Firewalker Design: Website Design and Development » Links

1st Edition of Drexter Magazine is Up and Running

firewalker — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:59:39 +0000

The first edition of Drexter Magazine is out and can be downloaded at drextermagz.wordpress.com. I just grab myself the first edition at first thing in the morning from Design Diary‘s RSS subscription. This might be another design source or inspiration for all fellow designers.

Graphic Design Forum Lists

firewalker — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 20:13:00 +0000

If I want to focus on some skills, I might lost track on other application. But clients won’t always be the same at all time, you never know which skills are applicable in the future. Furthermore, it will be a waste of time if I learn all the application throughly. If the client is asking some new application which I am not familiar with, I might get into trouble meeting the deadlines.

How am I respond to this? The answer is easy; instead of lurking on each application, I might just asked people who specialized in that application for their tips and trick. Then I can focused on one application that I prefer. Either way, people may also seeking for my guidance as I am focused on the application. All of this activity, mostly appeared in community forum.

What are the forum for graphic design? Here are my complete lists:

DeviantArt
Try joining the artists community that match your style. For example, I am joining the Vector Artists because I prefer vector arts, and I subscribes their newsletters for latest news and events.

CGSociety
Specialized on 3D arts such as Modelling, Animation, and Video Edit. The people here were awesome that they might be hired to the big animation studios in Hollywood.

Animepaper
Cute and colorful Anime and Manga wallpapers are born here. The Photoshop skills in this forum are considered as high class or master. They gives rate for each wallpaper being submitted. And they also do re-trace for scanning materials such as CD/DVD covers, Art Books, Posters, and many more.

Vexels
Vexels is an art consists of vector shapes, such as my secret art. The term is not populary known in graphic design world, but their classification makes the forum becomes more and more creative. Their art are usually beautiful, like paintings.

Click here for the list of Indonesian Graphic Design Forum.

Need brushes, everyone?

firewalker — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:16:00 +0000

When you browse a thing about “photoshop” in any search engines, what do you see most? Well, if it is not a way to strip your girl friends naked (well, I’m not one of them), it must be about “brushes”. Yes, Photoshop become famous through one of this powerful, expandable, and modified tools. It is easy to shared and the file size isn’t big enough to fill up your hard disk.

Many Photoshop lovers are unlike Professional Photographers. The one and only difference between them is that: Photoshop lovers aren’t stingy. They don’t charge a penny on their brushes and actions. No copyright, only asking for a little PayPal or Amazon donations, hahaha… what a joke.

Well, here are things that I found through browsing “free photoshop brushes”:

Design Fruit

PS Brushes

Get Brushes

Magurno

brusheezy

Adobe Exchange

Graphic Identity

Obsidian Dawn Brush

And this list will be updated regularly!
Last Update: January 14th, 2008

Useful Links for Starting a Blog

firewalker — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:34:00 +0000

Know your Blog needs, check out these items below:

Join the Indonesian Blogger Community. Meet bloggers from any edge of Indonesia archipelago.

Have a GIF or JPEG image for your logo? Put it on your website favicon with this Favicon Maker!

Bring different colors to your website by using scripts and methods that was posted for free! Dynamically change the way people saw your site!

Another Anime wallpaper community. But this international community is either unique and has the quality check. Join this anime wallpaper maker community or just download their wallpapers.

One of many ways you can earn money beside Adsense. Less complicated procedures and higher click value than Adsense.

Nice clocks for your site, however it needs flash player plugin for every browser that views it.

One site that must be considered by any GD. Check how your site looks like in various different browser and operating system here.

Search Engine Optimisation troubles? Need tools for your research? Need to be number 1? Then It’s done!

Need a search engine to free photos around all stock photo sites? Need a collection that only graphic designers are willing to pick? Yotophoto, please…

Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size. IT IS A VERY USEFUL TOOL FOR WEB DESIGNER (Updated November 20, 2007)

Validate your HTML with CSS or CSS only. Simple type your URl and validate it (Updated November 20, 2007)

I’m Bad at Typography!

firewalker — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:16:00 +0000

One thing that you should aware of when you are learning Graphic Design by yourself/independently is typography.

Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.

Typography technique is a must for graphic designers. Not only graphic designers, but art directors, typesetters, and compositors as well needs to learn more from this. It is a technique that is already being developed since 1600BC in Greek and followed by China. You should already know that without typography, you won’t have History class anymore.

Since there is a technique to typography, then it can be trained. Training an abstract skill like this requires further research and browsing thousands of font. Now, I know why Graphic Design students hate this.

Since I just learn this thing, I can’t say much without going on with references. So, let’s start browsing on some recommended sites. Hmm… what first? What about some font banks?

Font Banks (Library)

Recommended Font Blogs

I Love Typography (yeah… a site which is an opposite of me)
Type for You (just for you, don’t bring anyone else)
Type Now: Free themed fonts, you’ll find a lot of movie, music, or brand fonts. Mostly available for WINDOWS OS, sorry for MAC users. (Updated Nov 14, 2007)

As for any beginner like me, this is my tips in learning typography:

Learn terminologies in typography
Learn how font was made (including search for font builder software)
Learn the types of font and where to use it
Browse the pages or biography of famous typographers, learn their tips
Keep intact with any typography updates by reading magazines, books and blogs
Try to make your own font after all this tips are applied (well, you can start sketching whenever you want)

Now you can apply it to your work. See if there any differences.

Hmm… I wonder whether I will improve from this.