Star Graphic Design

I have some great advice for any Graphic Design student, or anyone coming into the industry. These are in no particular order, just things that I wanted to share that have helped me.

- Get your personal portfolio online. The sooner you buy your dot com and throw a splash page up there, the better. It helps to at least get you ranking with Google, that way when you are ready to put you final site up, you already have a base.

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Just wanted to say Happy Valentine’s Day to all my Graphic Designers out there.

Most cities have old mural advertising on the side of any building created around the turn of the century. These forgotten pieces of art are often hidden right under your nose. Just recently I have decided to document as many as I could find.

It’s amazing how far the field of Graphic Design has come, and we are lucky to still have these pieces within our view.

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Yesterday Apple released an update. No big deal, right?

Wrong. Photoshop CS3 has been giving every designer I know, trouble. It freezes when applying blending options, dragging in Smart Objects and pretty much anything that seems to use a moderate amount of RAM. This results in many wasted hours of design time, when you need to Force Quit Photoshop once an hour, all day long.

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I have a great tutorial for you here on turning an image into a mosaic using Photoshop.

There are a lot of different ways to do this, each with a different result. I’m not saying mine is the correct one, or even the best. It just has a really cool screen printed look when finished, which I really like.

Start of with the picture of your choice, then follow these steps.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed an excess of CSS Showcases on the web. (If this is the first you’ve heard of this phenomenon, google it). What I have for you today is a list of the lesser known, international CSS Showcases.

These are a great way to see what the rest of the world is up to when it comes to web design. I tried to include a well-rounded list, so enjoy.

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I have a great tutorial for you here on creating a good looking page curl using Photoshop. I think it looks especially good if you use a black and white photo to start with.

This is one of my favorite things to use when doing web design, or a brochure design. You can also take it a step further by putting a tack or piece of tape at the top of the image.

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I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you to my blog. The focus is going to be design-related topics as seen in the categories below.

Another thing I’m excited to talk about, is the fantastic site re-design of www.stargraphicdesign.com. It now has more content, better usability and is a lot more professional looking. I have high hopes for this coming year, as well as a list of goals. So I want to thank you for coming and I hope you visit again.