Make a festive Holiday Card!

Turn a simple piece of card stock into a holiday card! Use the template below to set up your designs, keeping the elements of your design within the blue guidelines. Also, make sure to leave at least 1/4" around the edges, since the printer leaves a margin of white space around the edge. You will need to account for this empty "bleed area" in your design.

CLICK HERE to download the holiday card template file.


Here are some designs created by students in the Fall Graphic Design Class...

Be a stickler with your Snapchat Geofilter!

Making a Snapchat Geofilter is pretty easy and fun – if you follow their specifications exactly!

Here is a chart showing you all the small details:

Make a snazzy Snapchat Geofilter!

Snapchat has a fun feature called a geofilter. Basically, you can create a filter for a specific location to give a shout out to a school, business or organization.

CLICK HERE to see some popular filters liked by Buzzfeed:

So how can we make our very own Snapchat Geofilter? Take a look at this short clip to find out:





Here is an example of a Geofilter I created for the Peer Leaders Club at NEST+m:

BEFORE YOU GET STARTED, CHECK OUT THE SNAPCHAT GUIDELINES HERE!

Content is king! (And did you make some typos?)

As designers, sometimes we get caught up in making everything look great, and we forget to check our work closely. This leads to lots of errors - typos, mis-spellings, styling issues, etc.

So we must proofread. How do we do that? Here are a few tips:

1. Read it out loud and also silently.
2. Read it backwards to focus on the spelling of words.
3. Read it upside down.
4. Use a spell checker and grammar checker as a first screening, but don't depend on them.
5. Have others read it.
6. Read it slowly.

When you find an error, you can mark it up using standard Proofreader's Marks! See a handy list below:

RGB vs CMYK: what do these terms mean?

The first thing you should think about before you start your design project is: will my project be printed or put online? There are two different types of image formats to choose from. Take a look at this quick clip to help you figure out which to choose!

Raster vs vector images: which one will work for your project?

As designers, we can choose from an array of images to add interest to our designs: photographs, illustrations, patterns, etc. Each image will fall into one of two categories: raster vs. vector.

Raster images are made up of lots of square pixels, and can be high resolution or low resolution.

Vector images are mathematically defined, so your software program calculates the line resulting from the starting point to the ending point of your design. Vectors can be scaled up or down and will not change resolution.

Here's a quick clip to explain:

Learn to Kern!

A really important part of making a beautiful design is learning how to make your type look really good. You can do that by adjusting the LEADING, TRACKING and KERNING. Take a look at this quick clip to find out how: