This tutorial will take you through the steps of setting up a basic inspiration board. The page is divided up into a modular grid to a number of cells of your choosing. Options for placing in content is explored as well. An inspiration board is a great tool for displaying images that are relevant to your design needs. Unlike a Pinterest board, a series of pages in Microsoft Word or Google Slides, this format presents all of your inspiration to you at one time at one glance.
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Category Archives: Tutorials
An InDesign Inspiration Board
How to recolor Swash Artwork in InDesign
In this tutorial, we will use the InDesign Effects Panel to change the color of a black and white piece of swash artwork. This is a great technique if you want to have graphic embellishments match the color palette of an existing layout.
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Design a Tri-Fold Brochure using InDesign
This tutorial will take you through the steps of creating a basic tri-fold brochure. There are endless variations on this but the underlying idea is to keep the document structured and to consider how you want a viewer to experience the information. Designing a tri-fold brochure presents a small difficulty as the finished product is three dimensional and is intended to be folded – you will see on page two of the document, the front panel appears on the right. The copy used in this tutorial is actual advice for the production of a brochure, I hope you find it helpful.
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A Multi-page Layout in InDesign
For this tutorial, you will be making a multipage layout in InDesign that can be used for a simple lookbook or photo journal. The tutorial uses master pages so that you can have elements repeat on every page in the same place, you will also create a second master page that can have elements that differ from the original.
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Stamped and Weathered Text in Photoshop
This is a really great technique for making distressed or weathered looking letters. (I can’t take full credit for designing this technique, but the original website disappeared and I wanted to preserve it for posterity.)
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Torn Edges in Photoshop
In this tutorial we will make an image appear is if has been torn out of a fashion magazine leaving raggedy edges. It’s not as good as the real thing but built into the tutorial are plenty of opportunities to modify the technique to achieve a certain level of authenticity.
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Subtle Textures in Photoshop – Mezzotint
Another in a series of creating subtle textures in Photoshop, this one uses a prepared gradient ramp that has the mezzotint filter applied to it. The texture ramp is saved as a smart object that can then be placed into a new file and colorized and blended as necessary.
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Subtle Textures in Photoshop – Heather
For this tutorial, we’ll create a subtle heather-like texture in Photoshop from scratch. This tutorial uses Smart Objects, layers that allow up to modify them without destroying them. We even get to nest a smart object within another smart object just like Russian nesting dolls or the film Inception.
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Text Overlay in InDesign
In this tutorial a graphic is placed on top of an image in InDesign. Using the Effects Panel, the transparency of the graphic is modified so that the image can still be visible through the graphic.
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Going 3D in InDesign
In this tutorial, you will create a little fake 3D in InDesign using a photoshop image that has been separated out into layers. There are a number of ways to do this – some a little less cumbersome – but I prefer this method as it gives you full control over how the image blends with the graphics in InDesign.
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