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If you live in America, chances are you've heard (or used) the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
Most of us know it means, essentially, that you shouldn't make all your plans based on one possible thing happening. But it's kind of a weird phrase, right? Have you ever stopped to wonder where it originated?
Its use in print has been traced to the novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 1600s, although it possibly was mistranslated to an inexact English idiom from the original and may have other roots in Italian phrases.
Different cultures around the world all have their own similar sayings — proverbs, if you will — that make sense to those who've grown up speaking the language but sound downright odd to anyone who hasn't.
James Chapman is fascinated by these sayings and how they translate across languages and cultures....
Color makes a design come alive.It can attract attention, set a mood, and even influence our emotions and perceptions. But sometimes it can be hard to know where to start when choosing a color palette for your design project. So we’ve done the hard work for you— giving you 100 color combinations inspired by nature, food & drink, travel, and everyday items. Want to use these color combinations in Canva? Click here to sign up for free if you haven’t already (if you haven’t — are you kidding me?!). Canva lets you change the colors of your design by entering the hex code in the color menu. Check out the video below for a quick tutorial on how...
There’s no reason for your designs to look drab – especially when it comes to color. A quick glance online and you’ll find a stockpile of color scheme apps ready to help you learn, play and perfect your next palette.From clever Hex code games to comprehensive color wheels, here are 15 of our favorite free color scheme apps to take your designs to the next level....
So a portmanteau is formed from two french words, "porter" which meanscarry and "manteau" which means mantle – a mantle is a cloak, the kind Anna wore in Frozen, or if you are a more traditionalist fairy tale lover, what Red Riding Hood wore en route to grandma’s house (to be honest, I’ve always thought it was a cape but I digress). A manteau is more of a clothes valet, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Put them together and you use portmanteau to refer to travelling bags or suitcases (because they carry your cloaks around?) only these bags are old-fashioned, made from leather and can open into compartments. Here are some examples....
The most brilliant writers and clearest thinkers I personally know have gone on to become lawyers, web developers, and even doctors. They wouldn’t be caught dead as content writers.
That’s a shame, because writing and developing great content is an incredibly valuable profession — and it requires a unique sensibility that is just as difficult and worthwhile to pursue. It doesn’t come easy.
But I don’t think everyone sees it that way — I’ve come across hundreds of writers who think they’re qualified to opine on behalf of my company just because they speak English.
Content writing still suffers from a lack of pride, skill, and craft. How do we change that?...
There are thousands of Tumblr themes all over the web. To be perfectly frank, most of them aren’t great, and won’t do your creative work justice. Today we’ve collected thirty of our favourite premium Tumblr themes from across the web.
All of these cost a few dollars, but all of them will take your Tumblr blog to another level. From stylish, minimal Tumblr themes, through to those featuring big colours and bold images — we have a full selection. All of them are available to buy straight from Tumblr directly, and can be set up on your blog in a few minutes!...
Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught.
And I’d love to share some of my favorite lessons.
I’ve emptied my swipe file. What you see here is everything I’ve starred and saved over the past five years. If you want to learn more about writing for the web, content marketing, and the most persuasive way to communicate online, I think here’s a pretty good place to start....
No design experience?
No problem! Let's start from scratch and get familiar with the basic Canva tools that will help you create amazing designs.
Design Essentials will guide you through simple tools and techniques that will help you create designs you can proudly share with the world.
Fonts bring your words to life. Learn how to easily choose fonts that emphasize your message and make your designs look beautiful.
Color can be used to convey moods and create emphasis in your designs. We show you how to build meaningful color relationships to create visually stunning graphics.
Whether you upload your own, or choose from our library of over a million, images are a vital component of eye-catching designs. Learn how to use simple Canva tools to compose and enhance your images for greater visual impact....
It’s no secret that designers have their special “go-to” places for inspiration and I was recently asked me what mine are.
When looking for inspiration with typography and design, these are the websites that I highly recommend bookmarking. It’s good stuff, really it is....
About six months ago, Pocket Gems, a mobile game developer, launched a new platform called Episode. It allows writers to script a story and then turn it into an animated interactive mobile story. It combines parts of TV shows, comics, and novels, and provides the unique ability for readers to have some control of how the story goes.
I started writing on the platform almost as soon as it launched and have written three stories to date. My most successful story, Finding Mr. Wright, has built a significant audience in a short time. So far it has an audience of 163,000 readers, who have collectively read over 1,222,000 chapters of my story....
Take your DIY design skills to the next level by getting a crash course in typography.
...Every little change you make to a word or a body of text can make a huge difference in the overall piece. The little details do matter.
In fact, one of the only college courses Steve Jobs took was on calligraphy and typography, which he believed played a critical role in the success of Apple. As he once said in his Stanford University commencement speech, "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts." Can you imagine a world where Apple products didn't have a focus on beautiful design? I certainly can't.
