, and fill them with carefully selected posts about relevant industry news, as well as your own personal projects. Design a portfolio to showcase your best work, with avenues for potential clients to contact you. The well-known Behance and Dribbble are just a couple of the many excellent portfolio hosting sites available to you.
Don’t undercharge, under-schedule, or under-network. You should have a good handle on what your services are worth and what you’re capable of accomplishing during the day, so you don’t sell yourself short on money or time.
As far as networking goes, becoming a fixture in your online community is a good strategy for gaining referrals and connections. It can also be a wealth of information on the best new tools and can inspire meetups where you build camaraderie with other designers.
While all of these online methods go a long way toward building your reputation, don’t neglect offline advertising. “Isn’t it a little incongruous for someone who works solely online to waste time advertising offline?” you may ask.
Actually, it isn’t a waste of time at all. Physical promotions stick in people’s minds and make them more likely to remember you, as these engage the tactile and olfactory memory as well as the visual. Even if you don’t have a physical item on hand to give them, the fact that you talked face-to-face rather than through a screen makes you infinitely more memorable.
Some ways to make yourself stand out offline include finding a workplace that isn’t your home. If you can pull it off financially, your presence in the public space makes more people take notice of you. You can really play this up with bright, fun window decals or even lawn signs — any indication that you are ready for business. Even if passersbys don’t need your design services themselves, they may know someone who does.
Image Source: Old Postcard Design via Shutterstock.
Consider sending physical samples of your work as postcards to your desired potential clients. It’s easy to stick your web address and social media handles at the bottom of something like this, encouraging them to engage with you further online and see more evidence of your talent. When you feel a genuine connection with a new acquaintance, having a business card and/or a useful personally branded item to give away also increases your top-of-mind presence.
Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of seeing your online and offline promotion as separate endeavors. They must work together for your best chance of success. The printed materials you give out or feature at your work space should point people online, so they can see more of your design in one place.
Your online presence should always have the goal of talking to people in person and getting your work into their hands, so they will be more likely to remember you favorably.
For a step-by-step business-launching journey that takes into account both the offline and online requirements of starting a business, check out Graphic Design Blender’s article for designers. The tips here will give you your best chance of success.
In addition to all of their great suggestions, the best piece of advice you can remember is not to be scared! You can definitely do this. It’s better to try to see what you’re capable of than to assume you’ll never succeed and stay put in a job you don’t love.
If you’re starting your own design business, what advice do you have to share? Tell us your personal experiences below!
The post Things to Remember when Starting a Design Business appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.
It’s that time of the week again, a chance for you to sit back and be inspired by some of our favorite web and mobile designs from the past week.
You may also like to browse the Web Inspiration Archives.
The post Weekly Inspiration – Teamgeek, Bad Assembly, and more appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.
Let’s start with the dress. If you’ve been online in the last 48 hours, we’re sure you don’t need it explained to you. There have been countless theories about why our perception of its coloring is so split: some scientific, some not.
Of particular note was Wired.com’s, which, when stripped to its essence, is fascinating for both its simplicity and the complexity of the brain process it implies. Basically, some people—most likely those who spend more time in the sun—have “daylight-balanced” sight. As such, their brains interpret the dress’s blue hue as an unwanted color cast and “correct” it to white, just like a camera with the same settings would. This happens instantly, subconsciously, and in many cases, entirely against their will.
The meme’s popularity lies in how shocking this revelation is to a lot of us: we assume everyone without vision disorders sees colors the same way we do, and most of us have been given no reason to believe otherwise. But it’s not so. As this article from LiveScience explains, an experiment with monkeys suggests that color perceptions are an adaptive behavior: they form in our brains as a response to the experiences with the outside world.
“Color is a private sensation,” says University of Wisconsin color scientist Joseph Carroll. “I think we can say for certain that people don’t see the same colors.”
This intrigued us, so we called him for more information.
“You can tweak perceptual white balance,” he explains, “[and] there’s some evidence that your environment can calibrate your color perception.” Basically, when the composition of the lights people are regularly exposed to is changed, their entire spectrum of color perception is changed. “The same way you can induce an afterimage by staring at a light for ten seconds,” but over the long term.
After that, a funny thing happens when we look at an image that seems to be lit in a subtly-colored light. “Whatever our brain’s guess is about the illuminant, and it is a guess” he says, “it’s going to then subtract that out from any determination about the color of the object.”
