Design your way

Online Marketing is taking more and more advantage some might think that print advertising is losing. Well if you think that way you should also consider some numbers before you decide that. This is because studies show that more than 55% of all consumers still trust print marketing. So, any flyer mockup has a chance of being used for sure.

We all know that flyers are a great way to get attention to a business. They are even more effective if the people that get the flyer can connect with the business that is being described.

Being a tool that connects the public directly they need to be done really well. You can’t say it’s just a piece of paper. It’s more than that because it speaks through the branding elements of a company.

Using a mockup means that you create your own ideal design before you send it to print. The internet has so many ideas that you can inspire from so take advantage of it. We prepared a few that you can try yourself. See if any of the following can help you out!

Flyer Mockup Examples

Free A4 Flyer Template

Check this mockup if you need a PSD format one. It can be great to design the flyer ideas that you had in your mind. You can also adapt it to other branding materials that you want to use quite easy. See for yourself and download it now.

Free 2 Flying Flyer Mockup

Flyers are simple pages that are designed to make people see certain products and services that are promoted. They are a simple tool used in advertisement and this means there are a lot of flyer mockups available.

This model has all the information sections that you need and it can be edited in no time.

Gravity Psd Paper Mockup

This is a simple and original PSD paper that is going to let you display different designs. You can use it with your own graphics. So, change the colors as you like and start using it.

Mockup of Two Floating DL Flyers

If you are in need of a mockup here is a template that has two floating designs. This means you get two options to get your designs from. The advantage of going for flyer mockups is that you can change them as you want.

A flyer can be a fantastic solution to spread the messages you have. It doesn’t matter if you share them in a mall or on the streets, they can bring real attention to your brand.

Free Hand Carry A4 MockUp PSD

Get this mockup if you want something simple that can work with the designs you have in mind. It’s a flyer mockup PSD so you will need Photoshop to make changes to it. Don’t worry, if you haven’t used the program until now it is not going to be that hard to understand.

Square Flyer Mockup Set

As you can see in the title this is a mockup that also contains a brochure and catalog design. So, if you need more examples it is even better to download it.

Mockup of a Smiling Woman at a Table Holding an A5 Flyer

The persons that are sending out your flyer are also important. If they are not smiling and doing a great job people might ignore entirely the information. One idea that you can do before you make a big order of printed flyers is to test them.

After that, you can use free flyer mockups like this one and get them finished. It shouldn’t take too much of your time so have a go at them.

Free Centre Folded Flyer Mockup PSD

Have a look at this free flyer mockup that has the right mix of shapes and colors. It is made by a professional designer and you will like the style for sure. Just decide how to do you want to use it. The design can be used in your own way at any time.

A4 Flyer Mockup with Little Flowers

When you get this flyer PSD mockup you will be able to create a realistic design. It has a nice design combining flower elements and nice backgrounds. If you don’t like the colors you can change them at any time together with the text included.

You don’t have to invest a lot of time and you will have the final design ready. Just impress your clients and start attracting new people.

A6 Flyer Mockup Featuring a Smiling Woman with Glasses

In this flyer mockup, you will get a brunette woman that is having a big smile. It is up to you how you want to use this template. The fact is that you can use it for presentations or certain prototypes you have in mind. So, get it on your computer and see what you can do with it.

Outdoor Poster Flyer Mockup Templates

You can buy this flyer mockup directly on graphicriver. It can be used for both posters and flyers. You get 6 mockups to choose from that have smart object included. This means you will be able to change all the images fast and easy.

Flyers Mockup For Presentation

You can show your flyer template designs by using this Flyers Mockup. It is great to be used as a presentation. Just see for yourself and get it on your computer.

Free Tutti Frutti A4 Flyer Mockup

A nicely done flyer mockup that we really enjoyed is this one. You can give it your own touch before printing it so consider it as a real option.

Free Stylish A4 Flyer Mockup PSD

If you need a professional A4 Flyer Mockup to showcase your flyer design go for this one. It can be exactly what you were looking for.

Square Flyer Mockup Set | Free download

Another flyer mockup free for use is this pack. It includes also a catalog and a brochure design that you can take advantage of. Take advantage of it and see if it can be your new and modern display for your product or service.

Free Bi-Fold Brochure Mockup

When you need to get a simple flyer mockup this might be exactly what you need. See for yourself and give it a test.

Free Square Flyer Mockup

If you want to get some cool graphics from your mockup this can be what you need. This mockup was created using modern trends and a nice color scheme. You can edit it entirely so for sure you can use it in your work.

Free Multipurpose Flyers MockUps Templates Psd

This is a big pack that has different flyer mockup PSD templates. It’s free to use so there is really no reason to stop you from trying it.

