Design Software & Strategy

In this tool, you can search for colors or moods, and see how those are applied to design and photography. Try searching for two opposite moods, such as "calm" and "energetic". What patterns do you see in the color palettes for each mood? How does each mood's color differ?

Practical tips on creating color schemes, identifying the dominant color in your designs, and improving color contrast in typography.

This tool can help you pick color schemes based on the harmony rules we talked about today, and help you understand how the rules of color harmony work. Try moving one of the color circles on the color wheel up and down the white line to adjust its saturation - how much of the current color is being added to the mix. Then, drag the color clockwise around the circle. Notice how the other colors adjust in relation to your current color. This is the "shape" that color harmony rule takes on the color wheel. Try this with several color schemes, noting the differencYou may also want to try changing the color mode from RGB to HSV, which is more intuitive to work with.

A game to help you master the pen tool

Huge, searchable network of graphic design examples. Great if you're stuck or want to see what others have done.

Online magazine for rookie designers, students, interns and juniors with intimate interviews, free design student awards and free resources.

Modern examples and study of cultural and political ramifications of visual communication worldwide. Case studies of how Western design principles do and don’t apply in other cultures, and how to avoid major pitfalls in global design. Easy read, lots of great examples. Recommended for students who plan to go into visual communication professionally or who are interested in anti-racist design practice.

Behance Student Show is a portfolio of design student work. See what other students like you are doing and get inspired for this semester!

How do you wrap a texture, pattern, or logo around an object? The answer is called a displacement map! Displacement maps are a special kind of distorting effect you use to change the way an image maps to geometry. It uses grayscale values to determine how close (or far away) a part of the distorted image should be. You're going to see some familiar key concepts in this advanced tutorial, including layer masks. You can find tons of different displacement map tutorials here.

A project-based primer on graphic design, Western graphic design history, and the Adobe Creative Suite, and the basis of this class. Recommended for students who are new to Adobe, graphic design principles, & design history, or who learn best through reading and following tutorials.