He also explained another, more well-known phenomenon: In many cases, the colors of objects are dictated to us by our surroundings. This is called “color constancy.”
Our brain can’t compensate for small sections of a scene cast in a colored light, but it’s “very good at ignoring uniform changes in illumination.” He explains. “If you had an actually white and gold dress, and you took a small bluish transparency and laid it over one of the dress’s white stripes, this white stripe would look bluish. If you took a giant transparency and covered the entire dress, it would still look white and gold.”
In the left image, the second card from the left looks like a stronger shade of pink than in the right image. In reality, they’re the same.
From Wikimedia Commons
We won’t, however, continue with the dress. Enough people have done that. As photographers and designers, we’re more interested in how color illusions can be created.
There are other optical illusions that you can pull off in photography, and we recommend you try them at home. As alluded to in Carroll’s quote, we will perceive shades as lighter or darker depending on how light or dark the background around them is: objects on light-colored backgrounds look darker, ones on dark-colored backgrounds look lighter. One simple trick you can pull is photographing the same-colored object against light and dark-colored backgrounds, then putting the pictures next to each other. Plenty of people will be surprised to learn that they’re both the same color.
It’s also been proven, by the Cornsweet Illusion among others, that humans perceive color and shade in different ways based on where the lighting is supposed to be coming from. It should be possible to create an effect like this by setting up a situation in which one object should logically be lit and the other cast in shadow, much like this image, and then lighting the bottom one.
The Cornsweet Illusion: The flat part of both squares are the same shade of gray. To test it, cover the border between them with a finger
From IllusionPedia
And as the Checker Shadow Illusion proves, our mind automatically corrects for shade as well as hue – this can also be duplicated in photography.
Finally, why not try photographing identically-colored objects against split backgrounds within the same photo, and seeing if there’s a difference in the perceived color of the object itself?
A list of other illusions like this can be found in Scientific American.
In addition, shining a colored light on a finished photograph can radically alter how viewers will perceive the colors within the photograph, and a lot of it can be down to individual perception and color correction. In a gallery showing, it’s possible that you could encourage visitors to see completely different things by lighting the photos with subtly discolored lights, then testing their individual perception of the photos’ real colors.
The Colored Cube Illusion: The two squares highlighted by the arrows are the same color.
By James Gurney
Unfortunately, however, those individual differences are a subject that scientists don’t know much about. That brings us to the question we were most interested in answering:
Now that we know it’s possible for an image to create a drastic split in how some people see it vs. others, we’re sure a lot of artists and photographers are going to be trying to figure out how to do it intentionally.
Multiple experiments have shown that this is a result of a perfect combination of white balance, saturation, and the exact colors present in the image: for many viewers, nudging the levels just a little bit in Photoshop makes the image change right in front of their eyes. So, by experimenting with the same subject on different colored backgrounds, with different colored lights, photographed at different color temperatures and levels of saturation, it should be possible to create images just like this. Right?
We asked Carroll about it. “I’m not aware of ways in which people intentionally do that to create an effect” he says, but concedes that it can be done. And although he couldn’t offer a solid explanation on how, he gave some advice to people who want to start experimenting with it. “Maybe something as simple as setting the white balance to a blue piece of paper instead of a white piece of paper.”
One Vine account is already giving it a shot with impressive results:
A Vine that shows the apparent color shift in action.
And as for the question that might be most pressing in your mind right now?
“I see it as white and gold.” he replied.
Let’s start with the dress. If you’ve been online in the last 48 hours, we’re sure you don’t need it explained to you. There have been countless theories about why our perception of its coloring is so split: some scientific, some not.
Of particular note was Wired.com’s, which, when stripped to its essence, is fascinating for both its simplicity and the complexity of the brain process it implies. Basically, some people—most likely those who spend more time in the sun—have “daylight-balanced” sight. As such, their brains interpret the dress’s blue hue as an unwanted color cast and “correct” it to white, just like a camera with the same settings would. This happens instantly, subconsciously, and in many cases, entirely against their will.
The meme’s popularity lies in how shocking this revelation is to a lot of us: we assume everyone without vision disorders sees colors the same way we do, and most of us have been given no reason to believe otherwise. But it’s not so. As this article from LiveScience explains, an experiment with monkeys suggests that color perceptions are an adaptive behavior: they form in our brains as a response to the experiences with the outside world.
