Design

Free Images Online - MorgueFile

Heather Solomon — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:40:49 GMT

I often find myself looking for free images for use in a project. It can be hard to find quality stock photography for free. Today I came across a site though that has really made my day, MorgueFile. (Sound weird? They explain the name on the home page).

Unlike some other sites where a search for a hum-drum term like "documents" returns 30 pictures of a kitten off of Flickr, this site has a good stock of photos, and a good search engine. The site also provides a lightbox (store photos for future use). Check it out!

http://www.morguefile.com

Things your design team wishes you knew...

Heather Solomon — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:05:00 GMT

I love this post:

How to live happily with a great designer, by Seth Godin

Why do some organizations look great... and get great results from their design efforts and ads... while others languish in mediocrity? I think it has little to do with who they hire and a lot to do with how they work with their agencies and designers.

Here are the things your design team wishes you would know:
Keep Reading...

Microsoft Design Site

Heather Solomon — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:10:00 GMT

Being a designer, I found this site interesting. I didn't know it existed before today, and I picked it up from a post from Jensen Harris about the new Office icons.

The site has case studies, design info about various MSFT things, bios and community info. Pretty cool.

Microsoft Design

Exposure from Alien Skin

Heather Solomon — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 13:32:00 GMT

Oh, this is just too cool.....

Use Exposure to recreate the look of a specific film stock. Control saturation, light temperature, dynamic range, softness, sharpness, and the addition of realistic grain in one place. Or save your signature look as a one click effect.

Check out the examples, very impressive stuff. All things you could do in Photoshop, but it would take more time to do it manually. Mac/Win $199 download.

Exposure

Fraction of a second to make your impression

Heather Solomon — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 13:18:00 GMT

From Darren Chan at thecssweblog:

Webdesigners have an average of 50 milliseconds to make an impression
We all know that with the ever shortening attention span of people these days that we only have a few seconds to catch the attention of a potential customer. Well guess what? Now we have a study that tells us that we actually have less than a few seconds. Designers have an average of 1/20th of a second to keep a viewer. How shallow no? A study conducted by Carleton University in Canada, published in Behaviour and Information Technology, and reported on by Nature.com hypothesized that websites had 500 milliseconds to make an impression. In reality we only have 50 milliseconds before the viewer passes judgement. And so there you have it, though content is still king, the trick for us is to make a lasting impression during the first 50 milliseconds of viewing. Doesn't sound that tough. The study aligned itself with the KISS philosophy, less is more. And however great your content is, the delivery makes the initial impression and sometimes it's the only chance you'll get.

Adobe releases Lightroom Beta

Heather Solomon — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 12:20:00 GMT

Adobe Lightroom Beta has been released. It and Aperture are still all Mac. Universal platforms due out soon.

Adobe® Lightroom™ Beta is the efficient new way for professional photographers to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images. So you can spend less time sorting and refining photographs, and more time actually shooting them. Its clean, elegant interface literally steps out of the way and lets you quickly view and work with the images you shot today, as well as the thousands of images that you will shoot over the course of your career. Because no two photographers work alike, Adobe Lightroom adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

Lightroom Beta lets you view, zoom in, and compare photographs quickly and easily. Precise, photography-specific adjustments allow you to fine tune your images while maintaining the highest level of image quality from capture through output. And best of all, it runs on most commonly used computers, even notebook computers used on location. Initially available as a beta for Macintosh, Lightroom will later support both the Windows and Macintosh platforms.

Don’t delay. Download now and send us your feedback. Adobe Lightroom Beta 1 build expires at the end of June 2006.

Note: This is a public beta, not a final release. Neither the quality nor the features are complete yet. We want to show you our direction and get your feedback so that we can incorporate it into future releases.

(Originally posted 1/11/06, removed and reposted for tech reasons)

Adobe announces Adobe-Macromedia software bundles

Heather Solomon — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:21:00 GMT

Via Jan Kabili over at theunofficialphotoshopweblog:

Adobe wasted no time after closing its acquisition of Macromedia to announce its first joint products: Adobe Design Bundle and Adobe Web Bundle. These are just what they sound like — bundles of Adobe and Macromedia products without any addition integration. A third bundle, Adobe Video Bundle, is expected in early 2006

Adobe Design Bundle, which sells for $1599 at the Adobe Store, includes Adobe Creative Suite Premium 2 (Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, GoLive CS2, Version Cue CS2, Acrobat 7.0 Professional, and Bridge) and Macromedia Flash 8 Professional. Adobe Web Bundle, which sells for $1899, includes Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Macromedia Studio 8 (Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3, and FlashPaper 2). Education prices are a much better deal—$549 for the Design Bundle and $599 for the Web Bundle. There are also some upgrade deals from Adobe Creative Suite 1 (Standard or Premium) and Macromedia Studio MX and MX 2004. There is no upgrade path from stand alone products, like Photoshop, to a bundle. If you recently purchased Adobe Creative Suite 2 and want a bundle instead, Adobe suggests in its faq PDF, that you try to return CS2 to the location from which you bought it.

Hmm, glad I haven't bought CS2 yet. Return it? What crappy customer service.

Another angle on the Resolution Debate

Heather Solomon — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 18:32:00 GMT

Oh one of my favorite topics is the resolution debates about tossing 800x600 to the wayside and formerly adopting 1024.

Jon Hicks posted his two cents and another slant on the debate, which was what about all the users out there that don't run their browsers full screen, people running at 1024+ but leave their browsers at a smaller size in order to view more on their monitors and use other tools?

I hadn't thought about that angle, but he has a good point. I think it is a definite consideration.

I stand by fluid design that looks good at 1024 and scales down very nicely to 800x600. No site should sit boxed up in the corner of the browser showing gobs of white space. Fluid sites are the ticket IMHO.

Flash Hater Humor

Heather Solomon — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:03:00 GMT

Hee hee hee, this made me really chuckle. Got this link from Scoble.

I have to agree, I don't like Flash either. I am glad the Flash fad has faded. The Internet is about information delivery. I shouldn't have to wait for menus to load, fly across the screen, fade in or sit through a montage of images of something I don't care about. That is why Tivo/DVRs are so popular, so we can skip through the crap.

Flash Troll Generator

New font for Office 12

Heather Solomon — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:18:00 GMT

An old design school buddy of mine asked me how many fonts I had the other day. I snickered. Enough to get by, but not enough to be considered a worthy graphic designer. Truth is, my world revolves around Verdana. It is the most optimized font for MSFT apps and a very good font for web site readability. When your life is web, you live by Verdana (at least for non Mac heads).

Jensen has posted about the new MSFT font, Segoe UI, which takes advantage of ClearType. It is an interesting read. I don't care much for the name though, too much interpretation for pronunciation.