Showing posts with label tutorials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tutorials. Show all posts

Friday, March 2, 2007

Useful tools for designers and creatives

I have set this out in two categories: INSPIRATION and RESOURCES. Feel free to add your own to the list, and tell me of your experiences using any of these sites and tools via the comments section below.

INSPIRATION:

Worlds best advertising is an advertising archive and forum discussing all the best work worldwide. Covers all media: Print, TV, Radio, Online, and Ambient.
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Find thousands of logos for study and inspiration at Logo Lounge
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An insightful and stimulating read on the logo trends of the year, can be found here
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In opposition to today's digital fonts, this site inspires by focussing on the beauty of Antique wood type
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The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising is an amazing brand and packaging collection over in Notting Hill, showcasing 200 years of consumerism, all reflected through packaging design, brand development, poster and TV advertising.
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The 24 Hour Museum alerts to news, listings and features from 3000+ museums and galleries. A fabulous guide to UK culture.
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If all of the above fail, just pick a good selection from wine.com!


RESOURCES:

Download eps logos for free at brandsoftheworld.com Here you'll find access to all the well known (and not so well known) brand logos in vector EPS formats.
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For high resolution textures Texture Space can't be beaten for an enormous selection of 3D textures. A very useful and thorough site.
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Fontifier lets you turn scanned samples of handwriting into a digital handwriting font.
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If you're trying to name or recognise a font, the font identifier site, Identifont enables you to locate it by answering a series of questions. Incredibly useful if you want to match an existing typeface, or identify a typeface you have seen in a publication.
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If you can't find locate a font by answering the questions in Identifont, then What the font? locates it for you by allowing you to scan a sample of it in (if you've seen it in a publication, for instance). Once submitted, it will supply you with the font name – a very useful tool and a real timesaver.
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Getty Images is an excellent search facility for an enormous range of photos, illustrations and films covering every type of theme.
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iStockphoto is a royalty-free image web site with a good selection of imagery and, more importantly for low-budget projects, they are incredibly cheap to purchase
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A good site for adding customisable, royalty-free music to multimedia projects is Partners in Rhyme. Also useful for voiceovers and sound effects.
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Photoshop Support does what it says on the tin!
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For every style of font, for use on a Mac, with a great search facility, check out Mac Fonts
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Once a printed magazine, x-height is where you will find interesting and useful information on and about fonts, type design, designers and technology written by industry experts.
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Magma is the best place on the web to find the most inspiring books covering all aspects of art and design.
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NB. I will soon be adding a post of inspiring websites of fellow designers and design and advertising agencies eg. Non-format, as recommended by Matt. If you know of any that you'd like to recommend for this forthcoming post, please notify me via the comments section