Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 29 September 2014

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

  • How to cre­ate type effects with InDesign
    In the screen­shot above (click on the image to down­load the PSD), you can see the type I have decid­ed to work with shown larg­er. I’ve put in grabs of the specs on each line, so you can see I have already done a few tweaks. Then I went in and ma…
  • Designers: Why Writing Your Own Copy Helps

    Designers tend to freak out when they hear the word “writ­ing.” That’s not my job, some­one else will get paid to do that – right? Well, not always. Sometimes, the writer is you – or per­haps, if it isn’t, it should be.

  • Photoshop Tutorial: Smooth Skin
    This tuto­r­i­al will show you how to edit peo­ple’s faces to smooth out their skins, just like how mod­els are edit­ed in magazines..
  • Here’s An Insightful Warning About The Way Human Desires Are Met So Easily Online
    Mr Harris is no abso­lutist or age­ing Luddite. Instead he makes a more cau­tious argu­ment, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of writ­ers like Nicholas Carr, whose book “The Shallows” had a pow­er­ful impact on our under­stand­ing of the way the inter­net is r…
  • 4 Glaring Signs You Need to Take the Freelance Leap
    Along my six year jour­ney through one full-time and two-part time jobs, the fol­low­ing signs led me to final­ly make the leap. If any of these res­onate with you, the edge of the cliff might be clos­er than you think.
  • How to Create Seamless Watermark Patterns in Adobe Illustrator

    Watermarks play an impor­tant role in pro­tect­ing your art­work. Generally, we do not give much atten­tion towards a watermark’s appear­ance and use a text or a Logo to get the job done. A well designed and prop­er­ly exe­cut­ed water­mark can real­ly pro­tect the art­work with­out actu­al­ly affect­ing its appear­ance. The best way to do this is pat­tern mak­ing. In this tuto­r­i­al, we will cov­er two dif­fer­ent water­mark designs using the same pat­tern mak­ing tech­nique. Let’s get started!

  • How to cre­ate real­is­tic 3D hair and fur
    CG artist Rouhollah Toghyani shows how to mod­el a cute crea­ture with fluffy hair and fur ready for animation.
  • 5 Impressive [Web] Photography Styles and How to Nail Them

    Though web con­tent can take on many dif­fer­ent forms – from text to graph­ics and video, it’s clear that pho­tog­ra­phy is one of the web’s dom­i­nant forms.

  • Making The Best Of A Bad Situation: Planning For Business Bankruptcy
    Nobody starts a busi­ness plan­ning on going on fil­ing for bank­rupt­cy. But some­times, despite our best efforts, busi­ness­es do not thrive. If your busi­ness has got­ten to the point that you are con­sid­er­ing fil­ing for bank­rupt­cy, there are some th…
  • 22 best iPad art apps for paint­ing and sketching
    Make stun­ning art on the iPad with these top tools! These pow­er­ful paint­ing and draw­ing apps can help you start cre­at­ing iPad art today!
  • Use Google Ventures’ “Note and Vote” Method to Make Group Decisions
    People’s opin­ions can quick­ly derail a meet­ing and stop the group from mak­ing a deci­sion. Google Ventures has a tech­nique to get to good deci­sions in 15 min­utes, which they call the “Note and Vote” method.
  • Here’s What Google Search Will Look Like in 10 Years

    From its mea­ger begin­nings as a stu­dent search engine project called BackRub at Stanford University, to the pow­er­house search engine that is both a noun and a verb in one, Google’s path has been one of growth and con­stant adap­ta­tion with the times.

    Examining the path of that his­to­ry pro­vides some inter­est­ing insights into what the world’s most pop­u­lar search engine will prob­a­bly look like in 10 years.

  • EDU How Computer Technology Will Transform Schools Of The Future

    The answer is prob­a­bly some com­bi­na­tion of rank incom­pe­tence, insti­tu­tion­al con­ser­vatism, and per­verse incen­tives. It’s a mess, but the good news is that it’s going to change — a lot — soon. The sit­u­a­tion as it stands is fun­da­men­tal­ly unsus­tain­able, and new titans are emerg­ing from the start­up world, ready to wipe the floor with tra­di­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic prac­tices. Today, we’re going to be talk­ing about the five biggest ideas that are going to change edu­ca­tion more than you’d believe.

  • Evaluating the Benefits and Drawbacks of Coworking

    The solu­tion to both prob­lems is a cowork­ing facil­i­ty. The con­cept is pret­ty sim­ple: Put togeth­er a group of peo­ple who all free­lance, rent out a desk for a low price, put in shared facil­i­ties such as a con­fer­ence room and recep­tion­ist, and you’re good to go. This keeps the costs down for renters, gives you a pro­fes­sion­al envi­ron­ment to meet clients and pro­vides human inter­ac­tion. It’s the best of all worlds, right?

