A great way to shortcut some ideas or at least get a design started, is by looking at some custom photoshop brushes. There are thousands, if not more of bushes out there customized in tons of ways. For instance, I found two amazing brush sets from Smashing Magazine that are freebies. Check them out:
These brushes also can be handy in that they can can be scaled as large as needed, and can be edited in illustrator and re exported as your own customized brush. Brushes can help add the fine details to your design that you may not have time to create from scratch. They are excellent tools that in my opinion should not be overlooked.
Many times when designing a website, I receive logos that are not in vector format. For those who may not know, vector images can be scaled infinitely, without losing quality, whereas a normal bitmap image will lose quality as it is scaled up, and even just saving the file repeatedly can lessen the quality.
In most cases, logos are originally designed in vector format, in programs such as Adobe Illustrator. They are later converted to bitmap images which get passed around and the original vector file gets forgotten. We designers need those vector files, otherwise we will need to retrace it which can take some time to get it looking perfect.
This rule of thumb does not only apply to website design, in fact, use of a vector image is most important for using in print or advertising. If a company were to use a scaled bitmap image of their logo on a billboard, it would look like this:
If the image was used in vector format it would look like this:
As you can see, a vector image will always remain at the highest quality, no matter what size. So be sure to keep this in mind when creating any design that will need to be scaled. (more…)
