Design Like a Vulture

Sometimes we need a little help. Luckily the design industry has lots of free resources available out there, but sometimes you gotta go nomad and scavenge the interwebs for it.

Here’s a list of designer resources I’ve used over the years to help me in a pinch. A lot of designers already know about most of these, but just in case you forgot about some…

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY: Good old fashioned royalty-free stock photography, you can’t beat it. especially when it’s got Vince Vaughn in it. Check it out!

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3043138/use-these-generic-stock-photos-of-vince-vaughn-businessing-for-all-your-business-needs?utm_source=facebook

Okay, here’s a more reasonable site to pull royalty-free, high-quality stock photography from that has a broad spectrum of subject matter.

https://unsplash.com/
STOCK VECTOR GRAPHICS: Don’t forget the ever important shortcut wormhole in case you forgot your thumbdrive full of social media logo types. They have a few links to many other helpful pre-canned, trendy, flat design icons and map elements, useful for various things.

http://www.dreamstale.com/free-download-72-vector-social-media-icons/

Oh and if you can’t find a popular brand’s logo because the franchisee doesn’t have access to the corporate FTP library, a lot of elements new and old can be found at:

www.brandsoftheworld.com

Just make sure you check with the client before sending a proof to validate your using the latest version of the logo. This includes all major credit card logos as well.

FONTS: There’s obviously nothing more important to any text based design layout than the font you chose. It has to be legible and you can’t be missing punctuation or capital letters. FontShop has the best variety of safe, well designed fonts and have free selections as well as those for pay. It’s a lot better than dafont.com which is for chumps in my opinion.

https://www.fontshop.com/

On the other side of this coin is when you have some mangled locked and undocumented font on a poster the client likes and you need to match it. Here’s a cutesy website that helps identify those pesky fonts.

http://fontsinuse.com/

COLOR SCHEMES: Helpful in a pinch when you aren’t sure what triad might go well against a burnt-orange logo element in your layout.

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

WEB DESIGN / CODING: Maybe you’re a newbie trying to cut into the web design space or maybe you just need to brush up on some coding languages.

http://www.w3schools.com/

SOCIAL MEDIA MADNESS: Maybe you need to manage your time a little better and want to save some by pushing a status update to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net? There’s an app for your phone called Buffer (Android, iOS) that does just that. 

Want to manage more than one Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumbler, ect. account at the same time? You gotta go with Hootsuite. They have a free version for PC/Mac that supports up to 3 social media accounts. You can pay a fee if you need more than than to upgrade to Pro or Enterprise levels of service.

TUTORIALS: Looking for assistance in a design program or three? There’s YouTube of course, but how do you know you’re getting a legitimate designer behind the wheel or anyone with real world experience that won’t lead you down some dark alley of personal trial and error that may or may not be the fastest or safest method or performing the actions you are inquiring about? You don’t, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research but I recommend getting some tutorials from…

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/

or

www.Lynda.com

or the native video tutorials that come with an upgrade to any
Adobe Creative Cloud software.

BONUS APP!Install Odrive (PC/Mac) on your computer and hook it up to your various cloud-storage services to keep everything in a single folder. It’s free for up to five accounts.

Hopefully this will be useful to you in your efforts to manage your resources more efficiently.