First Things First

Hoping that the year 2010 has started well for you all.

Say Hello to 2010

Best wishes in all your noble endeavors this year!

The Place to Be

Unless you’ve been living under a stone, you must have heard of CreativePro and A List Apart. Unless of course, you are not a web and/or graphics designer; or merely masquerade as one.

All the same, today we take time to highlight these two sources of design info, inspiration,  tips and tricks and invaluable insights for professionals.

Creative Pro

Creative Pro: Where Creatives go to know

I must admit that when I was learning the ropes in graphic design way back in early 2006, I found  Creative Pro totally relevant and absolutely necessary in graphic design.

Having discovered the web site from a link within the InDesign Magazine, I have to date subscribed to the Creative Pro weekly design tips.

Creative Pro covers pretty much everything Adobe, QuarkXpress and other leading DTP software and design services. A good starting point is the extensive Creative Pro How-To articles.

I personally owe much of the success I had when self-tutoring in design to Creative Pro. If you you’ve never been there before, I strongly recommend that you do, you’ll without a doubt discover just how much you’ve been missing.

A List Apart

A List Apart: For People Who Make web sites

A List Apart is essentially a place where you go to get enlightened. The site’s mission is clearly outlined on the homepage:

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Explore our articles or find out more about us.

Need we say more?

If you go to the A List Apart web site today, a survey of those who make web sites (designers, developers,  copywriters etc) is currently underway. You can also have a look at the results of the 2008 design survey.

The easy-to-read articles, cool illustrations and clean layout of the A List Apart web site sets it apart as a welcome source of much needed design insight.

Every person who makes web sites needs to keep abreast with what’s cutting at Happy Cog (publishers of A List Apart).

Learn and Share

Complit Design is all about learning and sharing. We’d also love to learn from you too.

What other sites should we highlight for design insight, creative inspiration, tips and tricks?

Cutting Corners
We all love to cut corners… actually, we all love the elegance of photos with rounded corners.
There exists no single click solution for achieving this, even though there is an easy way to do this for photos already placed in InDesign (topic for another day).

The Need for Rounded Corners

For most designers who work in both web and graphic design software, (Adobe’s Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite) there is a growing need for images with rounded corners. You can see the above photo at the Peter Njenga home page.

The advent of rounded element containers in CSS has necessitated this. See these at the Complit Communications homepage.

How to… (using Photoshop CS2)

Following is our original image:

Complit Design: Making Rounded Corners in Photoshop tutorial - Original photo

Step 1: At the Layers Palette, the image is on its own layer. Create a new layer right on top of it.

Rounded Corners Tutorial - new layer

Step 2: Next, pick the rounded rectangle tool

The rounded rectangle tool in Photoshop

Using this tool, draw a rounded rectangle on this new layer you created. No need to worry about the fill color, but ensure this rectangle captures as much of the original photo as possible.

Draw a rounded rectangle

Your Layers Palette should now look like this:

The Layers Palette

Step 3: On the Layers Palette, select the layer you drew the rounded rectangle on, and double-click that layer. This opens the Layer Style Palette:

The Layer Style dialogue

In the Advanced Blending area, slide the Fill Opacity percentage down to 0%.

Step 4: Back in the Layers palette, click on the Paths tab.

Select the current Path, click on the little arrow in the upper right corner of the Layers palette, and select “Make Selection” from the select list as shown below:

The Path tab on the Layers Palette

In the “Make Selection” option box, make sure Feather Radius is set to 0 pixels, and Anti–aliased is checked.

Make Selection dialogue

Upon clicking OK, you get a nice, smooth selection of the rounded rectangle that you created.

And finally…

With the selection still pending action, go to Edit, Copy Merged. Create a new document,  go to Edit, Paste.

Complit Design: Making Rounded Corners in Photoshop tutorial - result

You get the above beautiful photo with rounded corners.

Great Success!

“If I have seen further (than others),
it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
- Sir Isaac Newton

The Need for Others

The above words are attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, the legendary scientist who advanced The Theory of Relativity.

These timeless words simply underscore something all designers know very well – that creativity and excellence in design is rarely solitary effort.

The Need for Inspiration

Graphic Exchange: Resources for Creative Minds

Graphic Exchange is a Canadian design company that provides information, tools and resources for graphic designers.

My biggest inspiration from the Graphic Exchange web site came from some Rich PDF back issues I downloaded way back in 2006.

The eMagazines are huge (approx 80MB) but are thankfully provided in three versions: basic(<10MB), stream (<20MB) and full. The infusion of design and innovation within the pages opened my eyes to the seemingly boundless possibilities that design offers to the truly creative. Download these free from the gX Archive.

