Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 1 August 2014

Great con­tent found by Pariah and shared to the design and cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties on social media.

  • 4 Integrated Marketing Hacks You Haven’t Thought of Yet

    Integrated mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions (IMC) is busi­ness jar­gon that lit­er­al­ly means sync­ing your online and offline mar­ket­ing efforts into one cohe­sive cam­paign. Rather than hav­ing your phys­i­cal pres­ence pre­sent­ing one facet of your com­pa­ny and your dig­i­tal pres­ence rep­re­sent­ing some­thing total­ly dif­fer­ent, the inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy aims to make the two one.

    So, let’s look at four inno­v­a­tive ideas to con­nect the two worlds you’re oper­at­ing in to cre­ate one cohe­sive mar­ket­ing mes­sage; mov­ing cus­tomers seam­less­ly through a uni­fied brand experience:

  • 4 Integrated Marketing Hacks You Haven’t Thought of Yet

    Integrated mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions (IMC) is busi­ness jar­gon that lit­er­al­ly means sync­ing your online and offline mar­ket­ing efforts into one cohe­sive cam­paign. Rather than hav­ing your phys­i­cal pres­ence pre­sent­ing one facet of your com­pa­ny and your dig­i­tal pres­ence rep­re­sent­ing some­thing total­ly dif­fer­ent, the inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy aims to make the two one.

    So, let’s look at four inno­v­a­tive ideas to con­nect the two worlds you’re oper­at­ing in to cre­ate one cohe­sive mar­ket­ing mes­sage; mov­ing cus­tomers seam­less­ly through a uni­fied brand experience:

  • How to paint photo-realism in Illustrator using the Gradient Mesh tool

    Gradient Mesh is a grid-based paint­ing tech­nique in Illustrator that enables advanced colour­ing of vec­tor objects with smooth and mal­leable colour transitions.

    If you’re rea­son­ably famil­iar with Illustrator’s Pen tool and oth­er path-drawing, selec­tion, and colour tools, you can use the Gradient Mesh fea­ture to add real­is­tic colour­ing, light­ing, and 3D char­ac­ter­is­tics to a flat vec­tor object. Ultimately, gra­di­ent mesh can give you the effect of photo-realistic paint­ing with all the ben­e­fits and free­dom of resolution-independent vec­tor artwork.

  • Apple Partners With Historic Rival IBM To Make IPhones More Business-Friendly
    APPLE MUSCLES ITS WAY INTO ENTERPRISE.
  • It’s a Trap! Nine Legal Quagmires for Entrepreneurs to Avoid

    Entrepreneurship, with all its risks and unknowns, can often feel like Luke Skywalker’s treach­er­ous mis­sion to destroy the Death Star in Star Wars IV. Experts con­tin­ue to debate whether entre­pre­neur­ship can be taught, or whether it’s some­thing more like the Force: a nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non that some­one is either attuned to or not. Putting aside whether you have enough midi-chlorians to start a suc­cess­ful busi­ness, every­one will have to dodge legal traps and obsta­cles along the way.

    Most of the legal prob­lems new entre­pre­neurs get them­selves into are not the prod­uct of fraud or neglect, but rather igno­rance. Here are nine exam­ples, and tips (from a non-attorney) for avoid­ing them:

  • The future of data-driven graph­ic design
    Stamen Design founder Eric Rodenbeck reflects on the end­less poten­tial for inno­v­a­tive design with data.
  • What Happens To Your Social Accounts When You Die?
    Did you know that in the first eight years of oper­a­tion, 30 mil­lion Facebook users have died? What hap­pened to their accounts? What will hap­pen to your data when you pass?
  • Send Your Kindle Book Notes and Highlighted Passages to Evernote or OneNote

    Productivity blog­ger Jonathan Milligan offers this sim­ple solu­tion to turn your Kindle notes and high­lights into (search­able) notes in Evernote. All you have to do is head to your Kindle account on Amazon, select one of your books, and go to the notes and high­lights page. Then, use the Evernote web clip­per to save the entire page. (You could do this with oth­er clip­ping tools too, like OneNote.) 

  • Freelancers’ faith in the UK econ­o­my wanes

    In fact, the Freelancers’ Confidence Index shows that where­as 70% of free­lancers thought in the first quar­ter that the econ­o­my would improve, only 59% are now con­fi­dent that it will.

  • Creative Calendars That Keep Track Of The Love And Happiness In Your Life

    Barcelona-based Spanish design­er Raquel Catalan, founder of Brigada Creativa, has cre­at­ed a cou­ple of quirky “life cal­en­dars” that help you track the lev­el of love and hap­pi­ness in your life over the course of 365 days. 

  • How to Create an Animated Pixel Art Sprite in Photoshop
    In this tuto­r­i­al, I will show you how to cre­ate and ani­mate a pix­el art sprite using just a few sim­ple tools in Adobe Photoshop. In the process, I will cov­er all of the basic rules that you can apply to your future pix­el art illus­tra­tions. Let’…

Curated by Pariah Burke