100 Top Resources for Typography and Hand-Lettering

100 Top Resources for Typography and Hand-Lettering

Some of the questions we hear asked often around the design community are:

What is the best way to learn about typography?
Where do I find the best hand-lettering/type inspiration?
Who are your favorite letterers?
What are the best typography and and lettering tutorials?
We decided to pull together some of our very favorite resources for you today. Here’s what you’ll find below:

Some of our favorite hand-letterers and typographers (some modern day experts on type, you might say!
Online educational resources
Awesome type and hand-lettering tutorials
Best sources of type and hand-lettering inspiration we’ve found
Super inspirational found-type collection posts
Books about type and hand-lettering
Off we go!

It’s Here! Introducing the Technology Mockup Templates Pack

Go Media Podcast – Episode 21: Why Should Designers Use A CRM?

In this episode, Jeff, Bryan, and Bill sit down with Chris Finnecy from TrellisPoint to talk about CRMs and why a small design firm like Go Media should be using them. We looked at all of the benefits, as well as reasons why people tend to avoid them, and try to determine what is stopping Go Media from bringing in a CRM into our every day lives.

Adding to our over 175 Mockup Templates!

Here at Mockup Everything, we are proud to provide you, our users, an easy-to-use online platform for applying your graphic designs to a growing variety of print products.

We offer mockup templates in categories including technology, apparel, print, outdoor and food & beverage, with over 175 templates in our library to date.

Each month, lucky Pro Users* are treated to at least 5 new templates and this month is no different.

How to Make (and Save) Money as a Graphic Designer

One question we get asked with great frequency is simple, yet profound: “How do I make money as a graphic designer?”

Jeff did a fantastic post about this very topic in September of 2012 called, “Side Income Strategies for Designers.” Check it out. Awesome, creative tips there.

We thought we’d take a different slant on the post this time, with wisdom coming from Go Media President William Beachy’s book, Drawn to Business. While Jeff went into side strategies, we’ll discuss strategies directly related to your growing business.

If you haven’t been introduced yet to the greatness that is Drawn to Business, it’s a nuts and bolts guide to how Bill built Go Media from the ground up. In it Bill outlines a 15 year journey, including years of struggle and growing pains, all bringing him to create the best agency in Cleveland web design, custom branding and print.

If you haven’t picked it up yet, what are you waiting for? It unlocks all the mysteries of our success.

Introducing the Awakened T-Shirt Design Pack by Jeff Finley

We’re proud to introduce a brand new product to the Arsenal today: the t-shirt design pack.

This product includes everything you need to design a great t-shirt. The pack includes vector illustrations, a tri-blend t-shirt mockup PSD and the completed original vector design. As a bonus, we’re including a free copy of our popular ebook Thread’s Not Dead: The Designer’s Guide to the Apparel Industry.

Vector Freebie: Go Media Design Tools

Textures You Can’t Live Without: Maarten Kleyne’s Colorized Art Collection

We’re super psyched to bring you the newest in texture excellence today.

Over 100 brilliant & bubbling textures, only $35.

At 45% off of the list price, it’s this week’s special.

How Go Media makes their amazing mockup templates, Hamster Style!

Here at Go Media, we’re custom template creating machines.

Between our mockup sites Shirt Mockup and Mockup Everything, the mockup packs on our Arsenal and custom templates for clients, we’ve got our system down to a science.

Disclaimer: Creating these nicely organized and layered files, for ease of mockup, is far from easy.

Follow along with me as I create a custom template, from high resolution photograph, to clean and crisp PSD file.

Signs You’re Doing What You Love

You hear a lot of this lately: Do What You Love.

Sounds easy enough, right? I’d disagree.

For me, the road to “doing what I love” has been a long and winding one.

Along the yellow brick road, I’ve racked up thousands upon thousands of dollars in college loans, gone to school far too many times (Masters x 2), spent years in job misery and have seen things in the workplace I am in contractually unable to speak of. (No, I’m not talking about you if you think I’m talking about you.)

Work, and the road to career happiness, has felt a little like hell.

20 Excellent Examples of Retro Logo Designs

The logo is the visual face of the company. It doesn’t just tell you the company’s name; it helps to give you an idea of the style, tone and personality of the brand behind it. The way in which a logo is designed can affect how the company is perceived – even on a very subtle level – and great designers can make use of that brilliantly.

