I’m very much an advocate of sharing useful resources, so here’s a quick list of some of our most-used online tools and resources:

The Noun Project

The Noun Project is an icon search engine, which aims to present a definitive icon for every word or phrase in the dictionary. They’re missing quite a few words at the moment, but the number of icons is consistently growing and they’re all available for free download. Great for infographics, certain types of logos, web icons and a lot more.

Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler is an online colour scheme reference tool that I use ALL the time, pretty much regardless of the type of design I’m doing. For those briefs where you have a style guide to follow colour schemes aren’t a problem, but when the choice is yours it can take up a lot of time playing with colours that suite the subject matter and complement each other in a satisfactory way. Adobe Kuler is fantastic for finding pre-made colour schemes, or for designing your own using their interactive colour wheel. Kuler provides you with all the hexadecimal codes, as well as codes for CYMK and RGB colour so you can get them exactly right in Photoshop and Illustrator. Hugely useful.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock unfortunately isn’t a free resource (it’s actually quite expensive), but it’s amazingly useful if you do decide to cough up the membership fee. Probably the best directory I’ve found of high-resolution photographs, vector files and illustrations available for download and use. Their collection is huge and the majority of them are extremely impressive (in terms of quality). I’d certainly recommend it if you find yourself constantly spending chunks of design time searching Google Images for suitable icons, photos and illustrations.

Creative Commons

If you don’t have the money for Shutterstock, then check out Creative Commons. It’s basically a vertical search engine for royalty-free images, illustrations, music and videos which can be used commercially without legal ramifications. It’s great for finding free images or videos for blog posts and is often useful when completing design briefs. The site allows you to search Google, Google Images, Flickr, Blip.tv, Jamendo, Spin Express and Wikipedia Commons simultaneously for royalty-free media, saving you considerable amounts of time and effort.

Font Squirrel

Font Squirrel is a hugely useful resource for any graphic designer, web designer, or anyone who has an unhealthy obsession with typography. All of the fonts collected on these site are high quality, available for free download (in OTF format) and licensed for commercial work.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

SOURCE: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48305999@N05/4557377271/

So what’s new in the recently released Adobe Photoshop CS5?

- New photography tools
CS5 reduces the number of steps needed (and therefore a lot of the complexity) in retouching and manipulating your photos. It has new, easier to use functions for sharpening, correcting lens distortions, adding grain, removing noise and creating HDR images. It’s also now much better for exporting raw file conversions.

- Improved complex image selection
CS5 has made it much quicker and easier to select complex images (it’s particularly good with hair, something which was far more difficult in CS4) and makes cutting, refining and intricate composition of images far more pleasurable.

- Increased creative impact, including realistic painting
CS5 has really cool new painting features which allow you to experiment with superb on-canvas blending and textured brush strokes. It also has new additional features for stretching and warping graphics, text and image elements to create fresh, interesting new looks.

I really like the new version of Photoshop; it feels quicker and much more responsive and the new features have already made an impact on my graphic design output. Apart from one of our designers (mentioning no names!) who keeps muttering he doesn’t like change, the whole designbysoap team has moved up to CS5 and we’re glad we did.

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Jason is our newest graphic designer and works on photo editing, logo design and general graphic design in Brighton.