G. H. Cloutier

Design Projects: Preparing Postcard Promotions

Sending postcards directly to prospective clients is a cost-efficient way to market services and advertise wares. But before you place that first order, it pays to know a few tricks of the trade, such as postal requirements, display alternatives, and impactful design. Here's what you need to know.

Design Projects: Creating Simple Logos

Simple is often best for both design and execution of logos. Instead of using a complex dedicated illustration program to design your logo, you can make a simple-yet-sophisticated logo using your page-layout programs built-in drawing tools. Here's one way to do it in InDesign.

Digital Photography How-To: Converting Color Photos into Black-and-White Images

Black-and-white images are imbued with an elegance and timelessness that color photography often can't match. Since digital cameras capture color images, you'll need to process them as black and white in Photoshop. But a simple transformation into grayscale mode will leave your images looking flat. Here's what to do instead.

Digital Camera How-To: Expanding Dynamic Range

Among the many compromises photographers must learn when working with digital as opposed to film cameras is how to adjust dynamic range. Images that contain patches of extreme highlights and shadows are especially tricky. In this story, see how you can expand your dynamic range by taking better pictures with your digital camera and then adjusting the images in Photoshop.

Illustrator Tips: Exporting Print- and Web-Ready PDFs

Adobe Acrobat isn't the only application for making PDF files. You can also make PDFs in Adobe Illustrator, although the resulting file won't be as robust as that created in Acrobat. Here's how to get the best results from Illustrator's PDF features.

Illustrator How-To: Creating Your own Chop

A chop is a personal stamp used by artists to sign their work. While mostly associated with Chinese soapstone carving, you can make your own chop using Adobe Illustrator. Sign your art-work digitally or turn the your chop into a rubber stamp for a more traditional experience.

Web How-To: Creating Pop-Up Menus in Dreamweaver and GoLive

Making menus for Web sites used to require access to programmers, but these days many more styles of menus are readily available to designers . In this feature, learn how to make menus that pop up in precise locations. This technique requires DHTML, but it's easily accomplished in Dreamweaver or GoLive, both of which are covered here.

Photoshop How-To: Making High-Tech Effects

In this article, we'll show you how to create a tech look. First, we'll go over how to create pattern-based designs. Then we'll show you how to make halftone graphics. From there we'll explain how to add radiating lines and square grids to your imagery, as well as create pixelated effects. Once you have a grasp of the components, you'll see how easy this look is to create.

Illustrator How-To: Breathe New Life into Stock Clip Art

Many designers find the idea of using clip art in their work to be somewhat gauche. While that may be true of using a lot of clip art in its raw state, you shouldn't overlook it as a potential design resource. Clip art can be a great basis for speeding up the production of custom graphics.

Surrealistic Illo: Adding Infrared Imaging Effects

Very often infrared images can make the ordinary look mysterious and interesting. In regular black and white, many pictures wouldn't be very remarkable, but in infrared they take on a spooky, surreal quality that catches your attention.

Understanding Typography Controls with CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) aren't a new thing. The CSS standard was finalized by the W3C back in 1996. What's new is that most of the popular browsers finally support CSS pretty well. In the last year, there's been a big improvement in browser support of CSS and there's little reason not to start incorporating CSS into your site design.

Advanced Layer Blending in Photoshop 6

Creating illustrations or compositing images usually takes lots of layer manipulation to create the exact blends and effects you want. With Photoshop's Layer Style dialog box, you get immense control and organization over applying blending and effects to your images and graphics.