Best of Graphic Design Conferences 2014: Connect, collaborate and be forever changed: Grab your the ticket to WMC Fest!

When your head is down and nose is to the grindstone, it’s easy to feel disconnected from the world, from your fellow creatives. As projects pile up, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and to even lose that fire you once had as a designer, artist, musician, entrepreneur, maker, doer, dreamer.

What if I told you you have the opportunity to breathe again?

Attend our 5th annual Weapons of Mass Creation Fest (running August 15 – 17) and you’ll experience three days of inspiration on overdrive: three days surrounded by folks just like you, who have all the passion in the world, yearning to become better than they once were. They’ll want to hear your successes, your struggles, to collaborate and connect. They’ll help you see life and work with new eyes. They’ll ask nothing in return.

The metal dumpster texture pack demo - by The Shop / Simon Birky Hartmann

Texture Tutorial: using metal and rust textures to destroy a design

An Interview with Rock Star Designer Tad Carpenter

He’ll be the last to tell you, but for us here at Go Media, WMC Fest 3 alum Tad Carpenter is a rock star. Designer, illustrator, author and teacher, Tad balances good stuff like brand identity, packaging and book design, illustration and interactive along with his role as Professor at University of Kansas. Surrounded by design (his parents were artists and his wife Jessica a designer, too), Tad creates whimsical, smart and all-around fun for clients like Macy’s, Chronicle Books, MTV, Adobe and Hallmark Cards.

Photoshop Mockup Templates are only $2.99 each!

I know how many grueling hours you put into that design. You’re so super excited that you’re tempted to just send it off to the client as is, amIright?

NO! You’re smarter than that.

Tell me that you have a few moments (and a few dollars) to make that design shine.

I promise it will take your design from ordinary to extraordinary.

The photocopy noise texture pack by The Shop / Simon Birky Hartmann

Texture Tutorial: Aged poster design with the Photocopy Noise Texture Pack

eCommerce Nightmare: How CS-Cart handcuffed us for years and why we switched to WooCommerce

Oh dear, where do I start? I feel like there’s a huge story behind the scenes that we’ve never let our community in on. To be honest, we’re quite embarrassed about it and we’ve been trying to make things right ever since. But I think it’s time to come clean.

TL;DR: We’ve been trying to upgrade our graphic design resource marketplace, the Arsenal since 2010 and have failed miserably due to working with a heavily customized version of CS-Cart which seemingly handcuffed us to their development team. 4 years, headaches, panic attacks and tens of thousands of dollars later we are FINALLY breaking the chains and getting a taste of freedom! We’ve switched our platform over to WordPress and WooCommerce. Wordpress and WooCommerce both happen to also be Go Media’s preferred solutions for so many of our own clients…

So what was the problem?

Packaging Design Inspiration: 50+ Awesome Examples

Here at Go Media, we’re passionate about all aspects of design: web, print, branding and illustration.

Some may say we have too much fun, but we’d disagree. It’s just that we believe it’s really important to love what you do.

Recently, we were tasked with yet another awesome project – packaging design for Dirty Energy, a brand new energy bar packed with all sorts of goodness. We enjoyed building upon its core theme, “built from the ground up,” incorporating earthiness into our design.

How to design a great t-shirt (even with minimal design skills) quickly: The Unleashed T-Shirt Pack by Steve Knerem

In design, it seems, speed and quality rarely go hand in hand.

But there are some instances when you can have it all.

Introducing the T-Shirt Mockup Pack

With our new t-shirt mockup packs, you can design a great t-shirt quickly.

Seriously.

Here’s what happens: we hook you up hard core with all of the artwork and mockup files. You take those files into AI and modify the original illustration (if you so choose). Then, you mockup your design in Photoshop with some of the World’s Best Templates (ours of course). Bada bing, bada boom: you’ve got a t-shirt to call your very own.

You have ultimate creative freedom, giving both you seasoned designers, and those of you with beginner design skills, countless possibilities.

The Number One Myth of Hiring (& How You Can Overcome It)

Hey Go Media Faithful! Here’s another excerpt from my book, Drawn to Business, about the number one myth I’ve found in the hiring process. For more of my insights and actual tools to help you start your own million dollar company, pick up the book as well as its supplemental materials, now available on the Arsenal.

Hold onto Your Hats: the Hat Mockup Template Pack is finally here!

Ready to realistically mockup your designs and impress the hell out of your clients in one fell swoop?

It’s as easy as picking up the Hat Mockup Templates Pack and pop your design on one of our high-quality, lovingly layered, shadowed and highlighted PSDs, including our:

5 Panel Hat
Ball Cap
Beanie
Cuffed Beanie (Flat View)
Cuffed Beanie (Ghosted, Side View)
Flat Billed Snapback Hat
Headband
Pom Pom Beanie
Trapper Hat
Trucker Hat

Witness 20 Creatives Sharing their Struggles and Successes: the WMC Fest 4 Videos

Jeff Finley, founder of WMC Fest, said it best: “Something about the WMC Fest stage, people stand up there and start spilling their guts. It transcends career. They took off their band-aids and showed us all their wounds, and it’s okay because they know they’ll be supported and taken care of. They will be loved.”

Must-Have PSD Mockups: The Paper Mockup Templates Pack is Here!

New Templates from the Best Mockup Template Site Ever in the History of the Earth. (Promise)

Hey look at you! You just finished the world’s best design. You’ve outdone yourself this time.

