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20 Magnificent Magazine Covers in Recent Years

Sunday, November 8, 2009

The art of graphic design is continually evolving with society, fashion, technology and politics. Our styles and colors are inspired by everything around us and in turn, we can see snapshots of our evolving culture in the designs of the recent past. Taking a look at 2 years of magazine covers from major publications, I collected 20 contemporary magazine covers that I appreciated.

Twenty Magazine Covers from 2007 – 2009

bon-appetit-aug-228

Bon Apetit Magazine – August 2008

departrues-oct-2008

Departures Magazine – October 2008

gq-march-2008

GQ Magazine – March 2008

harpers-bazaar-mar-2009

Harpers Bazaar – March 2009 (Subscribers Edition)

home-miami-may-2009

Home Miami – May 2009

latina-march-2008

Latina – March 2008

new-york-look-magazine-mar-2009

New York Look – March 2009

new-york-look-spring-2008

New York Look – Spring 2008

new-york-magazine-mar-2-2009

New York Magazine – March 2, 2009

new-york-magazine-mar-9-2009

New York Magazine – March 9, 2009

new-york-magazine-nov-2007

New York Magazine – November 2007

new-york-times-magazine-dec-2008

New York Times Magazine – December 2008

new-york-times-magazine-jun-2008

New York Times Magazine – June 2008

New-York-Times-Style-Magazine-spring-2008

New York Times Style Magazine – Spring 2008

sports-illustrated-december-2008

Sports Illustrated – December 2008

the-new-yorker-nov-17-2008

The New Yorker – November 2008

vanity-fair-jan-2009

Vanity Fair – January 2009

vanity-fair-sept-2007

Vanity Fair – September 2007

wired-2008

WIRED – April 2008

w-magazine-mar-2009

W Magazine – March 2009

Create a Cool Wet Ink Typography Effect in Photoshop

Sunday, November 1, 2009
Create a Cool Wet Ink Typography Effect in Photoshop

Follow this Photoshop tutorial to create an awesome distorted type design. Using a range of Photoshop brushes we’ll create the appearance of printed type that has come into contact with drops of water, breaking up the text with oversaturated drips, runs and splats.

Ink typography design

I was recently out at the clothes store and came across a cool t-shirt by Diesel. The design featured some nice typography that had been treated to some image manipulation to give an awesome effect of wet ink, as if the design has come into contact with drops of water that distorted the print.

I remember originally seeing a similar design by Craig Ward, with his amazing ‘Ink and water don’t mix’ design. I’m not sure whether Craig was also behind the t-shirt art, but I fancied giving the effect a go myself, so I booted up Photoshop and started experimenting. Follow this walkthrough to see the simple steps of creating a similar design, using ready-made brushes to distort some typography of our own.

Start work in Photoshop by creating a new canvas. I’ve chosen to create a landscape poster. Set out a phrase using a classy and sophisticated font, such as Bodoni.

Split the words into their own layers and move them into position to form a balanced layout, align elements of the words with the letters above and below to give structure.

We could get our hands dirty and splash some ink onto some paper and scan in the results, but instead we can take the easy route and use ready-made resources from generous designers and artists. Scour the web for collections of ink splatter brushes for Photoshop. Here’s the selection I personally picked out:

Download and arrange the ABR files into a file. In Photoshop click the tiny arrow in the Brushes palette and select Preset Manager then load all the ink brushes.

Pick out interesting ink shapes from the various brushes and paint odd splats and runs over the type on a new layer. Adjust the size of the brush by using the square bracket keys.

Tailor the shape of the ink splatter towards a similar area of a letter, so for instance if it’s a long ink mark, paint this over a suitably long, straight letter.

Give some letters some major distortion by adding plenty of ink marks, but keep the words legible when viewed at 100%.

Some brushes in the set are created with paint brushes. Since this design is meant to look like it’s naturally distorted by water drops, just pick out the drops, splats and subtle drips.

You can reuse brushes while avoiding any repeating shapes by rotating the brush in the brushes palette. Grab the circular crosshair to adjust the angle.

When the design is nearing completion, download some spraypaint brushes to make use of tiny drips to add some little touches to the design.

Download a grungy paper texture to add some visual interest to the background. Desaturate the image and drop the opacity right down to 15% to leave subtle background tones.

Ink typography design

Take a look over the design at 100% and make any final tweaks. Adjust the opacity of any layers that are taking too much prominence, and use a small soft round brush to blend in specific areas of ink and text.

