Following the previous article on work trends Design Specialization vs Generalization, this designer tool below is created to help you find your design persona – realizing your own design qualities and weaknesses to prepare you for real life design industry.

Out of the 15 keywords given, click only 5 keywords that you think describes your design interests and preferences.

Every designer has their own design specialty that helps in leading a design team. There is no one designer that is good at every stage of the design process; we all think differently. So, different design personas are needed to create a success.

Design Strategist

A design futurist, one who always dares to dream of new concepts and visions that are innovative and futuristic.A strategist who is capable of forecasting the future market through doing intensive research on people and products.

Possible Job Scope: Strategic Designer, Innovation Design Consultant, Brand Manager

Design Experimenter

A design psychologist, who creates design through understanding how a person would use the products by scenario mapping and models testing.An interactions researcher who thinks of more personal ways of product usage through re-looking at design detailing.

Possible Job Scope: Design-Centered Researcher, Product Designer, Usability Consultant

Design Realist

A design technologist, who experiments with mechanics or electronics to build upon his design concepts.An engineer, who thinks of practical solutions to solve product design issues.

Possible Job Scope: Product Engineer, Industrial Designer, Quality Assurance Manager

So, what design persona are you, a strategist, an experimenter or realist? If you wish to read more about design personas check out the The Ten Faces of Innovation.

Welcome to our Killer Feature Guide for the all new Creative Suite 3, during the Adobe Live 2007 Amsterdam edition we’ve picked up some great features and tips for you. If you use any of the following applications make sure you get your productivity & creativity boost: Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Light Room, Dreamweaver and Flash.

Photoshop CS3

The most used and well known product in the Creative Suite, has been updated with some incredible features. Before we get to these great features, there is something much more important to highlight! Photoshop now launches in just a few seconds, that is as long as you’ve launched it once before, otherwise it I’ll take slightly longer. Great new features in Photoshop are auto aligning pictures to get rid of (for example) tourists and 3D layers to import your 3d files into Photoshop, 3d layers support input from 3D Studio, Alias | Wavefront, Google Earth files and more. Of course Photoshop files can now be opened in Flash and Dreamweaver. The absolute and brand new Killer Feature we highlight today is the 3D Layer functionality.

Killer Feature: 3D Layers
open a Photoshop document
go to Layer > 3D Layers > New Layer from 3D file
locate and select your 3D file
go to Layer > 3D Layers > Transform 3D Layer
use the options in the toolbar to change the rotation, position, scale and material

The 3D layer is very useful when you want to do low-quality 3D product presentations, the quick and dirty kind, for high quality and detailed textures and materials you’ll still have to use your 3D application. (more…)

Your design portfolio is ready, your personal resume is done, and you are all dressed up. You are now just minutes away from that important interview that will land you your future job. Do you know what to expect from the interviewers? Are your prepared enough for what is to come?

The interview is a discovery process, for the employer as well as the candidate. It is not only a time for the employer to understand more about the design applicant, but it’s also a good personal time for the designer to understand more about the employer and the position he is applying for. So here are some tips for you that I hope will prepare you for your design job interview: (more…)

“A tussle over the iPhone trademark, owned by network equipment manufacturer Cisco Systems, had been expected over rights to use Cisco’s iPhone name, shortly after Apple boss Steve Jobs launched the Apple iPhone last Wednesday 10th January 2007. After no agreement was reached, Cisco sued Apple in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking injunctions to prevent Apple using the name.”

This is a lesson that we designers need to learn from - how to protect our design ideas and rights to protect ourselves.

More often than not, there are many actual cases where designers are not sure how to protect their design rights, ideas and trademarks the correct way because of the lack of understanding about design infringement law and rights. Moreover, with high accessibilty of internet information today, original designs can be more easily copied by other people worldwide.

Hence, design piracy is a farce we need to deal with nowadays. Here are a few tips to how you can protect yourself against design piracy:
(more…)

As a designer you never stop learning, you need to keep up with trends, new software, new materials, changing technologies and keep up, or even better beat, your competition. So you need to improve, you need to learn, but how? You life is probably so busy that you wish you could squeeze in some quick exercises! Well here they are the designboom design aerobics for 2007. To list some of the topics: Sex, Work, Ecology, Packaging, Ceramics and many more.

As creative artists, we find ourselves creating new things, being art, products or graphics, we create! What we create doesn’t go without colour, when we say colour, we mean colour palettes. When creating colour palettes we have our good days, our bad, and our really really bad. Adobe saw this problem and developed a tool for that in Adobe Kuler.
Adobe Kuler allows you to view colour palettes created by other people, rate them, or upload your own. So the next time your stuck creating a nice colour palette or when you want some inspiration go ahead and suck up the good stuff at Adobe Labs. And since it’s adobe, you can put it right into Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator or any of the other adobe software you use.

Studio469 - Colour into your world

So remember Adobe Live 2006, one of the events we featured this year. Well next month Adobe is  organizing a bootcamp. To allow you to practice their newest tools, software and lates tips and tricks.

So go ahead and upgrade your crossmedia creative suite skills.

As young designers who want to earn a little cash on the side, we often find ourselves building websites. I know many of you are in the same position, and of course many of you experience a lack of inspiration from time to time.

This is why we decided to type up a little list of websites to visit to get your website design up and running as quick as possible, the 469 way. (more…)

In todays climate, if you want to create a document, you mostly want to use Microsoft Word. Not because the program is ‘that good’, but because more than half of the business and educational world is using it.

But now, you have writely!

Writely is a WYSIWIG text editor, that lets you store documents online, collaborate with other users or contributors, and even lets you output the document in just about any format you need!

Can I … upload from Word? YES!
Can I … save to my desktop? YES!
Can I … publish on the web? YES!
Can I … post on my blog? YES!

It’s just a little wait untill the guys from writely have moved their files over to google…

Try using Newzpile, a tool that searches in different categories all at once.

Studio469 - Designer Tools & Resources