|
Catalog
My Account
Help Me!!
|
Artwork Tools and Links
Artwork Tools and Links |
Use these tools and links to help you with your artwork. |
|
ENJOY! |
 |
| Fonts: |
| Fonts are an essential part of a design, and finding the right font can be frustrating. Please feel free to use the links below in your quest to finding that perfect font. Please install the font to your computer to be able to use it. For XP professional users, after the files have been unzipped simply drag and drop. For Vista users, right click and select install. Please provide the font file and/or font name when sending your image. |
 |
dafont.com is my favorite FREE font website. It allows you to see the fonts in categories and styles. It also has a text area with lets you type in a word so you can see a preview of how it looks like in that font. Please provide the font name or font file in your email with your artwork.
|
 |
Font yukle probably has the most fonts than any other website out there, and if it doesn't than it has to be pretty close, plus its all FREE.Please provide the
font name or font file in your email with your artwork. |
|
| Stock Images and Vectors: |
| Images and vectors are sometimes hard to find so here are some sites that we use. Some maybe more expensive than the other and you might have to search all of them to find the right image but at least you know where to look now. If you do not know whats a vector or the difference between a vector and a raster/ bitmap please scroll down to the bottom of the page to see details. |
 |
Shutterstock is a site I use the most. With a large variety of images and vectors at a great price you would too. Starting at $10 you can get a high resolution image or vector.
|
 |
Fotolia has a large assortment of images and its even cheaper than Shutterstock. If you can find it there you can try here, if not try the next.
|
 |
istockphoto has one of the largest collection of images and vectors online. You might pay a little more at around $16 per image, but it might be worth it for that perfect image.
|
|
Corbis is a great site if your a professional and willing to spend some dough. If your looking for images that no one else will have than you will find it here, but it will come at a price. |
 |
This neat little site gives you a bundle of vectors starting at only
$10. The graphics are designed for garments. This is becoming a favorite
of mine. |
 |
Not the largest assortment of Vectors but you never know you might find what your looking for, the great part is that its all FREE!
|
|
| Programs: |
| Can you paint without paint or a canvas? Then how can you graphic design without a design program? You need some type of graphic design program to edit your images and vectors. Some are easier than others and also more expensive. Below we have some free image editing software as well as pay ones. Please feel free to try them out, even the pay ones give you a free trial. |
|
Inkscape is a image editing software that has many feature one being that its completely FREE. You can use inkscape for 99% of the things you want to do, for the other 1% you can go spend hundreds of dollars on a program that can, or you can just suck it up and work around it.
|
|
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It
is a FREELY distributed program for such tasks
as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It
can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo
retouching
program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image
renderer, an image format converter, etc.
|
 |
Corel or Corel draw is one program I highly recommend and is commonly used among garment designers. Its a vector base program that allows you to edit, manipulate, and convert images and vectors. Its not free but at $489 it's definitely worth it. Corel Draw X5 is the current version on the market. |
 |
Adobe Illustrator is an industry standard when it comes to web editing or vector base programs. Part of the adobe family, files can be shared easily between Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop a raster base program. Adobe Illustrator will run you around $600. CS4 is the current version.
|
|
Photoshop is a raster or bitmap base program. Great for photo editing. I recommend having Photoshop if your willing to spend some money in junction with one of the top vector base programs. I personally use Photoshop and Corel, but some like to keep it in the Adobe family, It just depends which career field your in. If your into garment designing go with Corel, web and overall other designing Illustrator. Having all 3 doesnt hurt either. CS4 is the current version. |
|
| Web tools and Shopping carts: |
| Do you have some designs that you want to share with the world, and maybe make a little money too? Well there are plenty of ecommerce programs out there, below are just a few of the ones that I recommend. |
 |
Volusion is the company we use. It is a great ecommerce solution company with plenty of backend flexibility and endless amount of custom pages. Easy to use at a great price, best part is that there is only a monthly charge starting at $24.99 for 25 products, $39.99 for 250 products and so on, there is a small onetime setup fee of $49. You can also try it for free for 14 days. If you think big then Volusion is it.
|
|
Bigcartel is used by many garment designers and its also alot easier to use than Volusion. one con is the flexibility of backend editing, and your max products is set at 100. If you plan on having a large inventory I recommend Volusion but if you think you will probably stay under 100 then your gonna save alot of money with bigcartel. Starts at FREE with 5 products and $9.99 for 25 products, $19.99 for 100 products. If you plan on keeping it simple this is it.
|
|
VECTOR AND RASTER
Vector: Graphics that use mathematical equations rather than pixels. Vector graphics use shapes, lines and points to plot out the image. Unlike raster/bitmap images this lets you size your image as large as you want without drastically increasing your file size.When zoomed in enough on a raster/bitmap you are able to see pixels, on a vector the image remains clear or smooth. Vector images are created on vector base programs such as Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator. Vector graphics can be also saved as PDF, EPS, and SVG files for exporting to other vector and non-vector graphic programs. |
|
| |
|
Raster: Also Called bitmap (bmp) are graphics that are represented by pixels. Pixels are represented as dots or squares that represent a specific information such as color or space. Jpegs and Tiff are common raster images. Your camera pictures are also raster. Raster images are based on pixels, scaling the image will affects it by replacing the added pixels with other colors, condensing them may result in pixelation, (blurrying the image). This is why it is extremely important that you design in no less than 300 dpi for printing, 72 dpi for web. Raster images also tend to be significantly larger file sizes. Adobe Photoshop, Paint, and Fireworks are the more common raster based graphic programs. |
 |
|
|
