Design

If you’ve ever wrestled with Microsoft Word for an hour trying to line up a few blocks of text and a couple of pictures to just create a one-page document, I feel your pain. Our monthly letters contain only two rounded rectangles (one at the top and bottom with our information), three main text boxes (for our main story, a box for prayer requests, and a caption for our photos) and two to three photos. It’s really that easy. Here’s how you can make a slick 1-page PDF in 20 minutes flat. ...

Crafting beautiful designs and compositions will get you far in life. It will get you extra far on the Internet. I never took a true design course in college. I took one Art History class where I learned worthless crap (artist names from the 15th century) and important CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, which is more helpful than memorizing 15th century artists) and that’s about it. Everything I’ve learned has been from the Internet, conversations with friends and examining quality design. I love designing invitations, advertisements, t-shirts, thank-you cards and documents.It’s a skill that anyone can develop and it’s one that will pay serious dividends in the way of cost savings from doing your own work instead of hiring it out and could bring in some cash if you’re good enough to do some freelance work on your own. There are unemployed designers people who have doctorates in Art Hisotry who may disagree with what I say below. They’re totally entitled to their opinions that they paid someone else too much to develop for them. This stuff works, trust me. **Without further ado, practically everything I know about design that will carry you down the road of being a self-made designer. ...