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Sunday, December 17, 2017

Stunning New Year's Graphics: A Curated Collection of Quotes, Photos and Cards

Stunning New Year's Graphics: A Curated Collection of Quotes, Photos and Cards
Whether it’s for some inspiration, a memorable photograph, or an invitation for a once-in-a-lifetime event, New Year’s graphics commemorate a fresh, new start with tasteful typography to match. While New Year’s resolutions are quick to fall by the wayside (and very run-of-the-mill), great New Year’s graphics will never let you down.
Looking for flyers to announce a killer New Year’s Eve bash? Or perhaps you’re in the mood for a specific email template to wish all of your employees, bosses, or co-workers a Happy New Year? Whatever your motivation, this roundup will have something for your Auld Lang Syne-loving sentimentality.
So prepare to unburden yourself from last year’s baggage, sit back, and enjoy this vibrant collection of quotes, photos, cards and other New Year-related design inspiration.

New Year’s Quotes: Timeless Sayings and Proverbs for Introspection and Purpose

The Internet has opened up limitless opportunities to find quotes for any occasion, but here are some of the topics most frequently sought around New Year's Eve:
  • Inspiration
  • Motivation
  • Inner strength
  • Philosophy
  • Love
  • Determination
  • Beauty
  • Perseverance
Perform a quick Google search for “quotes,” and you’ll see more than one billion search results! To say that quotes are in high search demand is an understatement. Websites like BrainyQuote specialize in offering quotes for any occasion from a whole host of famous and infamous figures throughout human history. Each quote is rendered in the form of a quote picture that’s also easy to share on social media, making the proliferation of quotes addictive and highly encouraged. Quotes are further sorted by topics and authors for well-organized searching.
Other sites like Goodreads showcase an exclusive popular quotes category, which even features a search engine just for its vast library of assorted quotes from historical figures, authors, notaries and personalities in general. Talk about a quote database.
Both popular quote sites also have sections specifically for New Year’s quotes.
In BrainyQuote’s New Year’s Quotes webpage, you’re treated to a plethora of quotes from an assortment of notaries like:
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Neil Gaiman
  • Scott Fitzgerald
  • Diogenes
  • Mark Twain
  • William Shakespeare
Here is a memorable example:
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.” – Neil Gaiman
In Goodreads’ Quotes About New Year page, you can choose from a couple of hundred quotes from various, well-known figures like Alfred Tennyson, S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Omar Khayyam, and K. Chesterton.
Again, here are some of this resource’s inspiring examples:
“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...” – Alfred Tennyson
“Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.” – Omar Khayyam
These quotes are well-suited as potential source material for new year’s graphics like an inspirational email template that you may want to send out, greeting cards you want to hand out to celebrate the season, or perhaps a new business card design that you’ve been looking to implement.
Here are a few New Year-themed email templates from our marketplace:
   
While you’re at it, check out some New Years's greeting cards from our marketplace:
     
Finally, here are a series of quotes bundles created by shop owners:
   

New Year’s Photos: High-Quality Images to Capture the Moment

There’s an old cliché that goes: A picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to New Year’s celebrations, this cliché is the ultimate truth. Instead of describing in words the moment, magic, and feeling you experienced in Times Square with your friends and family, or at your local watering hole when the new year rolls around, a single image can capture this essence more powerfully than anything else.
Don’t believe that New Year’s photos are the way to go to create lasting impressions?
Consider the following: ever heard of something termed the picture superiority effect? This phenomenon makes the case that using New Year’s graphics like photos is the best way to enshrine the mood and grandeur of any celebration.
In sum, it confirms that photos are far better remembered than mere words. This has been shown as true in a plethora of experiments—in essence, it demonstrates that we human beings are visual creatures.
From the designer’s standpoint, this is powerful information.
For example, if you’re working on a project involving a new site that needs to go live right before New Year’s because it’s for the special rollout of an alcoholic drink, you need to communicate the celebratory aspect of new year’s to site visitors. You can’t do this with mere words alone. If you do, your new site would be rather dull and not fare as well.
Entrepreneur Magazine states that "visual content compels audiences to stay on your website for longer
.”
You’d need to pepper your new site with many New Year’s-related images, in addition to high-quality images of the new product, to stand a chance at driving traffic.
Check out the many new year’s photos from our marketplace that would be ideal in such a scenario:
                 
Other design projects call for the use of photos, too, over mere words. If you’re designing a travel brochure that features new year’s destinations or packages, you’ll want aesthetic photos showcasing those destinations and opportunities.
If you’re involved in creating a flyer that calls attention to various New Year’s Eve hotspots around the city, you’ll also need vibrant imagery to make your readers pick it up and pay attention.