70 Free Useful Portable Applications You Should Know

Sunday, October 18, 2009
  1. Portable applications in general are software and programs you can run independently from a removable drives (like flash/pen drive) without going through the hassle of installing them. They are widely used and have been a favorite approach for professionals of different various industries.

    free portable applications

    With portable applications, you can leave your laptop behind; plug in the thumb drive in any client machine, run the application without worrying about leaving anything behind. In this post, we attempt to show a collection of useful and free applications you can run independently from thumb drives, sorting by profession by general. You’ll be surprise how many applications you can actually run without installation. Full list after jump.

    Portable Apps For Bloggers

    1. Mozilla Firefox

      Mozilla Firefox, portable version allows you leave no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go.

      mozilla_firefox

    2. Opera

      Full featured web browser, rapidly gaining popularity. Fully portable, keeping all data in its local folder.

      opera

    3. Google Chrome

      google chrome

    4. Portable Safari

      Portable Safari is packaged so you can carry around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (or also on your internal hard disk), taking your preferences with you.

      safari

    5. Windows Live Writer Portable

      Windows Live Writer Portable has all your blog settings, ping server settings and FTP settings to redo.

      windows_live_writer

    6. Zoundry Raven

      Zoundry Raven™ is the next generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster.

      zoundry_raven

    7. FileZilla

      FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP and SFTP client. It includes a site manager and supports uploads/downloads queue, keepalive, timeout detection, SOCKS 4/5 and HTTP 1.1 proxy etc.

      filezilla

    8. FeedReader

      Feedreader is a FREE RSS news aggregation solution that provides robust, state-of-the-art features in an intuitive, user-friendly environment.

      feedreader

    9. GreatNews

      GreatNews displays full pages of news articles across rss feeds, optimized for fast reading.

      greatnews

    10. Foxit Reader

      Foxit Reader is a small and fast PDF viewer.

      foxit_reader

    11. StickyTweets

      A lightweight Twitter client built in C/C++ with Win32. No additional frameworks required.

      stickytweets

    12. Fruitfultime Bookmark Manager

      Bookmark websites from any web browser with a global hotkey and bookmark documents, pictures, and other files with drag and drop ease.

      fruittime_bookmark_manager

    13. Web Design Toy

      Web Design Toy provides a deceptively simple split-window layout. Whatever HTML is typed in the editor window is instantly shown in web-page form in the display window.

      web_design_toy

    14. Lingoes Portable 2.6.2

      Lingoes Portable is green portable version of Lingoes released by Lingoes Project.

      lingoes

    Portable Apps For Designers

    1. GIMP Portable

      The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

      gimp

    2. Artweaver

      Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools.

      artweaver

    3. MobaPhoto

      MobaPhoto is a nice freeware for managing your digital photos. MobaPhoto allows you to resize, crop, correct red-eyes of all your pictures very easily in "batch-mode".

      mobaphoto

    4. Active Pixels

      Activepixels is a neat full-featured photo editor. Interesting auto enhance options (including shadow/hilight recovery), many filters, correction and denoise settings.

      active_pixels

    5. Photoscape

      Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

      photoscape

    6. PhotoFiltre

      PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it.

      photofiltre

    7. Fotografix

      An image editor that can be used for image enhancement and graphic design.

      fotografix

    8. Anim8or

      Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program.

      Anim8or

    9. XBlender

      Blender is an integrated 3D creation software suite.
      It lets users create high quality 3D graphics, movies and replay real-time, interactive 3D content.

      xblender

    10. X-Inkscape

      Inkscape is a vector editor that supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface.

      xinkscape

    11. Inkscape

      Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor.

      inkscape

    12. Diagram Designer

      Simple vector graphics editor for creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.

      Diagram_Designer

    13. FastStone Photo Resizer

      FastStone Photo Resizer enables users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.

      faststone_photo_resizer

    14. JPEGCrops

      JPEGCrops is a Windows program, created for preparation of a batch of images for printing. It provides lossless cropping with fixed aspects using jpegtran.

