behind the scenes

Travel Calendars

behind the scenes, Digital Nomad, Fun, Real life, Travel, Uncategorized

I am a digital nomad. This means I travel alot. Before my very first big overseas, multi-destination trip, my parents asked me to make them a calendar they could use as the background on their tablet devices. As a graphic designer, this task is super easy. So I made some backgrounds in Illustrator. I figured they need to know city and flight/bus details. I thought I would throw in the visual reference of flags.

TK-Europe-December

The desktop size of my laptop is much greater and I really liked these calendars as a way of knowing where I was now, and what was coming up. I used the additional widescreen area to put some key photos (found on Google) that inspired me about visiting these locations.

K-Dec

This year when going on another long-extended multi-destination trip, I did the same travel calendars for friends and family. I was super glad to have made it easy to work with as I went through adding the new flags and locations. This time the trip was a lot slower so there is lots of duplication. (I walked 500km on the Camino de Santiago).

desktop wallpaper travel holiday calendar infographic design by lakazdi freelance graphic designer specialising in books and documents

But at  the end of this trip, I had no home base to go back to and so many choices of my next adventure, I wasn’t sure how to express this. So I used fades and question marks.

10-October2018

The artboard in my Illustrator document has all the various goodies or elements to drag around as I need them. Super easy.

The desktop size of my laptop is much greater and I really liked these calendars as a way of knowing where I was now, and what was coming up. I used the additional widescreen area to put some key photos (found on Google) that inspired me about visiting these locations.

If you want something similar, contact me and we can discuss your specifics.

Graphic Design mockups

behind the scenes, Showcasing

It has been really interesting for me to see how much the trend of print mockups has been on the internet as a way to showcase your work. Not so long ago when I first was adding portfolio items to behance I was using just screenshots of my files and now I take the time (which is getting quicker and quicker) to make mockup images. They really do tell the story better and are instantly recognisable. It is not until I see the two side-by-side that I realise this is a trend that will not be going away and this is something I am very happy with.

It certainly makes a difference when showing spreads of a book. Previously I felt the need to show the spine and edges otherwise there is no context.

using photoshop photo realistic mockup files to showcase your printed design work

I really do not think the difference is as profound with the cover but certainly, it is more obvious that this is a book cover and not a flyer or something else.mockups2But when showing something really quite big, like a billboard, the mockups are simply wonderful because it is so much easier to understand the scale in this context.

using photoshop photo realistic mockup files to showcase your printed design work

Easy Template Design

behind the scenes

While making an InDesign template for a client. I thought of how daunting InDesign can be with all its options and tools. Knowing my client would like the easiest template possible I did certain things to simplify the template. The biggest consideration was to lock anything that the client will not be editing. I set up the InDesign package with multiple cover images so updating the link changed the cover image. Super easy.

The template has the date and company name getting changed in several places each so I have set up find and change terms (find <company> and <date>). This makes it very easy to change all instances. The textboxes which contain these two terms were also made flexibly so if there was to be a long company name, the textbox would adjust.

template terms find replace, find/change indesign template easy for client to edit and change or alter based on input locked layers locking indesign cc

Another item which needs editing by the client is a radial graph. Everything that is not being edited is on a locked layer. This takes out most of the complexity here and creates a less daunting editing task.

lockedLayers