New Year’s Cards: Use Great Design to Get More People to Your Event

Picture this: It’s mid-December, and you need to get the invites out for the New Year’s Eve bash you’re throwing. Instead of sending the typical email, you want to use a more personal touch. You want something tactile that your guests can actually touch, feel, and turn over in their hands to admire and appreciate.
The solution?
As far as New Year’s graphics go, try the old-fashioned, physical, invitation cards.
Apartment Therapy featured a helpful comparison of physical invitations versus digital invitations, and some of the distinct pros of keeping it traditional include:
  • Inclusiveness – Everybody has a physical address, but not everyone has an email address or is on Facebook
  • Design sensibilities – If you’re a designer, you can show off your design chops a lot more deeply when you go with a physical card instead of a digital one
  • Confidentiality – You don’t want strangers and the uninvited crashing your new year’s bash, so sending traditional invitations guards against an email invite being incorrectly forwarded to somebody or a Facebook invite being seen by the wrong people
  • Clarity – Physical cards offer unprecedented clarity because they can individually address numerous people in turn, whereas an email invite to, say, the head of a household’s email address makes it less clear who all specifically in the household are invited to an event
If this has you sold on the power of tactile invitation cards, then take a look at our huge selection of New Year’s cards that are ideal for any soiree or bash that you’re throwing on that fateful night:
                   
The way you design a card is also at the core of how many people end up going to your event.
Let’s quickly look at the most crucial elements of winning New Year’s cards:
1) The copy – The words you use to convey the importance of your New Year’s event and why you want certain people there has to be persuasively worded. Invitations should be personalized with the names of the person and include calls to action, urgency, and an appeal to one’s emotions. Paragraphs and sentences should be short, and a “chunking” effect should be used to ensure the copy is broken up into smaller, digestible snippets.
2) The typography – How you make what you write look has a huge impact on response rates and general interest. The fonts you use should be readable and legible. You might be tempted to use fancier typefaces, but that tends to make an invitation harder to read and understand rather than creating a sense of elegance. Instead, use sans serif fonts that are simple and minimalistic for great readability.
3) Symmetry – If your invite’s design elements (copy, images, any insignias, emblems, etc.) are well-balanced because they’re centered on the card itself, this creates a nice, aesthetic sense of symmetry that’s pleasant to glance at. Using symmetry adds to the overall appeal of the card.
4) White space – A card announcing a New Year’s event needs to emphasize and draw attention to the most important information: the location, time, data, and other crucial details. White or negative space (which doesn’t have to be white, per se) is a solid-colored area around this crucial information that frames it like a border. The effect is to make the actual information stand out more noticeably to readers.
5) Colors – Another useful design element in your card is your choice of colors. Colors enliven the design presentation and give helpful accents and touches to your readers. Colors are also used to make important information stand out—like who the sender is, what the name or title of your event is, etc.

New Year’s Graphics: Typography, Illustrations & Flyer Templates

New Year’s graphics aren’t limited to just quotes, photos, and cards. You’ll find a lot of creative New Year’s designs centered around different fonts, illustrations, and flyer templates.
New Year’s typography is festive font that epitomizes the celebratory mood of people as the clock counts down to midnight. These graphics are apropos for anything from photos that need a splashy New Year’s font to a template for a restaurant menu that has a special course just the last few weeks of December.
This festive typography comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from creative hand lettering to exotic calligraphy. They smartly spruce up any ordinary card, banner, or design to give them that unmistakable New Year’s flair that’s perfect for the season.
Here’s an assortment of finely-crafted New Year’s typography from our marketplace:
   
