Print Features

How to Use Color Effectively in Your Designs

In these striking examples, you'll see how color affects the mood of a piece, and how it interacts with other elements of the designs.

A Question of Character: Finding What You Need in Your Fonts, Part 2

Everything you wanted to know about Unicode but didn’t know whom to ask. Bonus: A cheat sheet for instantly creating such characters as fractions; up and down arrows; and open and filled circles and squares.

A Question of Character: Finding What You Need in Your Fonts, Part 1

As fonts get larger, finding the characters you need keeps getting more complicated. Here's a chart that gives keyboard shortcuts for the degree symbol, multiplication sign, the cents sign, and much more.

Create Better Marketing Postcards

Postcards are like freeway billboards: You have a very short time to communicate your message. Here's how to create effective postcards that get the response you want.

Flickr Friday: October 9, 2009

Derek Powazek is a Web guru and a lover of print and fine photography. And recently, he became an instant publisher, going from Flickr to a print magazine in 31.5 hours.

Antique Gothic Grotesque: Deciphering the Typeface Name Game

The vocabulary of type is mysterious at best, and nowhere is this more true than in how typefaces are labeled. Yet knowing how typefaces are named and categorized has very practical benefits.

Free For All: Textures

This large assortment of free downloadable textures includes paper, wood, bricks, grass, fabric, and more.

Free For All: Harvest These Freebies

Summer has officially given way to fall, and in the northern hemisphere, that means it's harvest time. Fill your basket with this delectable sampling of free tools, fonts, and services.

Free For All: Halloween Edition

Halloween in August? It's not too early to start thinking spooky, especially if you'll be sending out Halloween-themed projects to a printer.

To Double-Space or Not to Double-Space...

A thought-provoking disquisition on the thorny issue of how much space should follow a sentence-ending period.

Free For All: Just What You're Looking For

Be free with Web 2.0 Photoshop layer styles; fire and flame textures and backgrounds; an InDesign image library plug-in; easy scheduled emails; and a service that displays a Web design in 90 different browsers.

Critique This!

Studying other people's design helps us improve our own. Plus, it's fun.

In White Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Think you're in total control of your type? Truth is, you're on a short lead, in the tight grip of your typeface's designer.

Design As Child's Play

People all over the world know and love the characters created by Sesame Workshop: Big Bird, Grover, Elmo, Boombah (in India), Putri (in Indonesia)... But very few people think about the design behind the Muppets. Here's the story.

Free For All: 103 Free Fonts!

Script fonts, modern fonts, grunge fonts, funky fonts -- what's your pleasure? We have them all, and they're all free!

Spec Work and Crowdsourcing: Gambles that Don't Pay Off

The economy's in the toilet and you're hungry for jobs, so you're working on spec or posting designs to sites like CrowdSpring. It's understandable. The problem is, spec and crowdsourcing can lower your value and hourly rates so far that minimum wage looks like a fat paycheck. Here's what to do instead.

InDesign Magazine: Tip of the Week Archive

This is a compilation of all pastInDesign Magazine Tip-of-the-Weeks.

How to Choose Colors Everyone Likes

A time-tested formula may not determine the difference between good or bad taste, but it does predict common taste. And that makes the formula quite useful when you're choosing colors.

Creativeprose: Wacky Web Site of the Week Archive

November 23, 2009 This site is all about charts and graphs, but it's not your typical business snore-fest. A recent favorite charts the appeal of "Twilight" in relation to the age of the female watcher. http://www.graphjam.com November 16, 2009 Recently discovered diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre reveal a man obsessed not with the void, but with food. Read excerpts here. http://www.pvspade.com/Sartre/cookbook.html

Free For All: I Can't Believe They Give This Away!

Are you looking for a fast, free way to resize a bunch of images? How about free templates for CDs and DVDs? Or free vector art? Could you use a designer-friendly diagramming and flowcharting application? Then this, my friend, is the article for you.