Wi-Fi symbol? Super easy with their system. I’ll let them run through the actual graphics, but they create a heart by making a v-shaped line with the pen tool, then plumping up the stroke and putting in rounded caps. Over at Bjango, however, they have a different plan. But if you’re like me, sometimes you overthink things and make them harder than they have to be. How cool is that?Įver had to make an icon for a project? I have, and it can be both incredibly enjoyable, and super irritating. The app installs on your iPhone, and then you use it to grab colors from the universe whenever you like. It’s called Cone, and it’s a way to pick colors from the world and get their color codes and Pantone shades. Wouldn’t it be great if that existed for the real world? Place that over the color you want to match, and it gives you a bunch of different numbers for that color, including the hex code. Click on it from your Menu bar, and it will give you a loupe. One of my favorite apps for the Mac is Sip. Again, it’s super subtle, but it makes a big difference. Set the blend mode to Multiply, put the opacity at 30%, and set distance, spread, and size at 1, 0, and 1, respectively. However, if you do the lightest of light shadows, well, they can look pretty good and make your text pop. I think they have their place, but often they’re overused and look crappy. I’m not a huge fan of drop shadows in Photoshop. But I will say that the Library of Congress is a great resource, and if you’re a designer, you might want to make use of it.įirst off, credit where credit is due: I found this tip on Design For Founders, and I loved it. Now I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take anything I’m saying as legal advice. And you still should do your due dilligence on who owns (or doesn’t) own the rights, but since most of the time you’ll come up blank, you’re in the clear to use it in your design. If you look under “Rights and Access,” you get a disclaimer that basically says that since the subject was produced before 1922, the Library of Congress isn’t aware of any copyright holders. How? Why? Well, let’s take this Plan of New Orleans, for example. But what’s really cool is that they have a digital collection, and it has a lot of images that you could use in your designs. government, and it’s packed with all sorts of historical documents. You know what the Library of Congress is, right? Well, it’s a mammoth library (dur) run by the U.S. Using the Library of Congress for Design Purposes And then there’s “frlorem,” which is all from Futurama. Should I type “swlorem,” I get 10 paragraphs pulled from the Star Wars trilogy. Jackson text pulled from various films he’s done over the years. If I type “sjlorem,” I get 10 paragraphs of Samuel L. But since I like my Lorem to be a bit funky, I have a few twists. In fact, I use it for entire paragraphs, including Lorem Ipsum text. Neat, right? Well it can do lots more than just simple words. If I want to save myself a few keystrokes, I just enter “ChV” and Text Expander pops out Chevrolet. I do a lot of writing about cars, and so I use the word “Chevrolet” a lot. I use Text Expander for a ton of writing-related things, but that’s not what you’ll use it for here - well, not totally.īut let me explain what it does by way of example. Spinning off the Little Ipsum pull, let’s talk about Text Expander. For example, I selected “1 word” multiple times and came up with “Mattis,” “Pellentesque,” and “Justo.” Neat, right? It then randomly dumps latin text into your clipboard, for you to do with as you please. It lives up in your Menu bar, and when you click the icon, you can select how many words or lines you need to fill. This app does pretty much what you expect: It outputs lorem ipsum into your documents - but it does it in a cool way. There are lots of ways to do this (and I’ll mention a few in just a minute), but if you have a Mac, you might want to try Little Ipsum. We’ve all had design projects that required some lorem ipsum - the name for the gibberish dummy text that we use as placeholders for the good stuff to come later on. Will you use these tricks every day? Probably not, but when you do remember that they exist, you’ll thank your lucky stars that you have them at your fingertips. Fortunately for me (and you), I had a combination of all three helping me out. To find them, you either have to know a few of your own, have some friends that are willing to dish their secrets, or get very lucky. Why? Because design tricks are a dime a dozen, but unheard of ones are, by definition, unheard of. I write a lot of different things, but this stacks up as one of the most difficult pieces.
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