Jacob Cass, a designer from Australia, has some useful steps for designing a logo. I completely agree with him, the steps are the same ones I use.

Here is a short version, but for the full article and examples visit Just Creative Design.

Steps for creating a logo that works:

1. Learn what a logo is and what it represents – logos exist in order to represent a non visual contraption. For example a company is not visible (their offices are), nor is the name of a product. You have the product being represented by itself because it is an object, but its name – it needs to be represented by a logo.
2. Learn the rules and principles of logo design – the logo must show what it represents clearly, it must work weather it is in color or black and white, it must be easy to remember & the logo must be recognizable at 1 inch in size.
3. Learn off others past mistakes – in other words, just look around you. You will see great logos to follow and “ugly” logos that you should learn from in order not to do the same mistakes. (more…)

All designers get so-so photos all the time. Is is time to reshoot the photo? Do you have time? Most of the time the answer is no; and there is where the photo manipulation capabilities of Photoshop come into play.

Looking to clear up skin? Enhance eyes? No makeup on the model? Wrong hair color for the page you are using? Need a blond? Need a brunette? Need them skinnier? Remove some love handles? No problem, Photoshop is here.

Follow the link for 33 Photoshop tutorials that can help!

This 100 tutorials collection is by 3dtotal.com and offers images that describe what is each tutorial. A great bookmark if you are an 2D illustrator that works a lot on Photoshop.

designertoday.com has a list of 225 different Illustrator tutorials; from beginner to advanced. Because you can never have enough tutorials or bookmarks to save them.

It seems “more” is surely in… every time I have seen a collection of tutorials during the last month the number just keeps growing 10 – 20 – 50 -100 and now 225 tutorials for Illustrator; because I guess 200 tutorials were not enough.

But then again, who am I to complain about free? Enjoy.

The title should come as no surprise; but thanks to that fact we can drive developers and programmers crazy sometimes.

We are picky on what goes where (layout), picky on which color to use (color combination), picky on how images should display (image manipulation), and if you are head of the project – specially picky on how the system works (design usability) and finally picky on the details that make the project look complete. These are pieces of the puzzle that some programmers and developers only pay light attention to. Just look at design-police.org for guidelines; yeah we have that many.

Although a system can -work- correctly, it might not display correctly or it might not give the impression a finished system should give. On the other side of the coin, programmers do pay attention to other parts of the system that we might not pay as much attention to. A programmer, somewhere, is mentioning this concept in a programming blog.

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Smashing magazine has an great collection of Photoshop tutorials. Anything from rendering products, lightning effects, retouching photos and improving their look, reflections, creating product boxes… you name it and it is probably there.

The list of tutorials is over 30 pages long, and that is not counting how long each tutorial is. So if you have a lot of free time to master your Photoshop skills this is a very good place to start; also a great page to bookmark since you won’t be done with those tutorials in a while and you might need them later.