Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 29 April 2015

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

• The Paradox of Personal Branding
  We live in a time where brands are try­ing to act like peo­ple and peo­ple are try­ing to become brands. It’s a para­dox­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. Corporate brands don’t fit well in peo­ples’ clothes — and peo­ple feel con­fined by posi­tion­ing state­ments and brand personas.

  Tags: Design Branding

• 8 Free Glitter Effect Patterns & Styles for Photoshop
  My home office is a com­plete mess with fairy sprin­kles every­where after cre­at­ing my lat­est free design resource. This pack of 8 glit­ter pat­terns will help you glam up your designs and achieve real­is­tic glit­tery effects in your art­work. They’re avail­able in var­i­ous colours as repeat­ing JPEG images, a set of Photoshop Patterns and Photoshop Styles, which can be applied direct­ly to your design ele­ments to cre­ate a fab­u­lous glitzy appearance!

  Tags: Photoshop free

• How To Prepare Your Artwork for Special Print Effects
  It’s every print designer’s dream to work on a project that involves spe­cial print effects. Varnishes, flu­o­res­cents, foils and emboss­ing are just some exam­ples of cool fin­ish­es that can be applied by indus­tri­al print­ing com­pa­nies, but the added cost makes these projects quite a rar­i­ty. If you’re lucky enough to have an adven­tur­ous client, or you’re feel­ing flush and want to splash out on some top qual­i­ty per­son­al prints, fol­low along with this guide to learn about the dif­fer­ent spe­cial print fin­ish­es avail­able and how to pre­pare your print art­work to accom­mo­date them.

  Tags: Design print CMYK

• How to Change OS X’s Finder to Suit Your Preferences
  OS X’s Finder seems pret­ty sim­ple by all out­ward appear­ances, but it’s actu­al­ly got a lot of dif­fer­ent parts that you have to know about to effec­tive­ly use it. A good way to mas­ter the Finder is to take advan­tage of its preferences.

  Tags: Mac OSX Productivity

• An Unofficial Guide To Goodreads For Readers And Writers
  I am dig­i­tal mar­keter who works in tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing, and I am also a writer. And though I am not self-published, I have two words for those who are: Goodreads STAT.Tags: Writing AmWriting self­pub epub
• What is the largest age group of self-publishers? 21–30? 41–60? 61+?
  Copy edi­tors, dic­tio­nary offi­cials and lan­guage experts seem to be com­ing around to using the gender-neutral ‘they’ in the sin­gu­lar, instead of ‘he or she.’

  Tags: Writing AmWriting

• 9 Great Tools for Entrepreneurs Without Offices
  No office? No prob­lem! Here are 9 tools to help you be pro­duc­tive, no mat­ter where you work.Tags: Entrepreneur Freelance RoadWarrior
• The Racy Things Designers Would Say If They Talked Dirty
  Aptly named ‘Designer Dirty Talk’, the site gen­er­ates racy lines, like “Baby, let me com­mand + Z and do you over again and again” and “I Want to See You In 0% Opacity”, that only design­ers will use. 

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