Extracting detailed objects from a background can be a tricky thing in Photoshop, particularly when dealing with fuzzy edges like hair, fur, and leaves of trees. The Quick Selection tool and the Refine Edge feature introduced in Photoshop CS3 go a long way, but there are more powerful solutions…

Personally, I’ve been a fan of the Extract filter for a while. With it, you use a “highlighter” to roughly define the edge of the object you wish to extract, and Photoshop comes pretty close to what you’re looking for. The results can be a little rough or jaggy, but usable or easily fixable in many cases.

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You’ve probably already heard the news that Adobe announced Creative Suite 4 tv.adobe.com on September 23rd, the latest versions of its ubiquitous design apps. As usual, there’s plenty of excitement surrounding this announcement, as every Adobe release brings cool new features, better cross-product integration, and (hopefully) speed improvements that make for an easy transition to your usual work flow.

There wasn’t much chance that Adobe could beat the buzz surrounding last year’s CS3 announcement, since that was the first version of the suite to include applications purchased from Macromedia, like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. And, realistically, CS4 isn’t the type of update every designer and her mom will run out and buy right away, but for you antsy early adopters, let’s have a look at some of the features that will get you ready to hit the preorder button…
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Nothing about this book looks like an art book. The somewhat colorless cover, the MIT imprint, the marked lack of giant, colorful images. At very first glance, you know that editor Oliver Grau, an Image Science professor and Cultural Studies dean, means business.

Media Art Histories is a more academic look at a subject normally approached with thin, glossy coffee table books and broad, superficial language. Grau’s compilation offers takes from over a dozen professionals on the history and acceptance of digital media as an art form. (more…)

With rising gas prices and other economic troubles, freelance designers (as well as their clients) may be feeling the pinch. Clients are eschewing major redesign jobs and other big budget projects, and designers are scrambling for ways to keep work rolling in.

But you might be able to get back on track with two little words: Thank you.

Now is the time to remind former clients of your services so you can encourage more business from them, and sending a thank you note for previous work is a great way to do it. Unlike a flashy brochure or generic card, a handwritten thank you note puts a personal touch on your communication and gives you a reason to extend a special deal to specific clients. Here are some tips for making it work: (more…)

No doubt you already know the value of tracking your site’s traffic. You know to look at visit totals. You know to look at what sites your visitors are coming from. You know never to rely on the number of hits. But there can be even more interesting information found in common site statistics that you can use to track down ne’er-do-wells or enhance your content.

1) Look at traffic to image files. Don’t just take note of which pages are visited most, but which images. When you see a spike on a specific image file that doesn’t mesh with the traffic on the page the image is located on, that file might be hotlinked. That means someone is using your image on his/her own site, and using your bandwidth to do it. (more…)

With the recent success of the sarcastic and definitely NSFW (not safe for work) You Suck at Photoshop tutorials that have made the Internet rounds, I’ve noticed a lot of people are trying to make their own design software tutorials to share on YouTube.

Search on any design app and you’ll find lots of tutorials from designers. What can you teach?
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Let’s talk about harmony. Not the hippy-dippy kind… the kind dictated by your color wheel. Unfortunately, with crazy deadlines looming and pushy clients on the phone, designers often don’t have time to go back to basics. The fundamentals of color theory that you learn early in your design education might even be a distant memory. You probably have a decent eye for color, but you rarely think “triadic scheme” or “a split-complementary will be great here!”

When you start losing sight of the fundamentals, it’s time for a field trip. Like the corporate branding field trip I sent you on last year, getting out and looking at design in use can give you a better sense of what works in the commercial world. (more…)

Most designers are pretty familiar with shopping for royalty free photos and illustrations for use in their designs. For anywhere from one dollar to hundreds, you can find just the image you need from various stock library sites.

Interactive designers often need more than images to get the message across. For many Flash pieces and videos, music or sound effects help convey the mood or indicate user input and movement through the piece. A quick search for royalty free music or sound effects will bring up loads of options (some of which are mighty cheesy), but I’ve come across a few interesting ones…

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I recently found an article that presented the 30 must-have fonts for designers, and it made me wonder what other must-haves that design professionals recommend for beginners…

First off, those 30 must-have fonts I mentioned are found at justcreativedesign.com. Jacob Cass breaks them down by serif and sans serif, and includes some that you likely have handy (Helvetica, Lucida) and some that are well worth the cost, like the lovely Frutiger. Paired with each font is a note on where each is often used, for example Futura is great for large displays, as well as small book text.
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It’s a question as old as freelancing itself. How much do I charge my potential client? Too much and you risk not getting the job. Too little and you risk a lot of things: looking low-end, not getting enough to cover your time and costs, dooming future jobs to similar low rates…

There’s no hard and fast formula to graphic design rates, but it can be really helpful to know what other designers charge. HOW magazine recently published a survey on designers’ hourly rates that sheds a lot of light on this subject.

One particularly interesting point in the survey is that, no matter where you are in the country, the average hourly rate is $68-74. I don’t have any older stats on designers’ rates, but I think this survey goes to show that location is no longer an issue when choosing your rates. Perhaps if you live in New York on California you would charge more because of your higher cost of living, but your clients can simply seek designers from the Midwest instead. Consistent rates nationwide, I believe, represent the Internet’s influence on design job selection.

Another point in HOW’s survey to consider is that 82% of designers surveyed do not share their hourly rate with their clients. They instead opt for quoting entire job rates. As some participants noted, an hourly rate can scare of a client off. And if that quoted job is fair, you have an incentive to work harder and faster on it because that would mean more profit.

There are some helpful links at the bottom of HOW’s article to other information on charging for your work, and a “Webinar” about the topic.

This is all great for graphic designers, but web design jobs can add an extra layer of complexity to the pricing process.

In addition to charging for the design, you may also need to charge for programming special applications or hiring programming or QA help. In my experience, (more…)