      JPEGCrops

    15. Riot

      Riot allows you to save images for web/email/other media with the best compression ratio and quality.

      riot

    16. SmillaEnlarger

      SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality.

      simillaenlarger

    17. PNG Optimizer

      Png Optimizer creates PNG screenshots and make them easily available.

      pngoptimizer

    18. IcoFX

      IcoFX is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing.

      icofx

    19. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

      Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a professional, yet easy to use tool for designing and retouching icons, cursors, animations and static images, and assembling icon libraries.

      greenfish_icon_pro

    20. WinSnap

      WinSnap includes easy capture of non-rectangular windows with customized and transparent backgrounds, simple and automatic canvas transformations, coloring effects, and the addition of eye-candy drop shadows.

      winsnap

    21. PicPick Tools

      PicPick features a powerful capture tool, image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard and etc.

      picpick

    22. SiteShoter

      SiteShoter is a free tool that can be used to take a screenshot of any webpage.

      siteshoter

    23. Greenshot

      Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity.

      greenshot

    24. FastStone Image Viewer

      FastStone Image Viewer has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments.

      faststone_image_viewer

    25. IrfanView

      IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for beginners and powerful for professionals.

      irfanview

    26. Cornice Portable

      Cornice Portable is an image viewer that has thumbnail previews, full screen modes, rotation, slideshow modes and more.

      cornice

    27. Osiva

      Osiva is a free image viewing program that opens and scale images fast — get images into view and out of the way

      osiva

    28. RealWorld Paint.COM

      RealWorld Paint.COM can display images using any zoom factor and always shows 100% accurate preview of the drawn shape. Tooltips are displayed throughout the user interface to explain meaning of controls.

      paintCom

    29. AMP Font Viewer

      AMP Font Viewer is an easy to use but powerful font manager, which allows getting a quick overview of both installed and non installed fonts.

      amp_font_viewer

    30. FotoSketcher

      FotoSketcher is a 100% free program which can help you convert your digital photos into art, automatically.

      fotosketcher

    31. Dia Portable

      Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams.

      dia

    32. Oiko CSS-Editor

      Oiko is a visual CSS editor. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows to separate the representation definitions of such structured documents as HTML, XHTML, XML from their content, which is an effective principle in the design of web sites.

      oiko_css_editor

    Portable Apps For Business Purposes

    1. OpenOffice.Org

      OpenOffice.org Portable is a complete office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database

      openoffice

    2. Notepad++

      Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

      notepad

    3. SoftMaker Office 2006

      An Office Suite which contains components that compatible with Windows Office applications like Word, Excel, etc.

      softmaker_office

    4. PNotes

      PNotes is fast and light-weight. It has flexible settings – both for the program in whole and for individual note.

      pnote

    5. AbiWord

      AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

      abiword

    6. Jarte

      Jarte is a WordPad based, FREE word processor whose unique interface will make you feel like you are piloting a swift, nimble yacht by comparison.

      jarte

    7. Portable Office Exec

      portable_office_exec

    8. ToDoList

      A simple and effective way to keep track of your current programming tasks.

      todolist

    9. Task Coach

      Task Coach Portable lets you bring your to-do list and task manager with you so you always stay on top of things.

      task_coach

    10. Date Reminder

      Date Reminder reminds you of recurring or nonrecurring events, like birthdays, bills to pay, appointments etc.

      date_reminder

    11. Sunbird

      Sunbird Portable is a standalone calendaring and task management application built on the same technology as the Firefox web browser.

      sunbird

    12. Koma-Mail

      Koma-Mail is an email client which is comfortable and has very handy functions. It does not need an installation, so that you can run Koma-Mail from your flash drive but, of course, also on your desktop.

      koma_mail

    13. Thunderbird

      Mozilla Thunderbird is the safe, fast email client that’s easy to use. It has lots of great features including quick message search, customizable views, support for IMAP/POP, RSS support and more.

      thunderbird

    14. Qm – The Quick Mailer

      Qm – The Quick Mailer is a tiny program for sending quick e-mail messages without having to load your main email client program.

      qm

    15. WinMerge

      WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

      winmerge

    16. KeyDb

      Keydb is a password manager. With it you create and store strong random passwords required by many websites.

      keydb

    17. 7-Zip

      For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip

      7-zip

    18. Express Burn

      Express Burn lets you create and record audio or data CDs with any CDRW drive.

      express burn

    19. Recover Files

      Recover Files is an award winning program that can undelete / recover deleted files after they have been deleted.

    20. Team Talk

      TeamTalk allows you to talk to friends and colleagues using the internet as audio carrier. With TeamTalk any number of people can participate in a conversation and is only limited by the bandwidth you have available.

      teamtalk

    21. Blowfish Advanced CS

      One powerful file encryption and security tool for the Windows platform.

      blowfish_advanced

    22. TrueCrypt

      TrueCrypt is a software application used for real-time on-the-fly encryption.

      truecrypt

    23. Tomahawk PDF+

      Tomahawk PDF+ is one of the most advanced word processing/pdf creation software packages available for the Windows platform.

      tomahawk

    24. GnuCash Portable

      GnuCash Portable is the open source financial management software packaged as a portable app, so you can take your financial data with you.

      gnucash