Then, there are New Year’s illustrations, which are attractive, graphical elements for use in anything from posters, t-shirts, flyers, and artwork that you want to distribute just in time for the new year. These illustrations come as vector or PNG files to allow you to design overlays for images, badges, stickers, tags, and other marketing materials.
Creative designers won’t have a shortage of ideas about how and where to use these illustrations. Here’s a selection of New Year’s-themed graphical illustrations from the marketplace: 
   
Now, if you walk the streets of a busy metropolis on New Year’s Eve, what’s the first type of advertisement material that you usually encounter? Flyers, of course! Whether it’s those stapled to telephone poles or pasted to walls, there seems to be no shortage of them in the days and weeks leading up to the big night.
Throwing a party or big get-together on New Year’s Eve means that you want a lot of attendees for it to be considered a success. Getting the word out over digital approaches like social media and text messages only reaches a certain number of people, but flyers on the street means that many passers-by will see the announcement for your big soiree.
For these occasions, you could design your own flyer from scratch and by hand, or you could do the more efficient thing: get one of the many attractive flyer templates to advertise your New Year’s event quickly.
Here’s a rundown of some of the best pieces we have in our marketplace: 
       
Graphics That Stun
Other seasons usually get more attention when it comes to graphics. Think of Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas. New Year’s isn’t traditionally associated with neat graphics, but this curated collection should make you rethink that.
Whether it’s the inspiring quotes that you’ll draw strength from next year or the beautiful New Year’s photos that enliven any presentation or site, it’s clear that the transition from the old year to the new one provides a lot of design inspiration and ideas.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Free Photoshop Brushes to Decorate Your Holiday Cards








Free Photoshop Brushes to Decorate Your Holiday Cards
Adobe Photoshop is a program that offers seemingly endless potential for creating. With all of the incredible features it boasts, it can sometimes be overwhelming to try to figure out how to make the most of them.
That's where Photoshop brush expert extraordinaire Jessica Johnson comes into play.
She's going to be walking us through some of her favorite brush techniques inside Photoshop. It will unlock your creativity and show you her insider techniques to create your own stunning holiday cards and illustrations!

Getting to Know Jessica

Jessica comes from a fairly traditional design background, having graduated from Missouri State University in 2002. "We BARELY had the internet when I was in university... so things were VERY different," Jessica explained.
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Her university's design department was headed by a group of distinguished “old school” professors. Although being very tough, Jessica learned to appreciate how they instilled in her the most important design fundamentals. These included how to properly approach design, and the importance of creative problem solving.
Jessica reflected, "These are the skills that are the foundation of who I am today as a designer." These skills, mixed with her insatiable curiosity, pushed her into the rewarding career of developing tools to help other designers.

Jessica's Adventure into Creating Custom Tools for Designers

Jessica started creating design tools during a rough patch in her life. She was living in Miami Beach and her freelance work was drying up. On top of that her dog started suffering from heart issues, and the expenses piled up. Out of desperation she decided to pack her dog and belongings up to move back with her family in Missouri.

Avoiding the 9-5 Life

After staying in Missouri for a few months Jessica came to the realization that she needed to start making money fast, or she would need to start a more typical 9-5 job again.
"I had uploaded just a few products onto Creative Market up to that point with a few sales... but I had an idea for a product I thought could be a BIGhit," stated Jessica. "I wanted to create a kit for some gold foil effects, not shiny gold like you used to see on club flyers all the time, but a gold leaf / gold foil effect."
At the time, there wasn't anything like it on the market. She had to work hard to bring her vision into life, and make sure that it looked good no matter what it was applied it to.
After releasing the product to a seemingly slow start Jessica said, "...it somehow gained traction and took off like crazy, and in those first few months I sold a BUNCH! All of my hard work, late nights, and manic over-creating (I created something like 180 original patterns which were the base of my effects) finally paid off!"
Jessica's hit product is shown below:
Jessica reflected on this experience, "It was a high I will never forget, and hearing amazing feedback from my fellow designers was more rewarding than anything."
She also noted, "One of the things I love about the career I’ve been able to carve out through Creative Market is the freedom I have to work wherever I want — which is a huge privilege — and being able to spend time with my best friends who live all around the world. I am able to live a life I never dreamed of up growing up in a small town in Missouri!"
She continued, "I even turned my travels into an instagram featuring my stuffed fox — that I’ve had since I was 3 years old — which went viral due to a fundraiser for a friend with cancer."
You can view her now famous travels with Mr. Fox here: https://www.instagram.com/thetravelingmrfox/

Stepping into Custom Brushes

Jessica built her niche in creating layer styles, but never stopped experimenting. "I had been purchasing brushes from my fellow designers, and became more and more intrigued by what was possible. That got me into experimenting with the brush settings and creating my own brushes for projects," she said.
Along the way, Jessica realized that she could take the brush techniques she developed and turn them into products for designers of all levels to enjoy and use.
"It was very essential for me to create a product that would let designers of all levels be able to pick up these brushes and start creating, no matter if they were a beginner or an advanced illustrator."
She continued, "I am proud to say that with the Impressionist Brushes and Wet Paint Studio (shown below), I was able to put something into the market that hadn’t been seen yet, and translate techniques I developed into a turnkey solution for so many of my fellow designers."

Hacking the Pattern Stamp Tool for Impressionist Color Blending Brush Strokes:

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The pattern stamp tool is an often overlooked tool in the Photoshop arsenal. It's a powerful design tool that can help you make amazing color blending effects and illustrations.
Since pattern overlays are perhaps the most common way to apply a pattern to an object in Photoshop, I feel that the pattern stamp tool — which simply applies the pattern to an area you paint with a brush — is overlooked by designers and illustrators.
More importantly, there is a setting WITHIN this brush that is also overlooked. The impressionist brush setting. When checked, instead of painting the pattern as you paint with your chosen brush, it will ‘spit out’ all of the colors that are WITHIN your pattern. If you grab a regular Photoshop brush and try this it will likely not look great. You will probably see unappealing bands of color as you paint.
However, if you tweak the Photoshop brush settings, you can disperse the brush marks so the brush creates an appealing blend of colors. What's cool about this feature is you can create a pattern that contains exactly the colors you want in your brush stroke; even if they are unrelated.
The color jitter feature has long been included with Photoshop brushes, but there are limitations, and it's tricky to be precise with the colors. You can blend foreground to background, or jitter the hue, but it's nothing compared to the pattern stamp tool!

Wet Paint Brush Effects Are One of the Coolest Features in Photoshop You’re Not Taking Advantage of:

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With the emergence of digital painting on our tablets, and new programs like Procreate luring designers away from Photoshop, it's easy to forget that some of these ‘new’ features are already in Photoshop. You're just not taking advantage of them!
Not only that, there are also amazing things you can do with Photoshop that you can't do with apps such as Procreate.
With the wet paint brush tool in Photoshop, you can pick up and sample MULTIPLE colors at the same time (not just push them around), and adjust your brush settings to create amazing wet paint strokes that blend all of the colors you have sampled in amazing ways.

With the Right Tools ANYONE Can Be an Illustrator

True Story: I cannot draw. As a fine arts major, I had to take drawing and painting along with everyone, but my attempts at realism were mediocre at best. I always considered myself a ‘designer’ and never IMAGINED that one day I could be creating illustrations I would be proud of.
However, through this journey creating tools and resources for other designers, I discovered that I was becoming an illustrator! What I LOVEabout advances in technology, is that it gives someone like me who can't traditionally illustrate, the ability to bring ideas to life. All because I've created tools to make this possible.
By creatively harnessing the power of the tools within Photoshop, I’ve pushed my own boundaries and am now able to create designs and illustrations I never imagined possible!

Push Yourself Through Experimentation and Play

One of the most important things I can stress is giving yourself time for creative experimentation and play. A LOT of the time, my tools and resources were the direct result of 'just messing around' and not because I was expressly trying to create an effect.
You may not consider yourself an illustrator, but by harnessing the power of the amazing design programs we have, you too can create things you never imagined possible! You may find yourself creating your own illustration sets instead of purchasing them and they will be uniquely your own!
As I’ve released my sets of brushes, I get messages from designers of all levels saying how they are surprising themselves with what they are able to do because of the power of Photoshop tools! This holiday season why not experiment and see what you can create.
Now we can use Jessica's techniques and brushes to create our own holiday cards!

