Pugly Pixel always has fun graphic design tips and goodies, but the tinsel Photoshop brush may be my favorite yet! You can grab it by becoming a member for $5, and you’ll get access to all the digital goodies there for a month too.
'D' for Design, 'T' for Tech, Filing Cabinet • 5 Comments • December 19, 2011
Here’s a question from my recent FAQ post. Nicole wrote:
Maybe this is a silly question, but how did you get the paint colors off the brand’s websites? [...] I wanted to email a “true” swatch [to my family] with my photos but couldn’t save a swatch from the Valspar website. Did you get permission from the companies or am I missing something??
Thanks for asking (and nice name, by the way). All of the big paint companies use flash for their websites, which means you can’t right click to save swatches. You can get around that though by taking a screenshot and grabbing your color from the image created.
So how do I make the brush strokes and paint blobs for my mood boards? I made my own custom set of Photoshop brushes, but you can use a font like Blobs, Brushstrokes & Balloons or this free ink splat font instead. Just pick your color and then use the brushstroke or blob of your choice. If you’re feeling fancy, you can play around with the layer effects in Photoshop.
There’s a nice tutorial over at Suffix.Abuse about using glyphs. Many fonts have alternate versions of letters that you can use for a more decorative look, and you can access them in Illustrator and InDesign through the glyphs menu.
For those of you on a Mac, the Keyboard Viewer is another helpful way to get the most out of your fonts.
Bring up your System Preferences (found in the Applications folder), and click on “International”.
Next, check the box for the Keyboard Viewer (under the Input Menu tab). You may want the Character Palette as well. Scroll down a bit and choose your language/country too.
You can close your System Preferences now. You should see a new icon in the top right of your screen, in the Finder’s Input Menu (don’t worry… I didn’t know it had a name either). Click and hold on the icon and select “Show Keyboard Viewer”.
A little keyboard will show up on your screen, and it responds to any key you press. Then you can choose a specific font off the Font Menu.
Now you can look for that fancy ‘d’, the ‘y’ with the big flourish, or just find the copyright symbol (hint: it’s option + g).
'D' for Design, 'T' for Typography • 7 Comments • November 3, 2007
