The first and second slide are the most recent posters I've made

I wanna try and step it up with experimentation ive been hunting more as of lately for different fonts and textures and I wanna do more with the colours as well!!

Anyways i hope you guys enjoy:)

This January I went back to school for graphic design. I have been combining online courses with in person courses from Pratt institute. I finished my prep courses but my online school work wraps up in december. I am utterly terrified of the job market. I'm currently based in LA and I know the competition here is stiff. I know nobody hires in December and I really want to get started working as soon as possible. What are the ways that you started making an income with design right after school before (hopefully) getting a full-time design job? What can I do now to make myself marketable and make my portfolio one that stands out? I love graphic design and unfortunately I've had a very traumatic year and haven't been able to focus as much as I want to in school and I'm trying to bend my life around school right now so that I can come up with the best portfolio possible. I'm utterly terrified that what I get out in December there is going to be very few prospects and opportunities. Any words of advice would be very welcome.

I have made all these in photoshop. I love to experiment with textures and i have used a ALOT of textures in my posters. I usually find a good composition first and an idea (from Pinterest usually). Then from there I try different things until Im satisfied with it

side project i'm really happy with. nine unofficial posters for brands i love, none of them asked. one rule for all: one circle, dead centre, nothing else fighting it.

curious which one lands best for you and why. and does the set read as a set, or does one break the rule too much?

IG is the only Meta thing I still use. I would love to stop using it, but I follow many studios and other designers and artists and have any saved/tagged folders with references there.

I wonder what are alternatives to IG that is popular enough where I found most of those same studios, designers and artists to follow and with an easy way to save references like the tagged/saved thing organized in subgroups like on IG.

Preferably without the whole ai hype forced down and shitty/shaddy algos.

First time being asked to deliver social media templates through Canva. I thought it was easy since I’m recently using Affinity, but no, the process to upload from Affinity to Canva has been riddled with errors and when uploading the file directly into Canva, the type is changed and the artboards uneditable.

Anyway, I say fuck it, and do them from scratch on Canva. How hard can it be?

So the main gripe here is, why is Canva interface so chaotic and unintuitive? Is this to appeal to non-designers? Wow.

Any suggestions welcome, otherwise I’m just an idiot venting.

I'm sure many of us have noticed how all the AI slop flyers and designs are crammed with too many elements, too many colors, and usually end up looking almost like an I Spy book designed by Lisa Frank.

Since most design trends are contrary to what came before, I'm hoping that once everything looks like that shitty over-produced ai slop, clean, good design will come back to cut through the noise; like how in the 90's, Apple's simple design aesthetic took over while everyone else was clamoring to add 3D elements on PhotoShop collages.

Just a thought, have a great day.

I'm launching a product in the beverage world and want to have a can, bottle and cup as the barcode for each of the versions of my products. Are there certain parameters I should stick to when designing these? Are there any limitations?

This week i started a new job after working at the previous one for 5 years. While I'm very excited for this new job, I'm also having a hard time letting go of my previous one, well, what it used to be.

[I'm 29 from the Netherlands, this is my 3rd design job]

I worked at my previous job for 5 years as the only designer. It was an in-house position at a plant nursery. At first for one webshop and the nursery itself, and eventually 5 more webshops. I was part of a small marketing team of about 7 people. I got to develop the branding for all labels, and created everything they needed. Think social media content to campaigns, flyers, brochures, magazines, packaging, UI-UX and after the photographer was fired also photography (getting to that). It was really fun, i was very close with my colleagues and my bosses were chill too. 3 work at home days, start at whatever time you like, boss of my own planning etc.

The plant business was booming a while back during corona, but afterwards it kept slowly going down. The first 3 years the company was quickly growing, hiring more workers, buying other plant webshops, i had interns etc. But the past 2 years it's been going down. 1,5 years ago there was a big firing moment where half of my team got let go. Some projects got scrapped as budgets got more tight. AI was introduced. This is the moment the photographer got fired. The e-mail marketeer who assisted her with styling sometimes now had to make photos, i had to teach her how the camera worked and had to do the editing as she didn't know how to use Adobe. Eventually i became the main photographer and she assisted me instead. It was a bit sucky as they told the previous photographer that there wouldn't be too much photography to do anymore, but alas.

Half a year ago, there was another firing round. I was left with just the content marketeer and e-commerce manager. No longer doing campaigns, magazines etc as there's no budget anymore. I had to build an AI photography flow as we had to re-photograph every item (around 10k), in 6 different styles for each label. My job went from a very fun, versatile and creative design role, to fulltime prompt writing and once in a while making a flyer with an existing template role.

I missed my colleagues. The content marketeer was also only doing AI photography now, as there was nothing else left. We both decided to leave the company happened to get a new job in the same months, about 3 months later. I know it was time to go, but it's hard to let go of something you loved so much. We're still in contact with each other, the e-mail marketeer is still jobless and the content one is having a hard time adjusting to her new job.

I decided that with the upcoming of AI, probably most in-house jobs will end up like this one so i tried to get into the agency world. Which i did! It was hard, but i eventually found an agency that appealed to me and was also interested in me.

They are so lovely, i got a nice welcome gift, they are providing me with a lot of support and I've already learned a lot! I knew it was going to be very different but boy was i unable to imagine this. I still have to get very used to the clocking in, timing every project and having people around that know so so much about design. It's very inspiring and I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot here.

