The Change Creative
You may have designed the best website in the world, but it may not benefit you or your business at all unless you have a great web host, too. With all of the options that are available, it can be difficult to figure out what web hosting service will meet your needs. There are several different characteristics that you should look for when you are choosing the best web host for your website.
Graphic designers are always looking for new and interesting apps to help with their work, and Canva is the latest cloud tool to fit the bill. Canva is designed for people who have no interest in Photoshop yet need attrative graphic design and illustration for their work. If you can work in Canva, you can sell your services to a whole new audience.
Here’s a quick guide to the brand new Canva site. It’s still in beta at the time of writing this review, but it’s slowly bring opened up to new members.
Canva is essentially a graphic design toolkit boiled down to its simplest components. Users can combine text, images, layouts and more into quick graphics for practically any purpose. It’s of particular interest to marketers because its presets support sites like Facebook and Twitter, so you can quickly knock up a header image that will fit.
Canva is built on presets, but you can expand the library of images for a small fee. You’re not limited to the Canva selection; you can upload your own graphic design work and play around with it on the Canva site. Canva supports your creativity with layouts that can be adapted, or you can start from a blank canvas and build your design from the ground up. There are thousands of fonts available for designers to use, and Canva says that its images are compatible with popular graphic design software. (We assume that this comment refers to Photoshop).
Need to get approval on your design or show off your ideas before they’re developed? Canva makes sharing simple. Just send your ideas to the client before paying for the content you need from the Canva library.
The really clever thing is the fee system on Canva; it’s free to share and create, but you have to pay to download the finished image. That means graphic designers can protect themselves; their clients could be asked to sign off a creation before its paid for to ensure they’re 100 per cent happy with the work. Only then can they use it on the web or in print. If they don’t like a font or a component image, you can swap it out before you’ve paid for it, keeping your client happy in the proces.
Graphic designers can also make money from Canva by uploading their own design work. Every time a Canva user chooses their uploaded content for a graphic, the original designer gets a cut of the licensing fee.
If you want to join Canva’s rapidly growing designer network, it’s easy to get started. But remember: your content will be jostling for attention among more than a million other library items. In order to make serious cash, you’ll need to spend time developing quality content.
Canva is prioritising access to professional graphic designers; the information is on its Designers page. There’s also a page for illustrators and photographers. Get started now.
Photo provided by: Guest blogging communityBy Sam Wright
Sam Wright is a creative writer with an interest in new gadgets and apps. He writes on behalf of Brand Republic.
What do you know about some of the most famous paintings in history?
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From Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper to Pablo Picasso’s The Dream, each work of art has its own backstory and legacy that not everyone is familiar with. As you learn more about the paintings that you see on display in galleries, you may decide to purchase reprints to hang in your own home. It can be tough to find just the right painting, but when you see something you like that speaks to you it is that much harder to say no. The top ten most popular fine art reprints that people purchase include The Mona Lisa, Starry Night, and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. You can learn more about each as well as the rest of the paintings on the list by reading through the infographic below. This way you can get a glimpse of pieces that you can add to your personal collection.
Created by Coastal Printworks, provider of provides Museum Quality T-Shirt Screen-Printing, Digital T-Shirt Printing and embroidery.
With technology becoming ever more developed, those devices that were previously reserved for communications – such as computers, mobile smartphones and tablets – are becoming an essential element of the creative process of art. Digital art is the umbrella term for any artistic works or practices that use digital technology as a key part of the creative/presentation process, so what is exactly does this new fangled method of creativity entail?
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A Brief History of Digital Art
Also known as computer art or multimedia art, digital art has been around since the 1970s and is considered a method of new media art. Previously favoured artistic methods, such as painting, drawing, sculpture and audible arts have been transformed and repositioned in a digital environment – something that sparked mass resistance from the more traditional of creative beings.
Once the resistance subsided, artists across the globe started to embrace digital art, with some even pioneering new practices such as net art, digital installation art and virtual reality. In the modern day, the term digital art is applied to works that use some method of digitisation within their creation or, alternatively, art that uses methods of digital mass production when it comes to presentation.
What are the techniques?
There are hundreds of ways to produce digital art, but one of the most used methods is computer-generated art – also known as fractal or algorithmic art. Developed in the 1980s, computer-generated art is created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, to produce a larger often abstract work of art.
Some artists however use materials from other sources to produce their work. Often images are scanned into a computer and used as an element within the final work (similar to a mash-up piece), whilst other artists work with vector graphics that are produced using a mouse or graphics tablet.
Digital paintings are also prominent in new media art. Produced in a similar way to traditional paintings, digi-paintings are created with the aid of computer software that produces pixelated brush strokes on screen or in the final print. Digital paintings are often printed as an image on canvas, just like their oil/acrylic/watercolour predecessors, or displayed on an electronic screen.
Prominent pop artist Andy Warhol was one of the first famous artists to incorporate digital art into his portfolio. Using a Commodore Amiga, he manipulated an image of Blondie front woman Debbie Harry, that was originally captured in monochrome using a video camera. He edited the image by adding colour through the method of flood fills, using an early graphics program called ProPaint. This article of Debbie Harry is widely considered one of the earliest and most notable works of digital art.
Andy Warhol’s Debbie Harry Digi-art (1985)
Source: http://images.thevine.com.au/resources/images/000/014/14549_harrydetail_010412034001_591w.png
What can I produce on a computer?
Computer-generated visual media
Visual media generated on a computer can be divided in two categories. The first is the creation of 2D visual information that can be displayed on an electronic monitor, whilst the second is information that is mathematically translated into 3D information. The latter is usually viewed through a perspective projection on an electronic monitor.
Graphics in their simplest 2D form are created via methods that reflect how artists draw using a traditional pen and paper setup. However, digital 2D graphics are drawn electronically, using a graphics tablet with a stylus or a mouse, but the final images still appear as a realistic painting or pencil drawing whilst on display on screen.
Meanwhile 3D imagery is created by using using geometric shapes in the production of three-dimensional objects and other scenes that can be ultimately used in sister media, such as film, game design or print, amongst others.
Computer-generated animated imagery
Animated digital imagery is usually produced using models that are created by specialist 3D artists. Computer-generated animated imagery is known in the film industry as CGI, and is often used in the production of special effects for the likes of the movies in the Harry Potter franchise and in Marvel films such as Iron Man and Avengers Assemble, amongst others. Computer images have been in used in movies since the 1970s, although it wasn’t until the late 90s/early 2000s that CGI became advanced enough to create animated images that looked impressively realistic.
Digital installation art
Digital installation art is often interactive, in that viewers can manipulate the art to put their own personal stamp on the installation. Most digital installations involve the use of projections or live video capture, but there are also many other techniques utilised in the production of installation art. Digital installations are a particularly good method for those artist-imagined pieces that wish to play on the viewer’s senses. Fruin’s (2003) installation at the University of Illinois in Chicago, US – entitled The Cave Automatic Virtual Environment – is a prime example of digital installation art.
With many subtypes beneath the umbrella of digital art – such as motion graphics, music visualisation, pixel art and others – this field will continue to grow alongside the further development of technology. As an already interesting field, creatives and fans of art can only become even more intrigued by the notion of digital art; it will be interesting to see which technology becomes the next virtual canvas.
Vicky works alonside Stuart Morris, a design and print studio. She is a keen illustrator and craft enthusiast who writes a range of art and design history articles as well as how-to tutorials.