I’ve always been impressed by logos that manage to create an elegant, stylish and retro look. A vintage style logo can be such a difficult style to pull off, and usually involves a tremendous amount of work around getting the typography just right. This is where hand-drawn scripts come in really well, as retro logos often make use of custom, hand-written lettering – or heavily adapted typefaces. Other elements that are common to retro logo designs include the use of textures to add a level of grain or noise to the artwork. Often, shapes such as ribbons and circles to create a badge effect can help to add a nostalgic air to a design.

65+ Free Textures for Designers: Vibrant, Gritty and Otherwise Great

How to Create Your Own Vector Pack – and sell it!

Go Media’s 100+ Must Have Design Resources

One of the top questions we’ve been asked recently is: “What tools, resources and programs do you use in your everyday lives over there at Go Media?”

Our creative studio here in Ohio City is filled with awesome, handy tools that keep us cranking out creativity, programs that keep us organized, and treats that keep our energy pumpin.’

Here’s a list of our favs.

Fears, Dreams, and Success with Jessica Hische

We are totally obsessed with Jessica Hische.

Letterer, illustrator and self-proclaimed crazy cat lady, Jessica oozes talent, crafting simple characters into candy before our eyes.

We probably don’t need to share with you all of her accolades: Forbes 30 under 30 (cough, twice), Print New Visual Artist, ADC Young Gun, GDUSA Person to Watch. We probably don’t even need to list her notable clients (Wes Anderson, Penguin Books, The New York Times, Target, Nike, Samsung, etc. etc. etc.!)

All we need to say is this:

Avoid Design Disaster with these New Mockup Everything Templates

Hello again from your friends at Mockup Everything! We’re here, as always, to help you avoid design disaster like this:

Tutorial: The Making Of An Editorial Illustration with These Are Things

Flip through your favorite newspaper or magazine and you’re bound to find a lot more than just words on a page. Alongside many articles, you’ll find art that helps to illuminate key concepts from the text. These pieces are called editorial illustrations.

From tiny spot illustrations to multiple page spreads, these informative works of art are sprinkled throughout each issue. Political cartoons are a classic example of editorial illustrations, but today’s publications use the work of contemporary artists to visually interpret a wide range of topics.

As editorial illustrators, our job is to create an engaging visual that both supports and explains the accompanying text copy. A successful piece carefully balances the art director’s vision with our own ideas, all while clearly communicating the article’s core idea to the reader.

These projects an exercise in creative problem solving. From the super-quick turnaround to the varied subject matter, each assignment is a new visual puzzle for us to solve.

Today, we’re going show you how we created an editorial illustration for Southwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine, Spirit. We’ll walk you through the entire illustration process, from our first client conversation to seeing our work in print.

Stunning Album Artwork

I do a lot of website design work, but I often find that looking at different mediums can help to fuel my creativity a bit further. I find that looking at product packaging design, physical print design and posters can all help to improve how I look at and work on design for the web, and helps me to come at design decisions from a different angle. Album artwork is one of my favourite things to look at when I need to give my creativity a boost. There are so many different design directions that you can go in when crafting an album cover that it’s refreshing to see how different artists have done it.

Clients who want the logo bigger: FUNK YOU!

5 New WMC Fest 4 Speaker Videos Released

In the chill of the Cleveland winter, we’re riding on a wave of WMC Fest 4 Speaker videos to keep us warm. Hot chocolate cheers to the release of the next five! Speeches include the talents of Kern & Burn, Jacqui Oakley, Nick Disabato, Jon Contino and Grace Dobush.

Watch them here or for free on our vimeo channel!

Comic Book Illustration Inspiration: 50+ Examples

Graphic Design Podcast: Welcome to the Go Media Podcast!

The Go Media podcast is dedicated to tips, tricks, and tales of the business-minded artist and designer. How can you be more profitable? More creatively fulfilled? It’s our way of letting you inside our studio to learn about the ups and downs we face here at Go Media and how we’re dealing with them.

Our podcast archives can also be found on Soundcloud!

Secret to Success: Track Your Metrics!

It’s a new year. A great time to look at what’s been working for us here at Go Media, as well as what hasn’t worked and what we’ll be doing better in the year to come.

We do this in the most accurate, meaningful way possible, one that benefits us ten-fold.

Ready for the simple, yet essential key to Go Media’s success?

We track our metrics.

Learn to Code: Tips for Designers (Part 2 of 2)

Ok, so you’re convinced. A solid grasp of some HTML/CSS and Javascript will serve you, the designer, well.

Where, then, do you begin? We asked our very own front-end developer designer guru, Bryan Garvin, as well as friend of Go Media, web designer, developer, and founder of Girl Develop It, Jen Myers, for some tricks of the trade.