Graphic Design

Ed Benguiat: Stranger Things, Esquire and the 600 Creations of a Unique Typographer

A retrospective on the prolific typographer and logo designer, featuring some of his most emblematic creations Ed Benguiat (1924-2020) was an American typographer, designer, and lettering artist whose influence on the creative world is difficult to overstate. In addition to having served as associate director of Esquire magazine—whose logo he designed, he was a prestigious jazz percussionist under the name Eddie Benart, a pilot, a teacher with more than 50 years of experience, and, every now and then, he found the time to retouch some "scandalous" images in magazines.

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Free Jessica Walsh’s Emoji Packs for Designers and Creatives

This legendary designer shares fun designs that you can use on social media platforms

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7 Sustainable Design Studios to Be Inspired By

Discover the studios that put our planet first when it comes to developing a design project Spanish creative director and graphic designer Núria Vila Punzano (@nuriavilapunzano) fuses her passion for the visual arts with today’s most pressing issues: sustainability and protecting the environment. While at university, Núria was drawn to experimental books and learning about alternative production techniques. Worried that her work lacked purpose (after all, what was her objective, just to make money?), she decided to turn her attention to environmentally-conscious design. She was disappointed by the standard of what was being classed as "ecodesign" around the world and decided to become the Irma Boom of sustainable design. Her Domestika course, Introduction to Sustainable Graphic Design, seeks to train other designers and creatives to focus their work on these issues, encouraging people to develop an aesthetic that respects and defends the planet. Below, we present seven design studios that prioritize sustainability and which Núria considers important references: La page This Catalan design studio sets out to develop projects with a zero-carbon footprint and analyses how much damage each stage of the process causes to the environment, from production to distribution. La page has launched BlueTool, an eco graphic design tool for public use.

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5 Key Tips to Make the Most of Online Education in 2021

How do you decide how to educate yourself? How to get the best out of being a self-taught learner? Many of the most important structures in our lives have been profoundly changed in recent months. Our habits have forcibly changed. However, despite some limitations, new possibilities have also been created. Acquiring new knowledge, tools, and techniques through different online education formats has been one of them. Now, with so many possibilities, how to choose what to train for? And when we do, how do we take advantage of it? Patricio Oliver (@patriciooliver) has been teaching Illustration and Typography at the University of Buenos Aires for two decades. He is also one of Domestika's teachers. To discuss important aspects of online education, we talked with him about how to be a good self-taught student in 2021. These are his key tips:

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Domestika Diary: Núria Vila

Núria Vila is a graphic designer and art director who specializes in sustainable design. She tells us about her daily routine and the creative process she uses to implement more sustainable and ethical projects.

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20 Useful Free Websites for Designers to Discover in 2021

These resources will prove very useful at different stages of the design process and help you start 2021 off on the right foot If you’re looking to create a library of useful resources for design projects, this list features websites that will help you fulfill your professional goals. Below you’ll find a list of websites organized into categories: from web design and branding to graphic design. If you want to discover additional recommendations for each category, just click on the category title in red. Free Websites for Creating Color Palettes Colormind Upload any image and Colormind will turn it into a harmonious color palette. Unlike other automated websites, instead of selecting the dominant colors in the image, this free website uses an algorithm to find the colors that go well together. You can also browse a selection of ready-created color palettes.

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Free Guide: The Principles of Visual Hierarchy for Design

Data Designer Katya Kovalenko shares a complete guide on visual hierarchy

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Top 5 Films and Documentaries on Design

Two of the creative minds behind Ciszak Dalmas Ferrari Studio share the films and docs that have most influenced them Architect Matteo Ferrari and product designer Andrea Caruso are the creative minds behind Ciszak Dalmas Ferrari Studio, based in Madrid. Both Matteo and Andrea have drawn on a wide range of influences to expand their intellectual awareness and aesthetic understanding over the years, helping them to develop and evolve their practice. In this blog post, they share a selection of films and documentaries that have inspired them, and which can be seen reflected in their work.

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10 Free Color Palette Websites To Achieve Harmony And Contrast

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Creating Fonts in Glyphs

What makes Glyphs the go-to program for designing and creating fonts? Juanra Pastor, better known as @Wete, is a Barcelona-based graphic designer specializing in typography. He is the founder of Wete studio and has worked on lettering, typography, and advertising projects for clients such as Adobe, Carolina Herrera, Reebok, Desigual, and LVMH. In this blog post, Juanra, who first developed a passion for letters as a 14-year-old graffiti artist, will explain the advantages of working in Glyphs when designing and creating typefaces.

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InDesign Tutorial: How to Create a PDF for Printing

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What is a Concept Artist?

Nacho Yagüe, art director for Gameloft, explains what a concept artist is Creating settings, scenes, and environments is an essential part of developing any game. Nacho Yagüe is an art director and concept artist who has worked on Ubisoft games such as Assassins Creed: Unity, Watch Dogs 2, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. He is an expert in designing levels, textures, and animations for video game concept art. To help us to better understand what this profession entails, Nacho explains a concept artist’s role in the video game industry. He also shares some examples that will give you a better idea of the type of work they produce and where they fit in the production process for developing a new video game.

