Design Archives - Page 4 of 7

November 14, 2017

Up your lettering game in a couple of clicks!

We are feeling waves of enormous gratitude all around and we want to share our good fortune with you! When we created Foto Rx we wanted to make tools for those in need of visual assistance for their brand, it started out as photo-centric, but we quickly saw a need for cleaning up lettering and illustrations, either scanned, or even photographed with your mobile device! This handy tool has helped thousands of artists take their lettering and illustrations from paper to pixel, allowing them to share their work in a professional manor and to create beautiful end products with their work, all without the pain of ever having to open up the daunting (and expensive) Illustrator program. In a couple of clicks lettering and illustrations are cleaned and digitized, ready to be used in your next project. In the image above we used some of Maybelle Imasa-Stukuls lettering, photographed on an Iphone and Lettering Rx to digitize–easy peasy!

Starting today and every Tuesday until the end of November we will be giving away one Foto Rx set to help you up your visual brand presence. Today we will start with the beloved Lettering Rx! It’s easy to enter:

-Go our Foto Rx feed and follow us (if you aren’t already)

For another chance to win:

-Tag a friend (or two or….) in the comments on @fotorxco (that friend will win if you do!)

We will announce the winner(s) on our feed on Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Good luck!

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Win Lettering Rx

Software: Photoshop / Lettering Rx | Paper to Pixel

Lettering Rx (demo)

November 7, 2017

Free mini surface design course

We are moving headlong into the holidays so we are sharpening our pattern skills around here, because we have some ambitious wrapping paper design plans in our future, you? We are planning to use some of our Rare Bird Font Foundry illustrative fonts to create some gift wrap along with some key phrases. We had some great results before when we printed out our pattern on engineer prints at Staples and we are hoping to have a repeat success. It was just too much fun to see the patterns come to life. Our friend, professional surface pattern designer, Bonnie Christine of Going Home to Roost is offering a one week free mini course in surface pattern design starting Monday, November 13th. Bonnie is such a great teacher and better still she is a successful, working professional in her field, so it’s amazing to get her expertise. We are just playing around with pattern around here, but if you want to take your illustrations + surface patterns to the next level we couldn’t recommend Bonnie’s classes more. If you are reading this past the date of her free mini course we have linked some classes below.

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Antler illustrative font shown

Mini surface design course (free for limited time)

Surface Pattern Design Course

Pattern Class for the hobbyist

Digitize your Lettering in Photoshop | Beginners

Free Adobe Photoshop trial

$10/mo Creative Cloud plan

Tristan B. is the co-creator of the world’s best + easiest product photography editing tool-Foto Rx | Shopkeeper’s Helper and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog.

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November 3, 2017

Writing to write.

It’s November and it immediately puts an extra spark of excitement in my everyday. We are closer to special birthdays, the beginning of holiday season and of course Nanowrimo where thousands upon thousands of masochistic individuals take on the task of writing a novel in 30 days. Michelle and I accomplished our goal of 50K words in 2015, took a year off of writing to basically recuperate and here we are November 2017. We aren’t going to go full on novel, but we decided to write one word or sentence everyday, I figured we could accomplish that, right? The purpose? Just to write. We love writing and being immersed in the worlds we created with the characters we have come to love, even the most wicked of them. Writing for us also has a really profound effect, it makes us feel more creative and in an industry where we need to constantly be producing it’s nice to know we can find something to re-charge those batteries. I decided one of my goals was to tackle writing a synopsis that would make you want to pick up our novel. I wrote five really, really bad ones yesterday, none capturing the magic of the story. Honestly, writing those synopsis last night was harder than any of the many thousands of pages we churned out previously. Michelle had one note on agreeing to this November and it was that we didn’t judge (ourselves of course) and that we just kept going. It’s so easy when you are writing to come back and censor or really tear your own writing apart, I think that a story could use a little distance, write it, come back to it with fresh eyes if you can and then edit. For today, I just want to be able to write my couple of sentences, hoping they may spark more and that I can come up with a synopsis that is utterly irresistible, I think that it’s an achievable goal (the few sentences, the synopsis, totally striking fear in my heart). I am including some resources below if you want to check out Nanowrimo for yourself or if you have done this before we would LOVE to hear your experience and any insight.

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Nanowrimo

Dabble writing software (this sounds so cool!)

Scrivner writing software

What to do after you finish your Nanowrimo novel

November 1, 2017

Couture Botanical Mock Branding

Starting a new company reminds me a lot of those first stages of bringing home baby, so much to do, not enough time, lots of late nights and sleeplessness, days filled with explosive joy and angst. We of course have not had a lot of time to think of anything else but the foundry so, we hope it’s not giving you the eye rolls here. We wanted to pop in and show some mock branding for a ‘couture botanical’ company. I am very happy with how this turned out, I feel that it is simple and elegant and reads luxe. We shot the image over the summer with hard light (inspired by Herb Ritts) and used our Stockholm Clean x Minimal Photoshop action set to edit, which I think looks aces, so crisp and clean. I was talking to Michelle about maybe adding high quality, luxe stock to our Foto Rx shop, we know how hard it is to find beautiful, quality images and it seems like there is always a need be it for branding or social media. etc. What do you think? Does that sound like something that would interest you? I feel like you could add a text block over the image and get attention for your blog how-to article, spring sale, etc. Would love to hear your thoughts!

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Specimen II font lettered by Karla Lim

Test the font out here

Photo edited with Foto Rx | Stockholm Clean X Minimal

Photoshop CC subscription

Photographer Herb Ritts

Tristan B. is the co-creator of the world’s best + easiest product photography editing tool-Foto Rx | Shopkeeper’s Helper and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog.

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October 25, 2017

Beautiful modern calligraphy font

Just coming up for a little air here! Michelle found this quote and I don’t think it could be any more apropos for what we do. We wanted to share it with you today and let you know if you are on the Rare Bird Font Foundry mailing list we will be sending a quote weekly so you can use on your Instagram feed, we totally get how hard it is to keep coming up with new + beautiful content and we want to help. Today though we are going to share the link here for a limited time, for personal use only of course;) The quote was created with our Specimen II lettered by Karla Lim of Written Word Calligraphy.

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Sign-up for free weekly Insta quotes

Download the quote here (limited time)

Our font foundry

Our Instagram