So, what do you say? Are you ready to take your DIY design skills to the next level? Let's get started....
...Below, we’ve excerpted twenty good reads he recommends for budding writers. These are books, King writes, that directly inspired him: “In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.”
To the writer, he says, “a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work.” And for the reader? “They’re apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.”..
Once upon the time--1969, to be exact--The Valley of Gwangi (see poster, left) was made. Based on a story concept by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien (King Kong), and employing the stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen (former apprentice to O'Brien), it was and is the greatest cowboy-dinosaur movie ever made.
In the summer of 1970, a pencil-necked geek named Matt (see photo, right) discovered Gwangi quite by accident when it was the opening "B-movie" at his local theater with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Matt was all of seven, and he hooted and hollered and cheered throughout the film.
He was all alone that evening ... well, sort of all alone....
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What you need is some help from artists who’ve already blazed a trail and discovered what actually works. Because some of those ideas might work for you too. So check out the following list of excellent role models for tons of ideas. And don’t just stick to your own field – cross-pollinate and explore ideas from other disciplines....
In order to arrange your design, you need a place to start. Backgrounds are the foundation of your graphics — it helps pave the path to forming a successful composition. Textures and colors help create depth and contrast, allowing your graphics to stand out and get noticed. Well composed images can help create space for you to overlay text, while visually communicating your message at the same time. Using a background can help give your designs more context and provide a visual element to help support your content. Bonus: We’ve designed most of the images in this article as templates for you to personalize! To use them for your own stuff, just click them and they’ll be ready to edit in your Canva account (No Canva? It’s free!).
Sometimes websites are just so darn ugly. You have to wonder what they were thinking about when they slapped it together. However, if you want users to take an interest in your website you can learn from all the mistakes of previous website admins.
While it might be a bit ugly below, every website is a goldmine of information on how not to design a website. When you put together the lessons, you can determine the best way to design your own site....
If you want to make something that people really care about, that they actually give a hot shit about, you have to care about it yourself. Because if you don’t, then try as you might, it’ll come out in the final product.
The reason for this?
Making something is hard. Making something you don’t care about is even harder.
The only way you’ll be able to consistently work, when you don’t want to work, consistently try when you don’t want to try, is by deeply and honestly caring about your work....
Update – we launched Pablo a new tool to create beautiful images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds
You can use Pablo right from the get-go, no need to login or create an account. Just quickly create amazing images super fast.
To make the visual side of your social media strategy a bit easier, here are some tools to help you create awesome pictures....
Amsterdam-based graphic designer José Bernabé has created a fascinating new type called Chemical Cloud.
By playing around with brushes in Photoshop, Bernabé successfully fuses a cloud-like pattern with a gradient of color, together with a sans-serif font as the backbone. The result is unexpectedly stunning.
There are over 650 Google Fonts available for free. But, pairing typefaces isn’t easy and many of those fonts don’t work for typical websites. Part of the 25x52 initiative, this collaborative, ongoing project offers inspiration for using Google’s font library.
All passages are from the Project Gutenberg transcript of Æsop’s Fables. All photographic images are from Unsplash.com....
A gentle application of transparency to your images is a clever way to create beautiful designs. Whether applied to a photograph used as a background or to shape and text to form a layered effect, this tool is a powerful and popular part of the web and print design process....
I guess I’m in a metaphysical mood today. Thinking about writing for the internet, how it’s different, and finding your own style.
So, let’s set the scene…
Seth Godin, Lao-Tzu and I walk into Hemingway’s Bar & Grill. Godin says, “I’ll have a Purple Cow.” I say, in my best Homer Simpson salutation, “Beer me.” Lao-Tzu says, “Ommmmm.”
Drinks with Seth Godin
That’s me channeling Seth Godin, echoing Lao-Tzu.
Except I’m not a bald guy and I don’t wear saffron like either of these wise men....
The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is "cognitively unnatural." For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?
Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible.
My friend and podcast co-host Tom Webster recently penned a really honest and thought-provoking post called “Authorship.”
In the post, Tom laments that the more he guest posts and syndicates his writing, the less relevant he may become. I know that sounds counter-intuitive but he makes some good points.
The web cares about CONTENT, not necessarily authors, and Tom postulates that in our frenzy to write and distibrute content, we may be creating more and more work only to become less and less visible....
I've been thinking about comic strip creation tools quite a bit lately so I decided to share a handful of ideas for teaching with comics and the online tools that students can use to create them.
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![Design School's Ultimate Guide to Designing With Backgrounds [With Ready-to-Use Templates] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/eUy0foC9bWwH53Mpp35bKjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Lots of wonderful lessons from the wisdom of these proverbs from around the world.