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The 10 Funniest Lorem Ipsum Generators

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." Forget the boring classic fake text and use one of these instead. A Lorem ipsum, as you probably already know, is a text commonly used in design and layout, which allows you to check that the spaces are well distributed and the fonts work correctly. It is a Latin passage extracted from a text by Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum. However, you don't need to stick to it in your projects. New fake text generators are constantly popping up and can help you give your designs a twist, even for provisional text boxes that are not meant to be read. If you are one of those who wants to have fun with Lorem ipsum, here are some ideas: Strangeripsum Our obsession with Stranger Things, the Netflix show that dusts off our eighties memories, has led us to Strangeripsum, a Lorem ipsum generator inspired by some of the show's scenes.

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What Is the Color Wheel?

You've probably heard a lot about this tool, but what exactly is the color wheel, and how does it work? The color wheel is an important tool to get to grips with when you begin a visual art. To put it simply: if colors were words, the color wheel would be the alphabet–it’s what you need to speak this language well.

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5 Design Trends to Look Out for in 2021

Discover which trends will impact photography, editorial design, and typography in 2021 Silvia Fernández Palomar, also known as Silvia Ferpal, is a designer and artist with a well-trained eye. She won the 2019 National Design Award for the young designers category; has worked at companies such as Ogilvy & Mather, Paseo, Designit Madrid, and Designit New York; and is a design teacher at IED. While Silvia believes that our perception of trends is subjective, when you listen to her make observations, you start seeing how new patterns emerge where you hadn't noticed them before. Her opinion, she says, is based on requests from clients, the projects she’s recently worked on, and her personal judgement. "The important thing about trends," she warns, "is to use them as a guide. These are, for her, five trends that will make an impact on the design world in 2021.

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The Letters of the Alphabet as Kamasutra Positions

Artist Malika Favre transformed the 26 letters of the alphabet into a book of erotic writing and illustrations French artist Malika Favre has just published Kama Sutra A-Z, an audacious and original book. The 26 letters of the alphabet have been turned into artistic illustrations alluding to sexual freedom and expression. Individually laid out page by page, Malika’s illustrations are accompanied by handwritten erotic texts, focusing on poetry. Celebrated poets such as Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stephanie Burt, Vanessa Kisuule, and Kyle Dargan have been included in the book–all of whom have inspired Malika over the years. Designed by Counter-Print, the book is the culmination of a project exhibited at London’s Somerset House in 2013, the year in which Favre was selected to take part in Pick Me Up. We interviewed the author to learn about her creative process and where she conceived the idea to combine the Kamasutra positions with the letters of the alphabet. She explains what the relationship between erotic writing and illustration is.

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Domestika Creatives: Birgit Palma

At 12, when her father took away the family computer in a bid to curb her gaming obsession, Birgit decided to buy her own laptop. She earned the money she needed by writing reviews of products she’d never tried. Once she got her laptop, she would spend hours playing every day. However, when she realized she would never be the best of the best, her commitment to the game waned. Eventually, she came across a tutorial for retouching photos which introduced her to the world of Photoshop.She was hooked. The computer literacy, resourcefulness, and focus that she had honed as a gamer helped her develop her craft quickly. It took her from her little hometown in Austria to New York and then Barcelona, where she would begin working at Vasava studio. After working for studios in New York and Barcelona, Birgit decided to become a freelancer. She continues to collaborate with global brands and now teaches students, keen to follow in her footsteps. You can learn about how to playfully combine illustration and lettering with Birgit Palma, on her online course, Illustrated Digital Lettering. You may also like: - Domestika Creatives: Marina Esmeraldo - Domestika Creatives: Edel Rodriguez - Domestika Creatives: Gary Baseman

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Design Better Websites Using These Wireframes

A good wireframe is the first step to a successful website and these are the different types Wireframes are schematic drawings of a web page that help us plan the distribution of content or communicate to a client how the users will interact with their page. Javier Usobiaga (@htmlboy) is the founder of Swwweet, a web design studio in Barcelona that has worked with numerous companies and institutions. Over the years, Javier has created countless wireframes for his own projects, and he classifies them according to their design and function: Bird's-eye view This is a global view of the website's navigation tree. It explains how users would move through the different pages and approximate the UX elements they'll encounter.

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Find the Perfect Gift for Creative Minds at Domestika

Find out how to gift a Domestika course in a few easy steps Creative people love to learn: for their professional development, to discover new techniques, and to learn new skills. A restless mind will always enjoy the opportunity to learn something new. Find out different ways to buy a Domestika course as a gift, following a few easy steps: Plan your gifts by making lists If you enjoy planning and want to save a list of the courses you would like to purchase for yourself or others, use the option Course list. Simply access the Lists section of your profile page, and click on Add new list. You can make these lists public or private, and make as many as you wish. You can also add courses directly from the Courses page (without needing to go to your profile page) by clicking on the +List icon that appears when you hover the cursor over the course name. You can see some examples of lists shared with you by Domestika teachers on this link.

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Tat*: A Graphic Designer’s Addiction to Ephemera and ‘Bad’ Design

A book of tat and ephemera collected by one of the UK’s most accomplished graphic designers, Andy Altmann Most scrapbooks are tucked away in a drawer or on a shelf somewhere, never to be seen again. But, when a scrapbook is compiled by one of Britain’s foremost designers and ephemera aficionados, it’s worth taking another look. Andy Altmann is the co-founder of Why Not Associates, the design studio behind brands like the Pompidou Center, BBC, Channel 4, and the Tate Modern. He is also an ephemera addict who has decided to put said addiction to good use by publishing a book called tat*. *tat (noun) – anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition; junk, rubbish, debris, detritus, crap

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And the Pantone Color of the Year 2021 is...

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How to Identify a Good Logo

Learn how to identify a good logo, with designer Sagi Haviv Your logo is the first image people will associate with your brand. That is a lot to ask of one small graphic, but the greatest designs manage to communicate a company’s identity and ethos in an instant. Few know this better than Sagi Haviv (@sagi), partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, who has developed more than 60 graphic identities, including those of the US Open, Harvard University Press, and National Geographic. In this video, Sagi Haviv reviews different designs, highlighting and explaining their strengths and weaknesses so that you can better understand how to apply these lessons to your own work.

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How to Vectorize a Lettering Design

Learn to digitize your letters easily using Adobe Illustrator with tips and directions from Daniel Hosoya Advertising designer Daniel Hosoya (@danielhosoya) specializes in digital lettering and teaches the Domestika courses, Introduction to Lettering in Procreate and Digital Lettering with Illustrator and Photoshop. Here, he tells you how to digitize your lettering designs, an essential step if you want to work on your hand-drawn creations and turn them into more ambitious projects.

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5 Sustainable Graphic Designers You Should Know

Designer Núria Vila Punzano shares the work of those who have inspired her You have probably heard about the sustainable design movement happening across fashion or architecture. However, it’s also a rising trend in graphic design, setting out to reduce the environmental impact of printed items (such as posters or packaging) from the get-go. Many designers take inspiration from nature to create and commit to caring for the planet in all stages of their work. Graphic designer and creative director Núria Vila Punzano (@nuriavilapinzano) is among them. She takes special care to reduce the negative impact her designs could have on the environment and to minimize her carbon footprint.

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20 Years of Pantone Color of the Year

Over the past two decades, Pantone has chosen 22 colors of the year based on trends, research, and analysis Imagine a world in which creatives were unable to guarantee how the final color of a print, fabric, product, or poster would turn out. Imagine a world in which, whenever you printed a copy of a design, the color was always different. Sounds scary, right? Well, that's exactly what the world was like until the arrival of Pantone. This unpredictable way of working was transformed in 1963, when Lawrence Herbert, Pantone's founder, created a system for identifying, combining, and communicating colors. Today, the Pantone Matching System is considered the international standard. The PMS is quite simply a color manual that opens out like a fan. Creative professionals use it on a daily basis to ensure that all the colors they use in their projects are universally understood. You’ve probably come across one of these catalogs of different colors.

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Free (Not Boring) Color Theory Basic Guide

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3 Websites Every Squarespace Designer Should Know About

If you are looking for inspiration for your next website, these three sites will inspire you to design wonderful pages using Squarespace. Squarespace is a powerful publishing system with beautiful templates. It allows you to create any type of web page with no coding involved. Founded in 2004, it is behind many of the pages we browse daily, like artist portfolios or restaurant pages. Many designers prefer Squarespace to other publishing tools, like WordPress, because of the quality of its templates. They all have good typography, neat transitions, and responsiveness, allowing the users to enjoy the pages on mobile phones or tablets without having to make tedious adjustments.

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5 Free Classes to Learn UX Design for Beginners

Get started in UX design and get to know the world of digital usability One of the biggest trends in web design, whether for websites or for apps, is UX design, our user experience design. This simply means that all design decisions are made with the users' needs at the center. These 5 experts in UX design will help you to discover basic principles of this discipline to make your digital projects have a high impact. To watch each class, just click on its title in red. Enjoy!

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7 Masters of Graphic Design Share Their Industry-insider Secrets

Get to know these legendary international graphic designers and discover their industry-insider secrets Just like any other creative discipline, the key to graphic design is practice. Listening to and learning from the best of the best will help you to perfect your daily output. These 10 graphic designers from our Domestika Masters series share their experiences to help you develop your own library of references and reflect on the role of a graphic designer. Domestika Masters: Milton Glaser Not many designers have been able to say that they have produced several works that are considered iconic all over the world. However, US designer Milton Glaser (1929-2020) was one of them. Founder of New York Magazine and creator of the I ❤ NY logotype–to give just a couple of examples–Glaser was a gamechanger in the history of design.

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What Is InDesign, and How Can It Help You?

This application underpins most of the magazines, books, newspapers, and printed ads you see every day. InDesign is one of Adobe's most versatile and advanced design programs, although it is not as well known as some of the other Adobe applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere. It's a desktop publishing and typesetting app, aimed at designers and creatives who work with products that generally end up in printed form. It is often used to create magazines, books, or newspapers, but also promotional materials such as posters, flyers, and all kinds of signage and advertising.

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