Over the course of the last several years, the DIY market has exploded spawning magazines, books, movies and fueling the growth of the online, handmade marketplace. In Robin Williams Handmade Design Workshop: Create Handmade Elements for Digital Designs, best-selling author Robin Williams and Carmen Sheldon take designers away from their computers and show them, step-by-step, how to use traditional artist's tools to create handmade elements for their digital artwork. The authors provide a wealth of new ideas to jump-start creativity and get graphic designers thinking in new ways. Each how-to is illustrated with tons of photos to show how to use paints, inks, textures, modeling pastes, and more to create handmade materials that can then be scanned in and used to create one-of-a-kind print projects or web sites. Examples of finished projects and Web sites are featured throughout the book to provide both instruction and inspiration for designers to use in their own projects.

Learn design theory and practical know-how from the award-winning author/design team, Robin Williams and John Tollett! Robin Williams introduced design and typographic principles to legions of readers with her best-selling Non-Designer's book series. Now she and designer/co-author John Tollett take you to the next level of creative design with practical advice and lessons in composition, visual impact, and design challenges. Presented in Robin and John's signature style—writing that is so crystal clear, it's accessible to absolutely anyone—and illustrated with hundreds of full-color design examples, the ideas in this book tackle design theory, visual puns, and layout and graphics strategies for real-world projects. Developing designers will appreciate the authors' imaginative approach and well-chosen examples. Discover practical and effective design principles and concepts—and how to apply them to virtually any project. Learn why some designs are attention-getting and others are not. Learn how to choose just the right look—corporate or casual, classic or trendy—for specific types of projects, such as business cards, letterhead and envelopes, newsletters and brochures, logos, advertising, and more. Test your design acumen by comparing before-and-after examples. Find a wealth of inspiration for your own design projects. Gain insight into the design process by studying the work of guest designers, who offer their personal commentary and insights.

Provides information on creating an effective digital presentation, covering such topics as animation, plot, contrast, software, and handouts.

In Digital Alchemy, acclaimed printmaker Bonny Pierce Lhotka shows how to turn your standard inkjet printer into a seemingly magical instrument capable of transforming your printed images into true works of art. Using plenty of visuals and straightforward terms, Lhotka walks you step-by-step through over a dozen projects. Forget printing on boring old paper, in Digital Alchemy, you’ll learn how to transfer and print images to a variety of surfaces including metal, wood, fabric, stone, and plastic using the techniques Lhotka’s spent years developing. If you’re a photographer looking for new ways to personalize your work or a digital artist who’s ready to take your work to the next level, you’ll find all of the tools, techniques, and inspiration you need in this book. Lhotka’s enthusiasm for experimenting with unusual printing materials and processes has led her to create new and amazing transfer techniques, including one that resembles a PolaroidTM transfer on steroids. She also shows you how to make prints using unexpected, everyday materials such as hand sanitizer and gelatin. You’ll even learn direct printing, the technique for sending your custom substrate through your printer almost as if it were paper. In Digital Alchemy, you’ll learn how to: Transfer images to metal, wood, plastic, and other materials that will not feed through an inkjet printer Print directly on metal for a fraction of the cost of using a print service Simulate a print from an expensive UV flatbed printer using an inexpensive desktop printer Use carrier sheets and paintable precoats to print on almost any surface Achieve near-lithographic quality digital prints with transfer processes to uncoated fine art paper In addition to the tutorials in the book, you can watch Lhotka in action on the included DVD-ROM, which has over 60 minutes of video footage where you’ll learn how to perform an alcohol gel transfer, transfer an image to a wooden surface, use your inkjet printer to achieve remarkable prints, and more. Simply insert the DVD-ROM into your computer's DVD drive. Note, this DVD-ROM will not work in TV DVD players.

In this text, Robin Williams takes her lessons on creative design, highly regarded within the graphics community, and applies them to the Web.

How pervasive digital devices—smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and their networks—us formulate a sense of place and refine social relationships How do pervasive digital devices—smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and cameras, among others—influence the way we use spaces? In The Tuning of Place, Richard Coyne argues that these ubiquitous devices and the networks that support them become the means of making incremental adjustments within spaces—of tuning place. Pervasive media help us formulate a sense of place, writes Coyne, through their capacity to introduce small changes, in the same way that tuning a musical instrument invokes the subtle process of recalibration. Places are inhabited spaces, populated by people, their concerns, memories, stories, conversations, encounters, and artifacts. The tuning of place—whereby people use their devices in their interactions with one another—is also a tuning of social relations. The range of ubiquity is vast—from the familiar phones and hand-held devices through RFID tags, smart badges, dynamic signage, microprocessors in cars and kitchen appliances, wearable computing, and prosthetics, to devices still in development. Rather than catalog achievements and predictions, Coyne offers a theoretical framework for discussing pervasive media that can inform developers, designers, and users as they contemplate interventions into the environment. Processes of tuning can lead to consideration of themes highly relevant to pervasive computing: intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference.