Awhile ago I was asked by Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine to design the cover of Paul Boag’s new book titled ‘Click! How To Encourage Clicks Without Shady Tricks’ (published in June 2020). Today I want to share the process of this design.

After having designed Paul Boag’s two previous books, ‘Digital Adaptation’ and ‘UX Revolution’, I was truly honored to get this request once again.

Read about the design process of the ‘UX Revolution’ book here.

About the Book

This book is about the fact that the web has become full of manipulative copy, annoying overlays and intrusive dark patterns. …

Pleased to say that the following will appeal to font lovers and typography enthusiasts. Read on if you are up to extend your font library without giving your wallet a heart attack.

With The Typography Lover’s Essential Collection from Design Cuts you’ll have typefaces on your hands full of modernity, elegance, boldness and detail. My top favorite is BR Hendrix, but choosing your favorite font is like choosing your favorite color, an impossible choice to make. Other favorites are the elegant Ageo, Parnas, Nocturne Serif, and the fun Organetto (top right in the header image) where you can play with…

One way of changing colors throughout your artwork in Adobe Illustrator is by adjusting the color of your Global Swatches. If you’re using Global Swatches as color fills (or strokes) on all of your objects, changing such a swatch will change this color throughout your artwork. You make a swatch global by checking this option in the color window that appears when double click a swatch. However, a more drastic way of changing all colors in your artwork is via the Recolor Artwork feature…

1. Recolor Artwork

This is a powerful feature that can help tweaking different colors and tones all at once…

Let’s talk fonts again. There’s this new bundle called The Type Designer’s Luxury Font Library that got my attention. I’m always looking to change things up a little when it comes to my font library. If you are thinking similarly, I’m pretty sure this one will interest you also. As a designer we all need variety of typeface styles that we can play around with.

What’s in it?

A lot, which is usually the case with these bundles. Some are better than others but this one is setting the bar pretty high in my humble opinion. What I especially appreciate about these bundles…

Selecting is what we do so much while we design. We select an anchor point, a path, an object, a group, all elements… When you hit the Select All shortcut, do you prefer everything selected on all artboards or just the one you’re working on? Are you familiar with the Group Selection tool?

1. Select All Shortcut

If you are like me and work with multiple artboards a lot, you need to be aware that the default Select All shortcut, Cmd/Ctrl + A selects all objects on all artboards. Cmd/Ctrl + Option/Alt + A selects only the objects on the active artboard. …

If you are a bit like me then you are subscribed to a few type foundry newsletters and are always on the lookout to expand your font library. Mostly what I see and like is expensive. That’s why I always look froward to these font bundles where you can upgrade your library at 99% off. Yes, that’s $2485 worth of top quality fonts for just $29.

Comprehensive Package

I think it’s fair to say that you won’t find a better deal. Helpful in times like these where money is tight and you maybe need to update your portfolio as cheaply as possible…

Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic vector creation tool and you can create a lot of things without ever using the Pen Tool. However, if you want to use Illustrator at its full potential, I personally believe that you need to master and become proficient in working with the aforementioned Pen tool. The inner workings of it aren’t easily explained in text form so that’s why I resorted to Pen Tool exercises. Remember that it is a tool that needs patience, and a lot of practice until you really master it.

The Pen Tool

When you have been using Adobe Illustrator as long as…

Art brushes are a powerful feature in Adobe Illustrator and can help reduce rather complicated steps in the creation of simple things. Think for instance what’s needed to create a rainbow. It’s basically a half circle of 7 colored lines of equal width. You’d think of creating each color line separately as a circle, but then you need to do the math to make sure each circle has the exact same width etc. This is a perfect example for the creation of an Art Brush.

1. Create The Art Brush

You start by drawing a square for the first color of the rainbow. Use 10…