If you were back in the days of old you’d send that bad boy via horse and buggy, ride it off into the sunset.

But times have changed, my friend. Now we need to step up our games. And step ’em up good.

Episode 22: Surviving As A Designer With OKPants

Why Working from the Beach Could Double Your Income

So recently I took a couple of months out from design to go travelling around South East Asia. Get me. I’d love to peg it as an adventure where I was searching for the lost city of whatever to find the hidden treasure of something something, but this was really just a straight up holiday.

I really don’t do holidays that often. I don’t really feel the need to – I love what I do for a living so why would I ever need a break? That being said, I’d had one too many big projects with tight deadlines in a row and even I was starting to feel like I was getting worn a little thin.

However after just maybe a week of exploring the Orient I genuinely started to pine for my wacom. I missed designing. I’d told myself that this was going to be a proper refresh for me, so I’d brought no laptop, no drawing pads, not even a pen! “Anyway”, I told myself “Bangkok really isn’t the kind of place you could sit down a get a really productive days work under your belt”, and so I tried to put it out of my mind.

The Newest Addition to the World’s Best Mockup Templates

I’m going to share a little trick we like to use to blow our clients’ minds every single time we deliver a design: guaranteed.

In our experience, when we present our clients with their finished design, mocked up in a realistic setting, they were *ten times more likely to be wow’d, impressed and baffled, as in “Wait, what? You’ve already printed the design? Just for me?”

(*more like twenty)

Comic, Creature and Character Illustration: 4 Pro Tips

Dei G of Deisign is a master of comic design. A provider of unique character and creature designs for the entertainment industry, as well as a generator of character driven covers and promotional illustrations, Dei has won numerous awards and has produced work for Paramount Pictures, Stone Circles Pictures and ToonBox Entertainment, to name a few.

His work is captivating, his characters jumping off the page with a refreshing sense of life, movement and vitality.

Just how does Dei animate his illustrations so exceptionally? Here are some of his pro tips:

Want to create a customized rock and roll tee (minus the lengthy design hours)? We can help.

Life as a designer can be completely overwhelming. With projects constantly coming through, work piles up and never-ending revisions make for long days and late nights. It isn’t like we’re not completely thankful, but let’s be honest:

Sometimes we just need a break.

Thankfully, there is a little shortcut sent from heaven that lets us do our job while cutting our hours, saving us money and making us look like a rock star.

Introducing the t-shirt design pack.

On Developing a Dedicated Sales Team

One of the best part of our jobs here at Go Media is connecting with fellow creatives. Recently, Jeff Gapinski, Co-Founder and Creative Director at Huemor Design in Commack, New York, reached out us. Jeff had some great feedback about Drawn to Business, as well as some questions about developing a killer sales team.

We thought we’d share the exchange with all of you. Enjoy and please feel free to continue the conversation with us in the comments below!

Become a Master Typographer: How to Choose the Perfect Typeface

A critical question we often ask ourselves and know other designers contemplate when working on any given design is, “How do I choose a font?”

So many factors go into this decision, however thanks to the help of some friends, including Creative Director Michael Prewitt as well as Art Directors Craig Weiland and Harley Peddie, we’re here to share with you ways you can choose the perfect typeface for every project.

You’ll never buy big bolts the same way again

We had the opportunity to collaborate with the Umbrella Collective, providing planning, web design and front-end web development for BigBolts.com, the web’s first & only site for large-diameter bolts, screws, nuts, and washers and the first of a fastener family that, together, will form an online fastener purchasing destination!

Present Professional Photorealistic, 3D Designs in Minutes using the World’s Best Mockup Templates

Want to knock the socks off of your clients, whilst instantly boosting your street cred? Take a few extra moments in your design process to mock up your art using the World’s Best Mockup Templates. (Promise: It works every time my friends).

The mockup is a trick of the trade for Go Media and the top design professionals in our community. Why? It gives your clients professional, high quality, palpable, photorealistic 3D imagery of your designs. The result fools them into believing you went the extra mile to produce a physical mockup! (But it’s okay, we won’t tell!) Not only will your client be über impressed, but you’ll just generally be able to communicate your vision to your printer and have a clearer vision of the end product yourself.

How to Get Your Apparel Line into Retail Stores

Designed your own original and unique t-shirt, printed and branded your work, ready to launch? Now you’re ready for the big time.

For a lot of brands, the holy grail of going big-time is getting into well-known retail shops. There’s certainly an appeal to being able to go into your local mall and see your brand on the racks. “How do I get my clothing line into stores,” you ask? Here are some general tips for breaking into retail, straight from Go Media Partner Jeff Finley’s book, Thread’s Not Dead: The Designer’s Guide to the Apparel Industry.

Beautiful Logo Sketches

Creating the perfect logo takes a lot of time and skill. It also takes practice – and one of the things that I find really interesting are the sketches of a logo before it’s been finalised. There are some extraordinarily talented designers out there who are as skilled at sketching out a logo as they are at creating one in Photoshop, and I wanted to bring together a post that showed off some of the best examples of their work.

I’ve always had an admiration for illustrators, and being able to combine calligraphy and beautiful lettering with logo design on paper is something that I’d love to be able to do myself. I hope you find these logo sketches inspirational, and that they get you thinking about practicing sketching too. As always, if you know of any other examples that deserve some recognition, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.