June 7, 2012

Guest Post with Katie Price

Hello Everyone! I'm excited to be here to talk with you about one of my favorite things: graphic design. In college, I minored in fine art and quickly learned that having quality supplies makes a big difference. So today, I'd like to share with you what is in my graphic designer's toolbox.


1- MacBook Pro
My Macbook is where it all happens. It is powerful, beautiful, and portable. Do I think you have to have an Apple computer to do graphic design? No. But you do need a powerful computer. Running any of the Adobe Creative Suite programs will use a lot of memory. {And we aren't talking about the "500 gigs of harddrive" some of the cheapy computers come with. That is an entirely different kind of memory.}

2- Photoshop
Photoshop houses both my canvas and my tools. It is where the magic happens. If you are interested in trying your hand at graphic design, I would recommend first starting with the much less expensive Photoshop Elements to see if you like it.

3- Color Picker
You have probably seen the beautiful Design Seeds palettes floating around Pinterest. But how do you take those colors and use them in your designs? By having a color picker tool that reads the color & outputs it as a HEX value that you can use in Photoshop or on the web.

4- Google Web Fonts
Free is good. Google has a collection of fonts that are completely free for personal and commercial use. As a designer I can't just use any font out there, it has to be commercial use ok. GWF is helping to bridge that gap between beautiful fonts & free fonts.

5- Bamboo Tablet
The Bamboo Tablet allows me to sketch or draw straight into Photoshop or Illustrator. There is definitely a learning curve to getting familiar with using a digital canvas, but the tablet is extremely helpful when I am trying to make organic shapes or trace edges.

I hope that gave you a little peek into the tools I use everyday! Please come visit my blog where today Sheanna is giving away a special print!



6 comments:

  1. Love it! I think the Bamboo Tablet sounds really cool, I want to try that out sometime!

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    1. You are welcome to! I got this one off of eBay & it came with a copy of photoshop Elements. So definitely look for package deals :)

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  2. I wish I had graphic design talent! The most useful thing in that collage for me is the fonts. Hahaha! Still, I'm always inspired seeing the beautiful things created by you experts!

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    1. We all have our talents. I wish I could sing like you! Now that would be awesome!

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  3. I love the idea of the Bamboo tablet too. I'm going to have to ask Katie if it is possible to just use my iPad as an alternative...

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    1. There are definitely sketch programs on the iPad that you can use with a stylus. You won't have the pressure control like a real tablet, but it should get the job done :)

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