The new year is almost here, and it’s time to make some resolutions. Remember to write 2008 on your checks, and…add Blue Iris to your design projects?!

Blue Iris is the color of 2008 according to the gurus at Pantone. This shade of blue-purple, also known as PANTONE 18-3943, was chosen for its calming and somewhat mystical properties.

Wave goodbye to last year’s Chili Pepper. Blue Iris is the color of 2008.

Compared to last year’s vibrant Chili Pepper, Blue Iris is calm, but it’s still very bold and complex, with lots of good combinatorial possibilities. Leatrice Eiseman of Pantone suggests combining it with (more…)

If you like typography and information design, take a look at these sketches from the Type Workshop. The concepts are mostly fundamental, but the drawings uniquely and effectively express the ideas. It’s good stuff.

via I love typography

Layer Tennis is a series of live design events hosted by Coudal Partners and presented by Adobe Creative Suite 3.

Two artists (or two small teams of artists) swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist or team gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley.” Each volley is posted to the Layer Tennis site. A third participant provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens. Observers can follow it all on the web. There are ten volleys, and when the match is complete, everyone with an opinion sounds off in the forums and a winner is declared.

Matches take place on Fridays at 2PM CST. You can learn more or watch a match here.

If you’ve picked up any of the Adobe CS3 applications, you may have noticed that they “come with” Adobe Stock Photos. I put that in quotes because to some extent Adobe treats this feature as a bigger selling point for CS3 than it really is. In fact, Adobe Stock Photos is available through Adobe Bridge (which comes with most CS2 and CS3 applications), much the way that the iTunes Store is available through the Apple iTunes application.

That said, Adobe Stock Photos is a pretty worthwhile feature to check out, as it allows for easy searching, management, and purchasing of royalty-free images. Just launch Bridge to get started.

Click on Adobe Stock Photos in the Favorites tab of Bridge and start searching for the perfect shot.

Lots of advanced search options help you sift your way through the 24 different image collections contained by Adobe Stock Photos. This includes images from popular services like Corbis and Getty and lots more. As a result, searching can be a slow process—be sure to use the Advanced Search feature set to narrow things down first. For example, if you know you only want photos (not illustrations), only want color photos, and don’t like photos from certain collections, check or uncheck the appropriate boxes before hitting Search. (more…)

I recently had to find a landscaper for my home, and doing so reminded me how much typography affects buying decisions, whether we realize it consciously or not.

I first called the landscaper whose Yellow Pages ad had the cleanest and most modern typography. I also called one with a much more dated and sloppy ad. Both ads stood out to me more than the rest, and both were for landscapers right near my town (so you know I didn’t base my calls on type alone). I had in my head before any of them came for an estimate that the first would probably be out of my price range, and that the second might be cheaper, but more traditional in style. Maybe it’s coincidence, but guess which one called me back first, was more professional, was more in line with my tastes, and… was much more expensive. (more…)

How many times have you started a web page design from a Photoshop PSD mockup? Or needed to revise an image in Photoshop after it was part of your web layout? Dreamweaver CS3’s integration with Photoshop makes these common tasks much quicker.

Start off by opening a page in Dreamweaver and opening an image in Photoshop, even a layered PSD (note that all of these techniques work in Fireworks too—it’s your choice!). Make a rectangular marquee selection of the part of the image you want to bring into your web page. Don’t worry if it’s not the size, format, or optimization level you ultimately want, just press Command-C (Ctrl-C on a PC) to copy it (or go to Edit > Copy Merged if the file is layered).

Now, position your cursor in your Dreamweaver document, right where you want the image to go—a div container, a table cell, whatever you like—and paste (Command/Ctrl-V).

Copying from Photoshop and pasting to Dreamweaver brings you to the Image Preview dialog.
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Regular Notes on Design readers may recall our recent interview with Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block. In addition to his popular design firm’s usual web projects, they recently built two phenomenal new panels for Adobe Illustrator CS3: kuler and knowhow. According to Richmond, these panels are valuable to just about every Illustrator user, so let’s find out how… (more…)

These days, your role as a designer is much more than just styling text and graphics. Designers have become the project ringleaders, hiring everyone else on the team including market researchers, copywriters, photographers, illustrators, printers, and programmers. Recommending good vendors to your clients is part of being an accountable designer. (more…)

Don’t forget to be accountable to mother earth.

Again less is more. Once you’ve convinced your client to produce less and better stuff (see previous post), how can you improve the quality of what you are producing and be accountable for it’s impact on society? Here are some things we have started looking at: (more…)

Redbook cover of Faith Hill; image via Jezebel

In case you’ve ever wondered what’s in a day’s work for professional photo retouchers, the folks at fashion blog Jezebel.com have something they’d like you to see. In an effort to debunk fashion editorial mags’ unrealistic standards of feminine beauty, they offered a $10,000.00 reward for the person who could submit the most egregious example of Photoshop-generated perfection used on a magazine cover. The winner was an astonishing, but totally typical, Redbook magazine cover featuring country singing star Faith Hill. The 39 year-old mother of three is genetically blessed to begin with, but in order to be considered cover-ready, a photo retouching whiz had quite a project of it. (more…)