Dingbat Fonts are usually seen as a set of totally useless symbols and pictures and are rarely used by Graphic Designers. I mean seriously what on earth can we do with a bunch of usually low quality boring pictures?

Well today I am going to bring new light on Dingbat Fonts and showcase a series of free and commercial Dingbats that are surprisingly useful and high quality.

Commercial

Tree Assortment

Swirlies

Heraldic Creatures

Pop Art Extras

Ornate B

Headline Helpers SG Two

Paisley

InfoBits

Heraldry

Shields

Mesa Pointe

Free

WC Rhesus B Bta

Imaginary Sources

GeoBats

WM Trees

Welcome back to the second in the series of DesignNerd’s iPhone Quick Tips. In the release of the iPhone OS 2.0 the ability to save images directly from Safari and Mail was made. This niftly little trick is what we are going to learn today.

I actually came across this function by accident just by playing around with my iPhone. Since finding it I find myself constantly using it. Here’s how it’s done:

When browsing a website in Safari and you come across an image you want to save, simply tap and hold down on the image until the option of “Save Image” appears. Click on the Save Image button and you will notice that tadaa!….nothing happens! Well it seems that way anyway but the image has actually automatically been saved to your “Camera Roll” in the “Photos” App. To do the same from Mail, just open the email the image you want is in and repeat the same steps as before. Easy!

Stay tuned for more iPhone Quick Tips!

IPhone Quick Tips is a new series on DesignNerd Blog where every now and then I will show simple little tricks of things you can do with your beloved iPhone. Yes I say beloved because all iPhone owners don’t just like their iPhone…they LOVE it. I know that I for one have a very strong relationship with mine!

Anyways let’s get started with the first of this series: How To Take a ScreenShot With Your iPhone!

Taking a screenshot with your iPhone is very easy. You can capture anything thats open on your screen at any given moment!

All you need to do is hold down the “Home” button and the “On/Off” button at the same time. You will know if you have taken it or not as you will hear the classic shutter button noise just like you hear on your Mac when you take a screenshot.

Now you’re probably wondering, “Ok great, now where is it??”. Well if you look in your photos you will notice that the screenshot you have just taken will be the last photo in the camera roll! Easy eh!

Stay tuned for more iPhone Quick Tips!

If you would like your blog reviewed by Corey just submit it to http://blogbydesign.com. I’m sure you aswell will get some great tips!

View DesignNerd’s Review Here!

Well March has been another fantastic month of design articles! It’s gone so quick but there were many many posts to choose from and was a very difficult decision to only pick a selection. (I could have easily chosen them all!)

Anyways below you will find links to great tutorials, freebies, articles and much more!
ENJOY!

Create an Awesome Vector Skate Deck Design

Become a Master of the Pen Tool in Under 30 Minutes

Logo Design Tips: Avoid Getting Intimidated

Designers Guide to the Apparel Printing Industry

9 Solid Logo Design Tips for Beginners

Create a Print Ready Beer Label

Create a Vector Milk Bottle with a Funny Cow Label

5 Things Your Clients Should Know

Create Beautiful Glowing Bubbles On Your Designs

Layers: Multi-Layered Screenshots

Logo Design RoundUp Part 5: 50+ Ways Designers Brand & Promote Themselves

28 Must Read Articles for Growing Your Freelance Business

10 Ways to Automatically Backup Your MySQL Database

Branding Yourself With a Twitter Background

Creating a Typographic Wallpaper

How I Can Code Twice as Fast as You

How to Design a Classic Heraldic Figure

Design a Surreal Photo Manipulation with Twisting Water

Make Your Photos More Intense in 12 Easy Steps

Design a Print Ready Ad in Adobe InDesign

Awesome Free Grunge Textures

Design a Surreal Windy Illustration

As much as I like Helvetica, there are a few little things about it that annoy me and stop it from being “The Perfect Sans Serif Font”. Firstly I don’t like the lowercase “g”. I really like G’s that are double storey with all the beautiful curves. Helvetica just has those really boring looking G’s (I don’t know what that type of g is called). Also in Helvetica I really like the little tail on the lowercase “a” but I always feel disappointed when the tail disappears as soon as you use Helvetica Bold. While these 2 things are very minor and any “normal” person would think I was crazy for even noticing them, they just bother me. I have however found a beautiful typeface which fixes both of these problems.

It’s called FF Bau and comes in a range of different weights.

You can see here the difference between the double storey “g” in FF Bau and the somewhat “boring” “g” in Helvetica.

Double storey lowercase “g” in FF Bau.

Helvetica’s somewhat boring lowercase “g”

Lately I have been browsing through many many fonts and just happened to comeacross a beautiful Sans Serif font that fixes these 2 problems! The font is FF Bau and is basically exactly like Helvetica but has a beautiful double storey “g” and the tail on the lowercase “a” stays even in Bold format. See the examples below:

Helvetica’s Bold “a” loses its tail.

The tail remains on FF Bau’s bold “a”

Perfect right?! Well yes….but no. FF Bau is not free and is not a web font likeHelvetica so you cannot use it for basic web typography. **Sigh Oh Well! Still a beautiful font though!