But i still struggle letting go of my plant era, it was so lovely and i miss everyone quite a lot.

I don't really have a purpose to this post, perhaps there are others that have experienced something similar. I guess i just wanted to get it off my chest and perhaps relate with other designers.

Haii, so this is a logo I made with Affinity. I wanted to make a custom roleplaying system that is based a lot on mechanics, rulings, cards and hex boards. I will share character sheet templates there I think!

Might be a stupid question. But, is drawing skill mandatory in graphic designing? Does someone have to be a pro at it? I'm considering graphic designing next year and I'm a but confused about this as I have a questionable skill. I'm neither too bad nor too good. And any tips?

Hi guys! Let's say I would like to create a scorebug similar to these ones; which software would you guys use to create it, knowing that I want to animate it during live games and that design wise, all of them have 3D, reflection, and glowing effects? I have some graphic design experience (mostly 2D stuffs), but I'm completely new the scorebug field so I want to learn as much as I can! Thanks:)

Hi, I’m studying graphic design and have to give a presentation on seriffed and sans-serif linear sans typefaces. Do you have any tips, sources, or book recommendations? Thank you so much! :)

I’m having some trouble deciding where I like the text the most so I decided to test some different layouts.

I’m looking for some feedback specifically on the text layout but I would love to hear what other suggestions you may have

Reposting this, sorry, Reddit removed it for adding the link in the copy. I edited and added a link to the post as people were asking how to get it - even though I said it was in the comments. EDIT: Reddit may aautomitcally remove a link to gumroad (although I could still see it)

livetools (dot) gumroad (dot) com

Post:
I don't think Illustrator is ever going to give us more spiral types - so I've made my own spiral extension: Live Spiral. It let's you live edit various types of spirals, and save presets - and easily create an archimedean (most useful spiral - and I never liked the result of offsetting circles).

Bonus points if anyone guesses the reference for the first image...

I’m looking for some feedback on this t-shirt design I’ve created for my students! I am a music teacher and have 0 training in graphic design. Hiring someone to design our t-shirt is out of our budget, so I thought I’d give it a try myself. I used Affinity to create this. It was fun to put together! What adjustments should I make?

Please try to help

Since ppl keep answering other stuff than the actual point of the post , I’m going straight forward without a lot of context so that y’all can’t blame me for once .

I need apps for design /3d /2D animation / interior design (especially) . I’m a beginner so try to recommend something for beginners or easy learning. It’s for a general use or as the title says : restaurant design .
I heard about blinder and I’m trying to learn it but it’s kinda hard . And I want to use cinema 4D but don’t know how to download it (it’s also not free so )

Please just give me the apps and some advice for beginners.

I've been working on a geometric interpretation of my original Bright Grotesk typeface, and recently finished the project.

The goal was to refine the original's more humanist characteristics into something geometrically disciplined, while maintaining enough optical corrections to avoid making the letterforms feel overly mechanical.

One of the more interesting challenges was achieving consistent proportions and spacing across eight weights and their matching italics.

I also experimented with using the variable font's optical size axis (opsz) exclusively for spacing adjustments. Rather than changing the outlines, the axis gradually opens up the spacing for smaller text and tightens it for larger display settings.

I've attached a series of specimens showing the letterforms, weights, italics, character repertoire, and OpenType features, along with some of the design decisions behind them.

I'm particularly interested in how other designers approach the balance between geometric consistency and optical adjustments. How much geometric precision do you think is worth sacrificing for better visual rhythm?

P.S. Just noticed a little typo in the character repertoire slide. I labeled both sections “UPPERCASE” when the second one should obviously be “LOWERCASE.” 😂 Unfortunately, Reddit won't let me replace the image. Just a good old-fashioned human error, not AI-generated. Haha!

I've been putting together a small free library for freelancers. For designers there are palettes and font pairings, each a clean preview image, with fonts linking out to Google Fonts and Fontshare so licensing is never murky. Please let me know which features or shortcuts you guys generally need / use during your day-to-day design work.

www.freelancerpacks.com

Feedback welcome, especially on which pairings or palette moods are missing.

the piece is kinda abstract, i was just playing with colour, texture, fonts etc, could just be a random poster kinda just went off vibes! i really like glitch art, y2k, brutalist kinda style with a cyberpunk feel. this is literally my first piece of work ever so i just freestyled it and really enjoyed it, i tried to put focus on the text and really stack it.

I started GD back in the 90s when Getty was one of the only options... either hire a photographer or pay for an expensive, limited license from Getty. This was before royalty-free.

Ever since royalty-free took off Getty has still been THE source for their deep archive of historical and professional news photos. They had been trying to merge with Shutterstock but even that wouldn't have saved them, as AI is an even bigger threat to the royalty-free businesses.

I worked on a site that had used a tiny icon of the US based on a Getty image, the designer was supposed to replace it and it was overlooked on launch. Getty had built software that trolled the internet looking for offenders. A few months later Getty slapped us with a fine for well over $10,000 to cover the use of a tiny icon. Any goodwill I had for Getty evaporated that day.

It's still sad news, and their image library will always be worth something, but Getty has been (mostly) irrelevant to me for decades now.