Tutorial: Create Your Own Holiday Card

Download the Sample Brushes and Follow Along!

Step 1

Download and Install the Sample Brushes

Free Photoshop Brushes

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Perfect for greeting cards

Add a special touch to your print design projects with this free set of brushes by Jessica Johnson.
In creating this holiday card design, we are using just a SINGLE mixer brush from my Wet Paint Studio collection, and I have provided 6 different ‘pre-mixed’ palettes that you can sample from to create beautiful brush strokes exactly like these!
In a hurry to see what you can create? Use the PRE-LOADED tool preset brushes in the file which have the colors already loaded for you!

Step 2

Using the Pattern Brush
Again, we will be using just a single pattern brush from my Modern Impressionist Pattern Brush Studio to create the glow of the holiday lights.
We will use 3 different Pre-Fab color palettes which will let you paint in beautiful, multicolored impressionist brush strokes that match the colors in the holiday lights! These brushes are also provided to you as a tool preset file, with the patterns already loaded and ready to go!

Step 3

Create Your Lettering
Create BEAUTIFUL ‘hand-lettered’ text with the gorgeous mixer brushes. NO layer style can emulate the directional brush strokes like you see here!
Pro-tip: Use your favorite font as a guide! Simply type out your text, create a layer above it, and follow the letters as a guide for your beautiful painted typography!
On this lettering, I used Buttermilk Farmhouse by Make Media Co. as a guide for my text!
Another tip: If you have the latest version of Photoshop CC 2018, use the stroke smoothing for even more fluid and natural strokes, even if you don’t have the steadiest hand!

Step 4

Illustrate the Greenery
Watch how easy it is to create beautiful illustrations with only two brushes.
Here, we draw out some very simple greenery shapes that anyone can master, and we let the brush do all the heavy lifting.
The mixer brush creates beautiful color blends that make even the simplest shapes beautiful and interesting. Add some gold into the mix, and be astonished and how beautifully it blends together — like real paint… ONLY BETTER!
Brushes Used:
  • Green Mixer Brush
  • Gold Accent Mixer Brush

Step 5

Create Glowing Holiday Lights
The glowing holiday lights are just as easy and fun to create! A basic oval shape becomes a glowing holiday fairy light when you load it full of beautiful colors from my Wet Paint Studio.
The base of the light is created with the gold accent brush. Then we use our pattern brush loaded with gorgeous Pre-Fab Color Palettes to create the artistic glowing effect around the fairy lights. After we brush the strokes, we will lower the opacity of that layer for the proper subtle effect!
Brushes Used:
  • Light 1 Mixer Brush
  • Light 2 Mixer Brush
  • Light 3 Mixer Brush
  • Gold Accent Mixer Brush
  • Lights 1 Multicolor Glow
  • Lights 2 Multicolor Glow
  • Lights 3 Multicolor Glow

Step 6: The Finale!

Put Everything Together
With only these 2 basic brushes, we can create a gorgeous artistic card like the one shown here. I hope you are inspired to experiment with Photoshop brushes more in the future, even if you don’t consider yourself an illustrator.
As you see here, there are a very powerful arsenal of tools within the Photoshop brush options. And NOW you have a couple insider tricks that can help you take better advantage of them to create designs and illustrations you never thought possible. It doesn't matter if you are a designer, illustrator or even a hobbyist!

Continuing Jessica's Story

"I carved out a niche career I never EVER could have imagined possible as I was making my way through design school," Jessica exclaimed. "Plus the fact I am doing work that thrills and inspires me, and makes a difference in other designer's work, makes all the hard work worthwhile."
When asked about how she continues to create amazing products she said, "With each message or comment I get on my product, I am injected with a boost of happiness and motivation that I am making an actual difference in someone's work or creativity."
"THIS is what keeps me going! If you learn something, share it with others! What you will get back is greater than what you put out...always!"
So with that message in mind, be sure to let Jessica know what you think of her brushes and techniques.
And should you create something awesome using the incredible brushes Jessica shared, be sure to link what you made in the comments below. We can all make this holiday season a little bit brighter with our creativity.

FREE Photoshop

Brushes

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Perfect for greeting cards

Add a special touch to your print design projects with this free set of brushes by Jessica Johnson.