  • 50 Designers Answer 5 Questions, Provide “Important” Answers
    Right now, there are 51 tiny inter­views on this web­site. And oth­er inter­views are com­ing soon. Each tiny inter­view con­sists of 5 ques­tions and 5 answers. I ask the same 5 ques­tions to every design­er. Important ques­tions. Short answers.

  • How to make your design event 100% car­bon neutral
    Kyoorius Designyatra founder Rajesh Kejriwal reveals how India’s biggest design con­fer­ence is putting its mon­ey where its mouth is.
  • How To Write The Perfect Email For The Mobile Inbox

    With such a small win­dow to keep things con­tained with­in, it some­times seems dif­fi­cult. Below are sev­en tips from MakeUseOf to help you with writ­ing the per­fect email (or text, or Facebook mes­sage, or Snapchat mes­sage, or…) for the mobile inbox.

  • How To Write The Perfect Email For The Mobile Inbox

    With such a small win­dow to keep things con­tained with­in, it some­times seems dif­fi­cult. Below are sev­en tips from MakeUseOf to help you with writ­ing the per­fect email (or text, or Facebook mes­sage, or Snapchat mes­sage, or…) for the mobile inbox.

  • What Is The Cloud? (Besides the mis­used premise for a sum­mer box office flop?)

    The Cloud. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot these days – so much so that its def­i­n­i­tion seems to have been dilut­ed over the years. What is the cloud, exact­ly? Why does it mat­ter if we know about it? And what does it mean for us?

  • The Neuroscience of Motivation
    Strengthening your pos­i­tive emo­tions and weak­en­ing your neg­a­tive ones can have huge ben­e­fits for per­for­mance. Here’s why.
  • 50 Tips For Starting Your Own Company

    Starting your own busi­ness isn’t easy. You not only have to come up with the company’s vision, but also the mar­ket­ing plan, raise start­up costs, find investors, reg­is­ter your busi­ness — there’s a whole lot that can go wrong if you’re not organ­ised. So if you’re think­ing of start­ing up your own com­pa­ny, this list of 50 tips should set you on the right course.

  • 50 Tips For Starting Your Own Company

    Starting your own busi­ness isn’t easy. You not only have to come up with the company’s vision, but also the mar­ket­ing plan, raise start­up costs, find investors, reg­is­ter your busi­ness — there’s a whole lot that can go wrong if you’re not organ­ised. So if you’re think­ing of start­ing up your own com­pa­ny, this list of 50 tips should set you on the right course.

  • Can you iden­ti­fy these 10 pop­u­lar typefaces?
    Can you tell the dif­fer­ence between Arial and Helvetica? Or Courier and Geneva? Put your skills to the test in our fun typog­ra­phy quiz.
  • Design Vs Art – The Difference And Why It Matters

    Design ver­sus art. What’s the dif­fer­ence, and how does it affect your career as a design­er? We all know there is a dif­fer­ence, and those out­side our indus­try might not be able to see it. Your par­ents, for exam­ple, might refer to you as an “artist” even though you are a pro­fes­sion­al designer.

  • Calibrate & Maintain Your MacBook Battery For Best Performance

    As your MacBook ages, your bat­tery per­for­mance decreas­es — that’s just a fact of life. But if you cor­rect­ly cal­i­brate and main­tain your bat­tery, it’s pos­si­ble to improve per­for­mance and put off replac­ing it for as long as possible.

  • Comics Sans for Cancer posters: top design­ers get down with the font we love to hate
    Designers have rev­elled in the chance to use Comic Sans with impuni­ty for this poster project to raise mon­ey for Cancer Research.
  • Delightful Posters Show Creative Ways Of Forming An Ampersand
    These posters are cre­at­ed dai­ly and they show cre­ative ways of form­ing an amper­sand, like using a pair of hands or two sun­ny side up eggs.
  • The 15 best places to find free vec­tor art online
    Looking for free vec­tor art? Joanna Zhou reveals sites that make it easy to track down high-quality graph­ics to meet your needs.
  • Researchers make color-shifting sur­face mod­eled on squid
    Devices that par­al­lel bio­log­i­cal mate­ri­als make for one-second col­or changes.
  • What makes a good font and why we need new ones
    Monotype’s Dan Rhatigan dis­cuss­es why we need new fonts and what makes a good typeface.
  • The 20 Best Free Photoshop Scripts
    You already know about Photoshop Actions – well, Photoshop Scripts can do so much more! We’ve round­ed up 20 of the best…
  • Is This The ‘World’s Prettiest Face’? Artists Combines Maxim’s ‘Hot 100′ Into One Woman
    Vibe then went on to fuse the faces togeth­er using the cup sys­tem as shown below. The above pic­ture was the ulti­mate result after numer­ous rounds of com­bi­na­tion using photo-editing software.