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I am currently working with a client who asked me to revise a logo concept I had drawn in Illustrator to be more cartoony or hand-drawn. He thought the original drawing looked too much like clip art. He was right. Luckily, I knew a technique to achieve this cartoony feel. I’ll show you how to begin with the even strokes that Illustrator creates when you draw, and transform them into looser, variable lines.

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This article is fantastic.

Eliminating spam is good SEO from Askimet.com

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the process of building and tweaking your Web site so it gets high rankings in search engines like Google.

If you are unfamiliar with Askimet, it is a software add-on for WordPress (the blogging software) that catches spam comments for you. Without Askimet, this blog would be inundated with spam comments. Askimet caught 88 spam comments on this blog since its inception in February 2009. It caught 267,375 spam comments on my other blog since February 2007.

Photoshop has a number of texture filters that can be applied directly to an image. If you want to make an image look like it’s painted on a textured surface, don’t apply the texture on the same layer. I have found that a more realistic looking texture can be created by applying the texture to a layer above your image. I’ll show you a trick to accomplish this. I’ll also give you a quick rundown of what each of the texture filters looks like.

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This list of ten tips from designer Daniel Thomas Cassaro is funny and true.

10 TIPS : YoungJerks (Dan Cassaro)
1 – STAY HUNGRY LIKE BIGGIE ON HIS FIRST ALBUM – Success can satiate hunger and blur the line between confidence and laziness. It’s best to remain critical and be open to the criticism of others. You’ll not only continue to grow as a designer, but you’ll keep things fresh and exciting for yourself. What kind of man would Bob Dylan be if he just continued to do the same thing album after album? MORE…

For years, I have worked with blogging software like WordPress and shopping cart software like X-Cart. For much of that time I have been intimidated by the prospect of developing an online community. They seem to be an order of magnitude more complex than anything I’ve worked with before. That has changed.

I spent the earlier part of this past week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. I learned many things there, and got some great visual introductions to 3D motion graphics. But the most paradigm-shifting (please forgive me the cliche) experience I had was a 3-hour seminar on Wednesday.
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