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Creatives share their best tips and tricks for making your projects more professional.

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  • How to Find Images When Creating a Digital Collage
    Illustration

    How to Find Images When Creating a Digital Collage

    Learn about different sources of royalty-free pictures and learn to search by color or resolution Israel G. Vargas (@israelgevargas) is a Mexican designer and visual communicator who graduated from the UNAM Faculty of Arts and Design. As an editorial designer, he has worked for different Mexican magazines, including Picnic, where he was a graphic editor for seven years. Israel is also an illustrator whose work has been featured in various international magazines and brands such as Wired, Texas Monthly, Atlanta, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Adidas, Tbrand Studio from The New York Times and Metaleap Creative, as well as in Mexican publications such as Tierra Adentro, Expansión, Accent, and Chilango.

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  • Dos and Don'ts of UX Design
    Teacher Design

    Dos and Don'ts of UX Design

    Learn from Ethan Parry what UX is and how to successfully use it to improve your product or service If you do an online search, you’ll probably find a few different definitions of UX, but at its core its mission is simple: designing a product or service that resonates with the user and their needs. While a successful UX design might look simple because it’s so intuitive, there’s a large amount of research, prototyping, and preparation that goes on behind the scenes. In this video, UX designer Ethan Parry (@ethanparry) shares three dos for how to create a powerful UX design, and 3 don’ts which represent common mistakes.

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  • Simple Exercises for Drawing Perspective
    Illustration

    Simple Exercises for Drawing Perspective

    Puño shares three useful exercises that will help beginners to get better at drawing perspective When it comes to drawing, there are some universal rules based on how human beings perceive things and their cultural norms. Whether you choose to respect these rules, break them, or experiment with them, there’s no doubt that they are essential for every illustrator. One of these rules is perspective, a technique in figurative art to show the volume, location, and position of an object or person depicted in a drawing. It allows the viewer to see the subject in three dimensions and understand its shape.

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  • Tips for Creating a Botanical Nook in Your Home
    Design

    Tips for Creating a Botanical Nook in Your Home

    Discover how to create incredible DIY botanical spaces and make the most of them Interior design is not only about color, shapes, accessories, and spaces, plants can play a leading role: having green spaces in our daily lives is of the utmost importance. Meena and Ceci from Compañía Botánica (@ciabotanica)–a brand dedicated to the design of gardens, balconies, and green walls–are experts in combining plants and design. Together they create botanical pieces such as living paintings of cactus and succulents, which can be adapted to any environment. Here, they sharesome tips for incorporating plants into the design and decoration of spaces. Why is it important to have natural spaces inside the house? Creating living pictures and spaces is a way of having nature present in our homes or offices. They have a great impact, dazzle with their colors and shapes, and attract a lot of attention. That's why, if you don't have enough space in your house for big flowerpots, you can use bright pictures on the walls and small flowerpots that complement the small spaces: having plants on vertical surfaces can really catch the eye.

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  • 5 Instagram Stories Hacks You Probably Don't Know
    Marketing

    5 Instagram Stories Hacks You Probably Don't Know

    Use these tricks to make your Instagram stories more attractive The only thing you need to share your creativity on Instagram stories is your phone. These five tricks will help you get the most out of the social network and engage your followers.

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  • How to Capture a City's Personality
    Illustration

    How to Capture a City's Personality

    Architect and artist Carlos Stanga teaches how to find the soul of a city for your illustrations Architectural illustration can provide a unique connection to urban space. It's a way to capture a moment or a building in time and to express creatively how a place makes you feel. Artist and architect Carlo Stanga (@carlo_stanga) has done precisely that with the streets of Milan, London, or New York, to name a few, and has some tips you can follow to capture the soul of cityscapes in your illustrations.

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  • How to Create Memorable Characters
    3D & Animation

    How to Create Memorable Characters

    Five tips for designing unique protagonists for your stories Sociedad Fantasma (@sociedadfantasma) is an animation and illustration studio, comprising Carlos Rupit, Gabriel Pichardo and Lizeth Rodríguez. They create wonderful stories through illustration and animation and have worked with clients such as Netflix, Gatorade, Google, and Nike. Their characters are one of the main pillars in each of their stories; they bring great substance to the plots and make the worlds they create all the more magical. While they’ve designed so many different characters, they all share characteristics that make them stand out. Here, Sociedad Fantasma shares their secret to creating memorable characters.

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  • 6 Tips For Designing Packaging For The Perfect Unboxing Experience
    Design

    6 Tips For Designing Packaging For The Perfect Unboxing Experience

    Discover everything you should keep in mind when designing packaging for your product and the unboxing experience One of the greatest visual and tactile experiences when buying something, especially when it’s an online purchase, is the moment of unboxing. That’s why packaging has become an important pillar of the branding of many businesses: you’ve got to know where to source the materials and how to balance functionality and aesthetics to create exciting packaging that suitable protects what’s inside. Tatabi Studio (@tatabi) takes care of every detail of the packaging and unboxing experience and has developed this six-point guide that will help you plan your own product’s perfect design.

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  • Combat Writer’s Block with This Technique to Beat the Blank Page
    Illustration

    Combat Writer’s Block with This Technique to Beat the Blank Page

    Learn to write stories in a fun and simple way with Natalia Méndez’s creative dice Overcoming the fear of the blank page has never been easy: thinkers, artists, and writers have been faced with creative block throughout history. Fear of failure, a lack of ideas, or the feeling that nobody will be interested in what you have to say, are among the many sentiments that leave us feeling lost and unable to continue our work. Editor and teacher of children's literature Natalia Méndez (@natumendez) explains how to combat creative block by creating dice with ideas and concepts inscribed on their faces to inspire new stories. We explain it step by step below.

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  • Adding Watercolor to Your Sketchbook Drawings
    Illustration

    Adding Watercolor to Your Sketchbook Drawings

    Mattias Adolfsson shows you how a hint of color will take your sketches to the next level and add depth Mattias Adolfsson (@mattiasadolfsson) is an illustrator living in a small town in Sweden, called Sigtuna, just outside of Stockholm. As a young adult, Mattias studied engineering and architecture before switching to graphic design, all the while continuing to draw in his spare time and develop his own unique style. During his degree, he became interested in 3D modeling, using it to build his own universes and tell fantastical stories. For his thesis project, he used 3D design and animation to create a visual piece about three cosmonauts traveling to Mars–a story he had developed over many years in his sketchbook. After graduating from university with a master’s in graphic design, Mattias worked for a decade in the computer games industry. In 2007, he left Electronic Arts to become a freelance illustrator. Since then, he has been commissioned by the likes of WIRED, Google, The New Yorker, Nickelodeon, Hollywood Reporter, Cartoon Network, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Disney, Amnesty International, and many more.

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  • How to Make a Rotoscope Animation in Photoshop
    Illustration

    How to Make a Rotoscope Animation in Photoshop

    Learn how to create an animation with the rotoscope technique using Adobe Photoshop in just six steps Rotoscoping is a technique that involves redrawing a shape—tracing each scene with any drawing technique—frame by frame, based on a sequence of real action images, like a video clip. This generates a silhouette with realistic movement that can be used as a reference to animate a character. The technique was used in films such as A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life by Richard Linklater. One of the experts in this technique is Gonzalo Cordero (@gonzalo_cordero), illustrator, animator, and motionographer who will teach us how to create a rotoscope animation in Adobe Photoshop, which is the perfect way to familiarize yourself with this kind of animation.

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  • How to decorate with plants
    Craft

    How to decorate with plants

    Plants have amazing health benefits and can transform spaces Plants can bring a lot of benefits to any area. They purify the air and give us that wonderful feeling of being in a fresh environment. Studies have shown that our concentration increases when we are around them. They also improve our workplace, dampening background noise, and helping us be more efficient. In short, they improve our daily life. But plants are also a design element that can be considered when designing the interior of a space. They can completely transform a room, giving it a more natural and earthy look. If you want to use plants for your interior decoration, Xènia Bas (@xenia_bas) is a ceramicist and artist who knows everything there is to know about the subject. Here are her tips and tricks: Evaluate the space

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  • Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design
    Design

    Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design

    Delima pays tribute to the work of Dieter Rams with an illustration series Dieter Rams (Germany, 1932) is a universal reference in the world of industrial designers. A key representative of the functionalist movement, his work stands out for its minimalism and adherence to the philosophy, “less, but better”.