Letter Size Flyer PSD Mockup

A good letter size mockup that is going to fit different projects is this one. IT has many resources and you can obtain a different version of it really fast

Free Half Fold Flyer Mockups

The last flyer mockup we want to talk about is this one. You can use it to show the designs you have in mind for your clients. It’s easy to edit and you will be able to really impress anybody that sees it.

If you enjoyed reading this article about flyer mockup, you should read these as well:

• Logo mockup templates to download and use to present your logos
• How to make a good flyer – modern flyer design inspiration
• Free brochure templates to use for creating your brochure

The post Cool flyer mockup examples you should check out today appeared first on Design your way.

Source: https://ift.tt/2Lbkft8

Understanding the Golden Ratio in Design

The proportion for Golden Ratio is 1:1.618. It is a mathematical equation that has found its way into design practices as well. The golden ratio has been scientifically proven beautiful. The best example to understand the importance of the Golden Ratio can be traced back to one of the most famous paintings: the Mona Lisa.  The painting itself uses the golden ratio.

Some other names for Golden Ratio are The Golden Section, Golden Mean, or the German letter “phi”. It is a useful number that helps create beautiful designs. The way Golden Ratio differs from other design practices is that design generally is led by instinct and creativity. Whereas the Golden Ratio has a different approach. It uses mathematical approaches to transform your images, layouts, typography and many more design practices.

The Fibonacci sequence:

This sequence is the sum of two numbers before it. Greeks tossed this practice. It used to help them form a visual pattern to help with their design. After you’re done, turn the sequence into squares and put them side by side and you’ll create a spiral of rectangles. This is known as the Golden Spiral. What’s amazing is that though this is a mathematical equation, there are a lot of natural instances that show the presence of this concept in their structure as well. Natural calamities, flowers and even shells, everything has a hint of the golden ratio. A Fibonacci sequence would look like 1, 1,2,3,5,8,13, 21.

Golden Ratio in Graphic Design:

Golden Ratio adds structure to design, which otherwise has an expressive nature.  An easy hack of applying the golden ratio to any element is multiplying the size of the element by 1.618 for figuring out the size of another element or overlay the Golden Spiral for adjusting their placement.  The golden ratio can be used for typography, images and much more.

1.Using Golden Ratio for Typography:

Typography refers to the art or technique of arranging type for making the written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. Adding hierarchy in your layout adds structure and flow to your design. You can use typography for wedding invitation or also for website layout. At first glance, it might not be possible to imagine any correlation between typography and mathematics. However, typography is a blend of letter forms and mathematical proportions.

Three factors are crucial to typography; font size, line width and line-height.  All these aspects need to be in proportion to each other.  By achieving proportion in these three elements, the content you want to put forth would be very appealing to your readers on websites, or even blogs. By tweaking the font size and the content width, you can get an understanding of what the font height should be.  A 70-80 CPL-Characters Per Line, is considered comfortable for reading. If the content is too lengthy, the readers would lose out on the natural flow and find it challenging to find the start of the next line.

Golden Ratio can also be of help to have a guide for typography sizes.  If you breakdown a three-line text by importance in three sections named A, B and C you’d be able to understand the golden ratio a whole lot better. Suppose C is the least important piece of information you have, and you use the size 10 px for its content. If you need to figure out what size of the text to use for more critical text B multiply the font size of C by 1.618.

2. Adding to the Image Structure:

Photographers always have a guiding principle that they use when they click photographs. There are many guiding principles in photography that helps photographers better frame their picture.  One such guideline or rule is known as The Rule of Thirds. The rule of thirds essentially is dividing a composition into 9 equal parts, by dividing the frame with two equidistant vertical and horizontal lines. The points where these lines intersect are known as intersection points. The idea of using the rule of one third is that the subject should be placed on the intersection points in a way that the subject only takes up 1/3^rd of the frame. This can also be done in post-editing using grid lines. Another such guideline is the Golden Ratio.

Golden Ratio works best when you are trying to create a perfect sense of harmony in your images. Now unlike the rule of thirds, using golden ratio when clicking could be a little trickier, especially when you’re new to the concept. Hence using the Golden Spiral in post-production is one of the best ways to go around it.  Overlay the spiral on top of your image. This would help you see which elements of the picture sit where and if they’re creating harmony together. It also allows you to identify focal points and where they need to be. It can also be used to understand which elements need to be moved for giving the design more energy.

3. For creating Logo Design:

Logos are one of the most critical aspects of business identity. It helps new potential customers identify your brand, and old customers to retain your services and products through your logo. A brand logo helps create the first impression of the business’ values and relevance to its audience.  It is the first interaction anyone has with a brand as logos are more visual than texts. This is why it is very important to have a great logo that delivers what the brand stands for at its core in a single glance.

One good practice for creating spectacular logo designs is using the Golden Ratio. Using the Golden Ratio for designing logos help people instantly connect to the brand. An excellent example of this would be how many famous brands like Twitter, Apple, even Pepsi have been using it to design their logo.