“Color is a private sensation,” says University of Wisconsin color scientist Joseph Carroll. “I think we can say for certain that people don’t see the same colors.”
This intrigued us, so we called him for more information.
“You can tweak perceptual white balance,” he explains, “[and] there’s some evidence that your environment can calibrate your color perception.” Basically, when the composition of the lights people are regularly exposed to is changed, their entire spectrum of color perception is changed. “The same way you can induce an afterimage by staring at a light for ten seconds,” but over the long term.
After that, a funny thing happens when we look at an image that seems to be lit in a subtly-colored light. “Whatever our brain’s guess is about the illuminant, and it is a guess” he says, “it’s going to then subtract that out from any determination about the color of the object.”
He also explained another, more well-known phenomenon: In many cases, the colors of objects are dictated to us by our surroundings. This is called “color constancy.”
Our brain can’t compensate for small sections of a scene cast in a colored light, but it’s “very good at ignoring uniform changes in illumination.” He explains. “If you had an actually white and gold dress, and you took a small bluish transparency and laid it over one of the dress’s white stripes, this white stripe would look bluish. If you took a giant transparency and covered the entire dress, it would still look white and gold.”
In the left image, the second card from the left looks like a stronger shade of pink than in the right image. In reality, they’re the same.
From Wikimedia Commons
We won’t, however, continue with the dress. Enough people have done that. As photographers and designers, we’re more interested in how color illusions can be created.
There are other optical illusions that you can pull off in photography, and we recommend you try them at home. As alluded to in Carroll’s quote, we will perceive shades as lighter or darker depending on how light or dark the background around them is: objects on light-colored backgrounds look darker, ones on dark-colored backgrounds look lighter. One simple trick you can pull is photographing the same-colored object against light and dark-colored backgrounds, then putting the pictures next to each other. Plenty of people will be surprised to learn that they’re both the same color.
It’s also been proven, by the Cornsweet Illusion among others, that humans perceive color and shade in different ways based on where the lighting is supposed to be coming from. It should be possible to create an effect like this by setting up a situation in which one object should logically be lit and the other cast in shadow, much like this image, and then lighting the bottom one.
The Cornsweet Illusion: The flat part of both squares are the same shade of gray. To test it, cover the border between them with a finger
From IllusionPedia
And as the Checker Shadow Illusion proves, our mind automatically corrects for shade as well as hue – this can also be duplicated in photography.
Finally, why not try photographing identically-colored objects against split backgrounds within the same photo, and seeing if there’s a difference in the perceived color of the object itself?
A list of other illusions like this can be found in Scientific American.
In addition, shining a colored light on a finished photograph can radically alter how viewers will perceive the colors within the photograph, and a lot of it can be down to individual perception and color correction. In a gallery showing, it’s possible that you could encourage visitors to see completely different things by lighting the photos with subtly discolored lights, then testing their individual perception of the photos’ real colors.
The Colored Cube Illusion: The two squares highlighted by the arrows are the same color.
By James Gurney
Unfortunately, however, those individual differences are a subject that scientists don’t know much about. That brings us to the question we were most interested in answering:
Now that we know it’s possible for an image to create a drastic split in how some people see it vs. others, we’re sure a lot of artists and photographers are going to be trying to figure out how to do it intentionally.
Multiple experiments have shown that this is a result of a perfect combination of white balance, saturation, and the exact colors present in the image: for many viewers, nudging the levels just a little bit in Photoshop makes the image change right in front of their eyes. So, by experimenting with the same subject on different colored backgrounds, with different colored lights, photographed at different color temperatures and levels of saturation, it should be possible to create images just like this. Right?
We asked Carroll about it. “I’m not aware of ways in which people intentionally do that to create an effect” he says, but concedes that it can be done. And although he couldn’t offer a solid explanation on how, he gave some advice to people who want to start experimenting with it. “Maybe something as simple as setting the white balance to a blue piece of paper instead of a white piece of paper.”
One Vine account is already giving it a shot with impressive results:
A Vine that shows the apparent color shift in action.
And as for the question that might be most pressing in your mind right now?
“I see it as white and gold.” he replied.