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  • Choosing References to Inspire Your Character Design
    Illustration

    Choosing References to Inspire Your Character Design

    Learn these basic tips for choosing and using visual references when drawing characters with Marcio Takara One of the joys of creating a comic book character is that that person can be whatever you want them to be, strong, weak, beautiful, ugly, tiny, or huge, and you can even create a totally new universe for them to live in. Chances are, however, that you’d like to situate them in a world that at least resembles some part of your own reality. Our imaginations are our most powerful tool, but carefully choosing references from which to create can help us design realistic and convincing heroes and villains for our stories. A good reference can also inspire you to take your drawings to new levels and different spaces. Here is a collection of tips from comic book artist Marcio Takara (@marciotakara) that will help you find visual references and provide the basic foundations for your next illustration.

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  • How to Import Fonts to Procreate?
    Illustration

    How to Import Fonts to Procreate?

    Procreate now allows you to add text to your illustrations, drawings, and designs. Learn how to use your favorite fonts Procreate has become, without a doubt, the favorite app of illustrators, cartoonists, designers and creatives around the world. The iPad software allows you to use the screen as a notebook and has a number of extremely useful features for digital artists, but until a few months ago you could not do something as simple as adding text to images. With the arrival of the function to add text comes a big question: how do you add fonts to Procreate? Here, we explain how, step by step.

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  • A Simple Way to Make Substrates for Your Succulents
    Craft

    A Simple Way to Make Substrates for Your Succulents

    Learn to make homemade substrates for your succulents using a few simple ingredients In the last few years, succulent plants have become decorations for countless public spaces and private homes, outside and in thanks to their hardy nature, the beauty they bring to their surroundings, and the ease of caring for them. But it's important to bear their idiosyncrasies in mind: for example, strong and healthy plants need to be cultivated in a special kind of substrate. In the following video, Meena and Ceci, two botanical designers who make up the Compañía Botánica (@ciabotanica) show us the essential ingredients for a good succulent substrate. Find out how to make on in the video below.

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  • Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Lettering
    Typography, Calligraphy and Lettering

    Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Lettering

    These pro tips from Chisko Romo will give new life to your lettering (and get you more likes on Instagram) Chisko Romo (@chisko_romo) is a graphic designer with more than seven years experience as a lettering artist. Throughout his professional career, he has collaborated with brands such as Adidas, Ted Baker, Moleskine, Apple Music and American Eagle, among many other great brands. He enjoys experimenting with shapes and volumes in lettering, interpreting letters as graphic forms that convey feelings, and creating compositions in different styles that he shares on his Instagram. That's why Chisko has given us three simple tips and tricks that will help you edit your photos or add effects in Illustrator, to turn your compositions into pieces worth showing the world with pride. Here are Chisko’s tips for lettering that will pop: 1. Remove unsightly edges Chisko makes physical letters using engraving and laser cutting techniques, so the final pieces often have burn marks, especially on the edges. To show a perfect piece, without marks or stains, the designer uses the Smudge tool on Photoshop that simulates the effect achieved by passing a finger through fresh paint.

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  • Why Start Your Own Creative Projects?
    3D & Animation

    Why Start Your Own Creative Projects?

    Learn, experience, and satisfy your creative side are just some of the benefits of taking on your own personal projects Josep Bernaus (@josep_bernaus) is a 2D animator. He’s worked on animation series and advertising campaigns for clients like the BBC, CNN, and TVE. However, he has never abandoned his personal projects, which hold an important place in his life and, he believes, should be important to any creative, artist, illustrator, photographer. Josep shares three reasons why personal projects are so important and what attitude and expectations we should have for them.

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  • Learn 3 Fundamental Pottery Techniques
    Craft

    Learn 3 Fundamental Pottery Techniques

    Lola Giardino teaches basic ceramics techniques so that you can start making your own creations Lola Giardino's (@lolagiardino) relationship with pottery started in 2011 as a way to escape from digital life. She tried different crafts but soon fell in love with ceramics and developed the skill to shape incredible objects just using hand building, a technique where the beauty and uniqueness of the pieces come from little imperfections. Lola shares the three basic modeling techniques so that you can also become an expert in hand building:

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