Dealing with Design Critiques

Dealing with Design Critiques

Even the most talented designers in the world receive negative feedback on their work. Design is, to a large extent, a matter of taste — and the people we work for sometimes dislike the flavors we employ in the designs we make for them. We asked a few designers and artists how they handled feedback to get a glimpse of the strategies they use for handling critical appraisals of their work.

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A Guide to Popular Printing Techniques

A Guide to Popular Printing Techniques

In college in Waterford, Ireland, one of our class projects was called “Techniques.” The brief was to become familiar with every printing technique we could and show them through physical pieces. It was a fun project. However, when you leave school, you don’t always get the chance to work with these really amazing printing techniques or even figure them into your budget, but what I will talk about in this guide are popular and affordable. Consider them in your next print project!

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To Our Readers: Half-Year Mark, Lessons, and the Future

To Our Readers: Half-Year Mark, Lessons, and the Future

Six months ago, my brother and I launched Design Instruct to serve as a place for designers and digital artists to get inspired, share techniques, and learn more about their craft. That was the basic idea we worked with. We had no idea where this would take us. Today, 6 months after the fact, we could not be happier with the way the design community has embraced our site.

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Showcase: Modern Retro-Futuristic Digital Art

Showcase: Modern Retro-Futuristic Digital Art

Retro-futuristic art, which refers to how artists in the past envision the future, bring to mind classic movies such as Mad Max, Star Trek, and The Terminator. When today’s designers and digital artists — armed with digital graphics software such as Photoshop and Illustrator — interpret retro-futuristic styles from the past, the results are quite enthralling. For your inspiration, feast your eyes on this collection of retro-futuristic digital art.

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Make a Meteoric Composition with Stellar Light Effects

Make a Meteoric Composition with Stellar Light Effects

In this tutorial, we will create an out-of-this-world composition of a computer mouse that is streaking down like a meteor. We will focus on creating unique light effects and leveraging layer adjustment techniques for coloring and enhancing our scene. We will use Cinema 4D to create a simple backdrop for our stars, however, the important parts, we’ll do in Photoshop.

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How to Draw a Realistic Mobile Phone with Photoshop

How to Draw a Realistic Mobile Phone with Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, we will draw a realistic mobile device. Our aim is to make our work appear so realistic that it looks just like a regular product shot. We will cover basic concepts for drawing a true to life object, making a basic pattern for the speakers of our mobile device, leveraging plenty of layer styles to keep our techniques flexible and non-destructive, and more. The key technique we will stress upon is paying attention to the small details, which greatly affects realism.

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Paint Blobs: Photoshop Brush Pack

Paint Blobs: Photoshop Brush Pack

This free Photoshop brush pack is released exclusively to our readers. There are 9 different brushes in this set consisting of big organic paint blobs. The download comes to you as an ABR file. The brush diameters range from 844px to 1141px, so they’re fairly large and suitable for most screen-sized work. Experiment with them and show us how you’ve used them by linking to your work in the comments.

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