first design hack is all about your design process it's going to allow you to come up with creative
and effective ideas that your clients just will not be able to say no to and to demonstrate I'm
soon going to reveal this poster design for a drink driving awareness campaign but let's
learn about this process hack first and foremost now here I'm using Miller nodes but you can use
any platform program or just simply a piece of paper so when you have a project brief try and
narrow that brief down to a single simple sentence or message so for a poster that needs to bring
the dangers of drink driving to the awareness of people I've got here the reality of drink driving
is deadly serious this is the first step in this hack but here's why doing this is so important
and so helpful by doing this we actually set the tone and the direction of our design in relation
to the project brief if we pick out some keywords and some goals from the brief and then condense
it down into a message like this we're on the way to making a supremely useful and effective graphic
design solution next we want to focus on emotion and so jot down some emotional responses that are
going to allow your design to properly get the main message across to the viewer so here we can
see that I've chosen emotions that will help Drive the point home to the viewer that drink driving
is serious it's deadly and it's no joke I want my design to have a shock Factor so the message
is clear and it stays in the minds of the viewer the next phase is where things get stepped up a
gear in this process this is where we think about design techniques that can express the emotional
response that we want to get on our design and here I've just written down three to demonstrate
and I want to have a focal point that is shocking and draws the viewer into my design I really want
to emphasize on a lot of white space to make the message clear and concise and to perhaps also give
a clinical or Bleak outlook on my design this will drive home a message that drink driving is in fact
really serious and it can be Bleak for the people involved and then I go into color schemes that
will perhaps help my design cause the emotional responses in the viewers that I want to deliver
with the message and lastly we can add imagery to help build up an overall density of the design to
generate ideas but me personally as a designer I don't really find this stage to be that helpful
but we all think and we will design it different ways of course but now the big reveal as you can
see I have really focused on white space to make the visual communication both striking and clear
the focal point is shocking and suggestive to the message of drink driving and I've worked in the
concept of crossing the line of drinking to then actually driving now this is a great hack to put
into your design process but it shouldn't be your entire design process most of the time expanding
on Concepts and generating ideas via this method is really really useful next a hack with fonts
well actually it's a two-part hack firstly I don't actually use Font managers these days all I do is
in Adobe I go ahead and just create a favorites list from that list I can narrow down searches for
Siri if Sans serif and so on but as you can see here my favorites list isn't that big I like to
keep it simple and refined down to the choices I know that I need for my workflows day in day
out and it's really easy to favorite a fonts all you have to do is click the start icon and bingo
it's now on that list the second part of this hack is an Adobe Illustrator in the character
panel if we actually come up to find more we can then have access to every single Adobe font that
is in existence and there are literally thousands of them to look through but if you know a specific
font from Adobe and you want to work with it you just click the button here to activate it and
it will be added to your list now I think that's pretty cool the next hack is in Photoshop and it's
me having a fun with a new technique it's a way to blur things on your design work via a menu I've
only just found out about this year but I can't remember why I first heard about it though but
here's exactly how we do it now I've got my text and then a different layer below that then come
over to adjustments and then add a gradient map click on the gradient and then go ahead and add
more color nodes along with the colors in those nodes that are going to fill up your blur effect
once that's prepped and ready to rock and roll select your text layer and then come up to filter
the blur gallery and then tilt shift now this can be tricky and the outcome depends on your gradient
map you must convert the text to a Smart object as well so increase the blur value and then have a
play around with the settings on the design itself now you can rotate it and increase the blur as you
go and like I said it might take a while for you to get the hang of it or until you're satisfied
and if you're not quite satisfied with the Outlook you might want to come back and change your
gradient map but yeah this is a lot of fun and using the blur gallery has been something new to
me and something I've been playing around with the next hack is a good way to remind yourself or keep
up to date with graphics and Trends to actually Ogle at eye candy design and get some inspiration
now here's a Chrome extension called muesli now check this out here it has over 30
000 users and the rating is a smidgen above four stars which is pretty good
and I've chosen it to be my home page whenever I click a new tab in Google Chrome like so some
people will find this annoying and it is an option you can turn on or off so that's pretty cool and
you can search for specific things which we're going to do soon but scrolling down we do have
trending Design Tech Etc but yeah this thing is really filled with tips inspiration downloadable
stuff and it just goes on and on and on but let's give a quick search for something maybe branding
and looking over here there are so many cool examples I just want to dive into and
explore Lots from dribble will be Hans and other well-known entities in the graphic design space
this thing really helps me stay up to date with Trends what's going on in design World
Tech world and also it keeps those creative juices flowing and if you want to learn some more useful
and interesting graphics and hacks that will allow you to make the designs you really want
to just click the video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace