Exploring Our Process: Zymetis Redesign from Start to Finish
One of my favorite aspects of being a web designer is the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of interesting clients. Zymetis, a company that is as passionate about biotechnology and the environment as I am about design, has been no exception. Every meeting with them was an enthusiastic adventure into the world of science and sustainable fossil fuel alternatives. The project gave me new insight into the world of bio-fuels. 
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Designing Through the Dog Days of Summer
When it comes to designer assignments, our ideal at Viget is to have one designer lead a project from start to finish – and in most cases they do. But the reality is that limited designer availability, summer vacations, or competing priorities have challenged us to find alternatives for certain projects. Respecting each other's design vision is imperative when we tackle these situations by re-allocating portions of the design responsibilities, which we just succeeded in doing with Interventional Paws.
We addressed this non-profit's simple redesign by having one designer do mood boards, another do design comps, and a third to build-out in ExpressionEngine.
Breaking Bad Habits in Photoshop
I’ve been a regular Photoshop user for almost a decade, which makes me feel old. But Photoshop 1.0 came out in 1990 which means some of you were learning to think in Layers while I was listening to NKOTB and wearing slap bracelets.
After ten years of Photoshop use you’d think I’d be a pro. And yeah, I’m decent. But I’ve got some lousy techniques deeply ingrained in my psyche. Many are amateur methods I learned as a beginner and should have outgrown. Some are just outdated ways of working with an ever-improving piece of software. They all impact my speed, efficiency, and quality. But it’s never too late to address a bad habit, so here are a few I’m working on curbing:
Creating Unique Shapes Using Actionscript
Every so often, projects come along that are so unique that it's difficult to find others like them on the net. When building a project, take a video player for example; I often search for others like it to see how other developers have handled the same problems and make any attempt to add improvements wherever possible.
Such a project came along recently which needed to give users the ability to create their own floor plans. Since floor plans come in infinite shapes and sizes, I needed to give every user almost limitless control over their shapes. How does one go about doing this?
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I Can Has Stock Images!
Stock imagery can really make or break a good design. Searching for that perfect image(s) to complement your design can be a very time consuming task -- not to mention budget limitations we may have to consider.
Luckily, there are lots of great stock image resources available on the web whether to meet any budget size.
Resizing rounded rectangles in Photoshop
The rounded corner style has been around for a quite a while now, and one thing (beyond wanton overuse) has always bothered me about it. When working with rounded rectangles in Photoshop, there seemed to be no elegant way to resize them. The corners don’t remain intact when you use Transform (Ctrl/Cmd-T) to scale the shape. Instead of lightly rounded edges, you end up with ugly mishaps like this:
My default method for getting around it was to rasterize the shape, move the ends around, and then fill the gaps by resizing the middle. Darren Hoyt has a good walk through of that trick here. Another workaround is to create the shape in Illustrator and then paste it in as a Smart Object. But both felt like bad hacks for doing something that should be inherently simple.
Getting Rid of Jaggies on Your Photo Borders
During a recent moodboard review, the design team got to wondering what the best solution was for getting rid of Photoshop "jaggies," those jagged edges that show up on your nice clean shapes; especially when you start rotating them. I had a few ideas but decided to do some tests to see what REALLY works best. I started my testing with a common design element that falls prey to jaggies: a photo with a white border, slightly rotated. The photo I’m working with happens to be of my ultra adorable dog Bruiser. First, I created two versions—one photo with an 8-pixel white inside stroke (Layer Style > Stroke) and one photo with a white square shape layer behind it. Then I rotated both sets 8 degrees clockwise. 
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Recent Comments
@Samantha, I’m not aware of a “find/replace font” function. That essentially would be exactly what we need, which is a type styles feature/palette. It’s indeed unfortunate, and is one...
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- kaske on 'Photoshop Type Time Savers'.
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