A Designer’s Life

by Deborah Gray Smith Graphic and Web Design

Adobe Illustrator CS5 Perspective Drawing

April16




This is just one of the tools I’m excited about in CS5. I can’t wait to play with it! I’m also looking forward to the Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop and CSS Inspect Mode with Live View in Dreamweaver. From what I’ve seen so far, this looks like an exciting release.

Color Palettes: Finding the Perfect Combination

October26

Finding the right color palette for a website design can be challenging. Often the client’s logo will dictate the dominant colors, or you might be basing the design on a photo from which you can sample colors. When I’m struggling with finding the combination that makes it all come together, I turn to some great online color resources - these are my favorites:

Adobe’s Kuler - http://kuler.adobe.com/ Explore palettes, search by tags, save your favorite themes, and create your own to share with other designers. View this tutorial video from AdobeTV to learn more about Kuler. I especially like having the ability to create a theme from a photo.

ColorJack - http://www.colorjack.com/ Hover over a color to see a palette suggestion. Don’t miss the articles section for some interesting background about color symbolism and psychology.

Daily Color Scheme - http://beta.dailycolorscheme.com/ Know of other good color resources? Please share them in a comment. Happy coloring!

Adobe TV

April14

If you haven’t already discovered it, you might want to check out Adobe TV. The site offers a good variety of online training videos for designers, photographers and developers. You can view online or download videos to watch later using the Adobe Media Player. Check out Taming the Web - Introduction to CSS:

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