Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 14 November 2014

The day’s best and most impor­tant design- and design business-focused arti­cles, tuto­ri­als, and resources hand-picked by Pariah Burke.

  • Adobe Ink & Slide Win the Popular Science Best of What’s New Award!

    I’m proud to announce that Adobe Ink & Slide just won Popular Science’s 2014 Best of What’s New award in the gad­gets category.

  • Superhero Caps Inspire Typography, Design, AND Comic Book Geeks Simultaneously

    Graphic design­er Eddy Ymeri has tak­en his twin loves of typog­ra­phy and com­ic book super­heroes and cre­at­ed some­thing tru­ly unique: Superhero Caps. Using Risograph dig­i­tal print­ing, he’s craft­ed three-dimensional paper mod­els (5 1/2‑by-6-inches) that you build your­self from pieces you punch out from 11-by-17-inch, 80 lb. Cover sheets. Perhaps most impres­sive is the thought that Ymeri has clear­ly put into the choice of type­face he used for each “cap.” Take the one he used for X‑Men’s “Archangel”:

  • Adobe Ideas: A New Name, A New Look, A New App

    Recently, Adobe Ideas, our pop­u­lar vec­tor draw­ing app for iPad and iPhone, that’s been down­loaded over 2.2 mil­lion times since May 2013, grew up and got bet­ter. Adobe Illustrator Draw is a trans­for­ma­tion that means a new­er, more mod­ern ver­sion of the full-featured draw­ing app that peo­ple have come to rely on.

  • ImageOptim Better Save For Web – PNG Compressor for Mac

    ImageOptim is a free app that makes images take up less disk space and load faster, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing qual­i­ty. It opti­mizes com­pres­sion para­me­ters, removes junk meta­da­ta and unnec­es­sary col­or profiles.

    ImageOptim seam­less­ly inte­grates the best opti­miza­tion tools: PNGOUT, Zopfli, Pngcrush, AdvPNG, extend­ed OptiPNG, JpegOptim, jpe­gres­can, jpeg­tran, and Gifsicle.

    It’s excel­lent for pub­lish­ing images on the Web (eas­i­ly shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also use­ful for mak­ing Mac and iPhone/iPad appli­ca­tions small­er (if you con­fig­ure Xcode).

  • 7 Tech Logos Before They Became Iconic

    Some of the world’s most ubiq­ui­tous logos had hum­ble begin­nings. In 1975, Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 to devel­op the Nike logo and the “Swoosh” we’ve come to rec­og­nize has remained more or less intact for near­ly forty years.

    Meanwhile, Pepsi paid the Arnell Group $1 mil­lion to devel­op its updat­ed logo in 2008. There are com­pa­nies who’ve paid tens of mil­lions for logo design.

    But what of icon­ic tech logos? Surely Apple’s logo—that sleek, sil­ver sym­bol of glob­al innovation—came into the world ful­ly formed. As it turns out, tech logos often have long, dark his­to­ries of their own, and we’ve high­light­ed a few famous examples.