The Need for Talent

Needless to say, talent plays a key role in exemplary performance, but we all know that talent is invariably predicated on practice. Because practice makes perfect, as seen in the following Wesbank TV advert:

The Need for Information

Every week, we shall highlight a web site that will be of tremendous help to any designer. Be it in web design, graphic design, photography, web strategy… we shall highlight and recommend those sites we find inspirational.

Carlos Castaneda said:

Once awareness is free, intent will redirect it in new evolutionary paths.

What are your thoughts on these? What other sites provide invaluable design inspiration?

Let us learn, share and progress together.

Simplicity in Design

According to Google, Simplicity is powerful. From the Google Corporate information web site, a ‘Googley’ design delights and satisfies people all over the world. Part of the Google design principles states:

Simplicity fuels many elements of good design, including ease of use, speed, visual appeal, and accessibility. But simplicity starts with the design of a product’s fundamental functions . . .our best designs include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals.

Ideally, even products that require large feature sets and complex visual designs appear to be simple as well as powerful. Google teams think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important feature.

Similarly, Apple Inc has won the hearts of many through use of intuitive, simple designs that translate into a rich user experience. It is in simplicity and elegance that Apple finds its strength.

David Pogue

In Feb 2006, David Pogue gave a talk at TED on Simplicity.

In his usual light-hearted approach, he made mention of Microsoft products, key among these the Windows 2000 [Shut Down, Restart, Log Off and Hibernate] dialogue that has a drop down menu. This he compared with the Mac OS dialogue that simply uses buttons to convey the same information.

He also highlighted the vast number of features in Microsoft Word, very few of which many users ever get to use.

Simplicity: Knowing When to use What - Windows 2000 drop-down

Simplicity: Knowing When to use What - Mac OS buttons

Following is David Pogue’s TED talk:

John Maeda

John Maeda is a leading Graphic designer, artist and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He is the author of The Laws of Simplicity.

He co-directs SIMPLICITY, a radical initiative that seeks to help people break free from the complexity of today’s technology, and redefine the way users relate to that technology in their daily lives.

John also talked about Simplicity at TED in 2007. Following is the video:

With Simplicity, Less is More

Designs that are fundamentally simple are more user friendly. They are more robust and manageable.

Designers should embrace simplicity and avoid incorporating unnecessary features in their designs.

I once wrote a post about design on The Walkabout sometime in April 2009.

It was about one Jacek Utko, a graphic designer from Poland whose award-winning designs help readers reconnect with newspapers.

Jacek Utko, Polish Graphic Designer

Lately, I’ve had time to talk to upcoming designers and some friends who still cannot believe that I did not attend design school. They keep asking what one needs to do to be a better designer. This post attempts to answer some of their questions.

Despite being a little-known newspaper designer, his redesigns not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. In the following TED talk, Jacek says in no uncertain terms:

“you can live in a small poor country, you can work for a small company, in a boring branch, you can have no budgets, no people, but still you can put your work to the highest possible level. And everybody can do it. You just need inspiration, vision and determination. And you need to remember that to be good, is not enough.”

Watch Jacek Utko’s TED Talk, read reviews, or download the video on the TED web site:

Design Success

On his official web site, Jacek outlines 7 Steps to design success. They are:

1. Strategy and goal
   What do you want to achieve? Increase sales? Attract new readers? Change image?
2. Newspaper content
   Is the change of content necessary? Is the paper structure clear? What are the reader’s needs?
3. Design
   Is design coherent with strategy and content?
4. Focus Groups
   Will readers accept it?
5. Organization and planning
   How to improve workflow and planning?
6. Marketing
   How to self-promote our content?
7. Implementation
   Presentation and training, style book, supervision

This post will be especially helpful to those in the creative, publishing and marketing services industry. In a broader perspective however, the above design insights and TED talk are useful to anyone who is in the business of adding value.

Why Design?

The essence of design is to communicate to an audience, and this communication only becomes effective when a design elicits a desired reaction on the audience.

Complit Design Inspiration

Great design goes way beyond merely impressing and informing. Good design is elegant, is engaging and delights the eye without distracting the mind.

Complit Design

Complit Design is an effort to learn and share how to design and communicate better.

We shall be focusing on Web Design, Graphic Design, Design Software, Search Engine Optimization, Design Tips and Tricks, Design videos and talks that inspire, edify and remind us how to be better designers.

We’d like to learn from you too, you can always join the conversation by sharing your thoughts and insights on our posts.