The hidden Buffalo Thorn tree in Photoshop
Did you know that Photoshop can draw instant trees?
Design
The cuteness of Wingdings and Webdings
Back in the 90s and 00s, the Wingdings font was the precursor to emojis, and it’s so adorable.
Color palette generator
Every day I check the Eiffel Tower webcam. Many days the colors are pretty nice. I’d like to grab a quick color palette to tweet with my @EiffelLive Twitter account. Today’s Eiffel Tower view is peaceful. Gray and white tones. I’m trying out some color palette generators on MacOS. I know they exist on the …
Using a silly font-picking method to illuminate Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer’s paintings are full of dichotomies. Earlier this week, I uncovered eight paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection with wonderful dual meanings. Themes like life and death captured in one painting. To really punch these double interpretations, I had fun photoshopping two words onto each painting. Each word is really BIG—as in …
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Five decades of design trends used in new General Motors logo
The new General Motors logo is very curious. It employs design trends from each of the past five decades. Perhaps General Motors wanted a logo that was timeless? If you use trends branching across a wide spread of time, that makes the logo timeless, right? Actually, it makes for one Frankenstein-hideous logo. Whoaaaaaa. Check that …
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Looking for a very tall condensed font?
Are you ever looking for a font that is super-duper condensed? A font so tall, that you can barely read it? A skyscraper of a font—even more than a skyscraper—I want a font that is a 1,450-foot tall stick. Is there such an ultra-compressed font? And is it free? My search for such a beast …
Free graphic design magazine 6x/year
Want a free graphic design magazine mailed to you six times a year? Here is a funny story about how my free subscription was accidentally mailed to someone else for five years. Graphic Design USA has been the trends magazine for and about the professional graphic design and creative community for over 50 years. You …
What if Quark’s auto-growing text boxes grew too big?
I just love getting promo emails from Quark trying to convince me to move back to Quark’s design program. I used Quark XPress in the late 90s in college, and at my first two jobs, but Adobe InDesign came and took over, and we all never looked back. To this day, Quark continues send me …
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The ligatures in Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
The Museum of Science and Industry is renaming the museum to be the “Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry” Sounds pretty silly right? Look at how long that name is. Plus, Chicagoans notoriously hate renaming buildings. The Chicago Tribune ran an article with selected Twitter reactions from Chicagoans. A typical Chicago response: Me? …
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Magnifying text on a computer screen
The screenshot tool is so incredibly handy tool. (also known as screen capture on Windows). With the Mac, if you hit command-shift-4, you get a crosshairs to click and drag the area you want to capture. Today I accidentally dragged the cursor over a very very tiny section of my screen. Just 12 pixels by …