You can also make use of the Fibonacci’s Sequence to create logos. Initially, start by creating a circular sequence using the Fibonacci’s Sequence and then rearrange them for forming a grid that would work as the basic framework for your logo design.

4. Golden Ratio and Architecture:

Architecture refers to the art of creating designs for buildings and constructing them as well. Ancient Greek architecture has been using the Golden Ratio to create its beautiful monuments. These monuments always seem to have dimensional relationships between their width and height.  The entire building gives a sense of being in perfect proportion. Famous polymath Leonardo da Vinci himself has used the golden ratio to create some appealing compositions in his times. Even the most famous painting The Last Supper the characters are arranged in the lower two-thirds of the golden ratio. Also, the position of Jesus is perfectly placed by arranging golden rectangles throughout the canvas.

Taj Mahal is known to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It also used Golden Ratio for its design. The central building of the Taj Mahal was designed using the Golden Ratio. The rectangles helped create the basic outline for the exteriors of the building, which were all in the Golden Proportion.

Using the golden ratio in architecture helps bring a sense of balance and height to the structure.  Any building that seems well balanced naturally draws attention towards it. One of the most simple manners to reflect balance in a building is by using the Golden rectangle principles.  Another advantage of using the Golden Ratio is it allows you to create various shapes. You don’t need to stick to box-shaped or rectangular structures. The golden ratio uses those shapes as a base to guide your design. Still, you can easily incorporate various other shapes. You need to make a few changes to the golden rectangle to turn the building into any shape you desire.  A few derivatives that architects usually use are the Golden Triangle and a Logarithmic Spiral.

5. Designing and Creating  Layouts:

Layouts are the system arrangement of various elements on a page that usually refers to a specific placement on text, image and the style. It is essential to understand layouts because a wrongly worked layout would lead to inaccurate delivery of the message you want to convey. A good layout is essential to convey the message effectively. Not only this but a proper layout would help enhance the look of a particular object individually and also as a whole. Hence for successful layouts, the two criteria that need to be kept in mind are individual visual elements and their relationship.

There are many layout options available to designers.  One of them is the “Z” layout which takes inspiration from the letter “Z” itself. It generally shows the path that a reader sees the elements on a page or a design.  Another layout principle is the Golden Ratio. Golden Spiral works best when you have many elements that might differ from each other to be arranged in a single layout. It is seen that people are naturally drawn to the centre of the spiral when witnessing a golden spiral. This gives us the insight to place the most important element in the centre of the spiral

6. The presence of Golden Ratio in Human Face:

Front face: It is interesting how prevalent the golden ratio is. For understanding its relevance, it is important to realize that even our faces draw from the concept of the golden ratio. The head makes a golden rectangle, and our eyes become the central point. The nose and the mouth are both situated at the right sections of the distance of the chin and eyes.

Side Face: If you look at a human head from the side, it illustrates the Divine Proportion. The first golden section that is at the front of the head defines the ear opening position. Then successive golden sections define different parts of the face, like the neck, the back of the eye, and front of the eye guiding back to the nose and mouth.

The human face has several instances of the divine proportion.  The centre of the pupil is proportional to the bottom of the teeth and bottom of the chin. The outer and inner edge of the eye is proportionate to the centre of the nose. Our outer edge of lips complements the outer ridges of lips.  The width of the iris is proportional to the width of the iris.

Understanding the Golden Ratio can be very helpful for design practices. It is a mathematical approach to design that stands out from other design practices. It is prevalent in many aspects of life naturally as well. Since it is naturally available in so many instances, we tend to appreciate any design that uses its principles many times without even realizing it.  Just remember the constant ratio 1:1.618 and keep using it in different instances and places.

The post Understanding the Golden Ratio in Design appeared first on Line25.

Source: https://ift.tt/2OXfOmD

Design your way

Those who spend a lot of time editing in Photoshop will find this article extremely useful. Photoshop Actions are the closest thing to magic for graphic designers and photographers. This useful tool allows you to bundle repetitive actions into a single one that will be automatically applied whenever you want it to. All the work will be done within seconds, without you having to worry about applying each step.

By the end of this article, you should know how to use Photoshop Actions and that will save you lots of time and effort. As you will notice yourself, the process is not complicated at all and it is extremely useful for batch editing.

Photoshop Actions – What Are They?

Simply put, Photoshop Actions are the recorded commands that you applied on an image. The same commands will be applied to the next image if you play the action you’ve just recorded. Basically, Photoshop will repeat all of your previous commands and apply them to a new file, thus saving you the time of doing it manually.

Photoshop is designed to make editing easy for everyone, and actions in Photoshop are the most useful tool for multi-step editing in batches. For instance, as a photographer, you need to obtain the same lighting adjustments on hundreds of photos, and that would be very difficult without using actions. Otherwise, you would have to repeat every single step, at the exact intensity, to obtain the same effect.

How to Use Photoshop Actions

You can use Photoshop Actions for many purposes. The main one is editing batches of photos, but that’s not the only way in which these can be useful. You can also use actions to edit all of your photos in the same style, without losing consistency. This matters in today’s world where an eye-pleasing Instagram feed can generate income.

Photoshop actions can be extremely useful if you know how to use them, so give it a shot and learn the amazing power of editing images automatically. Below you will learn the steps involved in using Photoshop Actions, carefully explained.

Turning them on…

To turn on Photoshop Actions, you need to make your action palette visible. If you can’t see it on your interface, go to Menu and then select Window, and Actions. You can also do the same by clicking ALT (Option on Mac) + F9. Next, you need to take a look at the Actions panel and figure out each button. Here is a short list explaining the most important ones:

• Stop – it stops the recording of the actions you are making on the file
• Record – it begins recording a new action after clicking the button
• Play – plays a previously recorded action
• New Set – creates a new set of actions
• New Action – adds a new action to an existing set
• Delete – deletes a selected set of actions, a specific action or a command

And some concepts to get familiar with:

• Action Set – this is an entire folder where all your actions are organized
• Action – this is the action you will be running; it is a collection of multiple commands
• Steps/Command – this is one command from the many that form an action
• Checkbox – here you will find the commands that will be executed and those that won’t be executed, according to your preferences
• Menu dialog – here is where you can control user input into an action; making it visible allows the user to modify settings for each file separately

Managing them…

Now that you are familiar with how to use Photoshop Actions in terms of tools involved, you need to learn how to manage them. To organize your actions, you need to make sure that you give a name to each Action or Set that you create. Without naming your work, it will all become a mess. Use descriptive names and double-check the content before applying the action to a new file.

You can place groups of multiple actions under a set. Sets are the best way to manage Photoshop Actions when you have a lot to organize. The secret relies on naming the sets and actions properly so that you can quickly search through them. You can also drag and drop elements from one set or action to another.

How to use Photoshop actions with the Button Mode?

The entire Actions Panel can be switched to Button Mode, thus transforming all of your actions in simple, clickable buttons. This makes using actions much faster, but it would be best to use this mode when you are already familiar with Photoshop Actions.

Recording them…

If you still don’t understand how actions work, this short paragraph will definitely explain it clearer. While working on a photo, you can start recording what you’re doing and Photoshop is able to apply the same changes in the next file you will be opening in the program. Basically, Photoshop records all of your steps and recreates them when you apply that action on another file.

How to play actions?

You probably understood how to use Photoshop Actions, but here is a detailed guide on how to record a new one:

• Open a file that you want to edit in Photoshop.
• Before beginning to edit anything, press “Begin Recording” in the Actions window. Every move you will make will be recorded from this point forward, including your keystrokes. Before making any change, think twice if you want it in the set. All actions are applied continually, so don’t forget about taking too long between changes.
• You can also create a new action directly by pressing the button with the same name in the Actions panel. This one will create a dialog box where you can enter the name of your new action. The process is the same as in the first case.
• After making all the desired changes, press “Stop” in the Actions window.
• From now on, you can play the action on other files.

To play an action you’ve recorded:

• Button Mode: click on the action that you have to play
• List Mode: select the action that you want to play from the list and click on Play

Assigning a key to your action

To make it even easier to apply Actions to your files, you can assign keys to them. Photoshop is very user-friendly when it comes to assigning shortcuts, so this will be really helpful in the long run, especially if you want to edit files in the same manner at all given times.

To set a shortcut, go to “Edit” and then “Keyboard Shortcuts”. In the dialog box, choose shortcuts for Panel Menus, expand Actions and for “Play”, assign the shortcut that is the most convenient for you.

Other tips on how to use Photoshop Actions

After learning how to use Photoshop Actions, you can apply other useful tips that will make your workflow process smoother. To edit only specific images using actions, use the Conditional Actions feature, which lets you update multiple images at once. You can set filters based on the image’s size, shape or other criteria.

For instance, if you have to edit a batch of images that include both landscape and portrait orientations, you don’t have to separate them in order to edit them all at once, because you can use Conditional Actions with a parameter set on size.

Hopefully, the tips you found in this article will be helpful. Learning how to use Photoshop Actions can be life-changing for a person who works with large batches of photos, so give this article a good read and get to work.

If you enjoyed reading this article about how to use Photoshop Actions, you should read these as well:

• Free Photoshop Actions For Photographers (100 of The Best)
• Pink background images to use in your design projects
• Wood background textures that you can add in your designs
• Beautiful Christmas wallpaper examples you should download

The post How to Use Photoshop Actions and Save A Ton of Time While Designing appeared first on Design your way.

Source: https://ift.tt/2OTVCSK