What are your opinions on the letters in Helvetica? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

1. Open up Photoshop and create a new document. It’s up to you what size, mine is pretty big and 1500 x 1064.  Fill your background with a dark brown color of #271717.

2. Then create a new layer and choose a lighter brown colour. Brush some random lighter areas onto your background. Your document should now look like this:

3. Create another layer and create some diagonal lines for the background in white. There are many different line patterns available on the web that you can download or you can just create your own. Set this layer to overlay at around %24 opacity.

4. On a new layer draw a large dark brown rectangle using the rectangle shape tool. It should cover pretty much th whole bottom half of the document and will become the floor. Double click on the layer so that the layer styles palette comes up. We are going to add a linear gradient overlay going from #271717 to #5d3a3a. Also add an outer glow with the settings: Size 188 and the blend mode set to colour dodge.

5. Now we are going to add the “Bubbles” text. Of course you dont have to do this step as its not really the main point of the tutorial. Create some text using a nice thick rounded font. Add the following layer styles:
Gradient Overlay with colours #dafbfc to #fb0891 and make the opacity stop at the pink end %0. Give the gradient overlay a blending mode of soft light and opacity to %63.
Bevel and Emboss:  Style Inner Bevel. Technique smooth, Depth 221, Direction Up, Size 7, Soften 8.
Inner Glow: Blend Mode Colour dodge, Choke 21, Size 14, Colour white.
Outer Glow: Blend Mode colour dodge, Opacity 48,  Spread 0, Size 27.
Finally set your bubbles text layer to colour dodge and the fill to %69 opacity.

Step 6. Now merge all your layers but DO NOT SAVE. After merging make a round selection using the elliptical marquee tool. Go edit - copy merged. Then press CMD+alt+z to undo until your layers are back to not being merged anymore and press CMD + J which will paste your round selection onto a new layer. Ok so it doesnt look like a bubble yet but up next is where the magic happens!

Step 7. Now we are going to add a few simple layer styles to our round selection layer we just created and with  a few simple layer styles will magically turn into beautiful bubbles! Here goes:
Gradient Overlay with colours #dafbfc to #fb0891 and make the opacity stop at the pink end %0. Give the gradient overlay a blending mode of soft light and opacity of %63.
Inner Glow: Blend Mode Linear, Opacity 70,  Choke 0, Size 84, Colour white.
Outer Glow: Blend Mode colour dodge, Opacity 68,  Spread 0, Size 120.
Inner Shadow: Blend Mode Soft Light, Opacity 52, Distance 34, choke 47. size 106.
Finally set your bubbles text layer to colour dodge and the fill to %69 opacity.

Step 8. Now all you have to do is duplicate your bubble layer as many times as you like, resize them and arrange them on your design! Simple as that!  You should end up with something like this: I added a slight fractal brush in the background for an extra effect but it’s not neccessary.

Here is the final result!

So there you have it!  Now you know how to add stunning glowing bubbles in photoshop!

Ok so don’t worry, my logo hasn’t permanently been transformed into Helvetica. It is my entry into the “Transform Your Logo Into Helvetica” Contest being held by the wonderful Graham from ImJustCreative. When I read about this contest I thought it sounded so much fun that I just had to enter! Basically all you have to do is transform your company’s current logo into the historic font Helvetica! Easy and lots of fun!

Below is a before and after of the DesignNerd Logo:

Before Helvetica:

After Helvetica:

Welcome to the first of a new series of posts here at DesignNerd. “Nerdiest of the Net” is DN’s version of the “Best of the Web” type posts. Here you will see roundups of the most amazing articles including photoshop tutorials, Illustrator tutorials, Coding tutorials such as CSS, HTML, PHP, Javascript and Jquery, everything Wordpress and many more interesting articles!

So lets get started on DN’s very first “Nerdiest of the Net”!

30 Incredibly Useful Mac Apps for Web Design

The Logo Design Process From Start to Finish

10 Incredibly Useful iPhone Apps for Freelance Designers & Bloggers

50 Insanely Weird but Awesome Photoshop Brushes

5 Reasons to Subscribe to Design Blogs

Free Texture Tuesday: Wrinkled Paper

Create a Filterable Portfolio Using Jquery

Photoshop Tutorial: Destroyed Heraldry

Make a Torn Vector Destop Wallpaper with Angled Text

12 Mac Apps for Running a Freelance Business

Quick Tutorial: Adding Gradients To Text

Splattered Vector and Photography Mash Up Tutorial

33 Photoshop Tutorials For Designing Amazing Posters and Ads

35 Stunning Hi Res Public Domain Astronomy Images

Tutorial: Vector Lightbulb Illustration

CSS Tricks: Moving Boxes

Retro Geometric Vectors In Space With Photoshop & Illustrator

Questions to Ask For 4 Colour T-Shirt Printing

Illustrator Quick Tips 1: Complex Symbols with Pathfinder

Since receiving my iPhone for christmas I have been pleasantly surprised in the amount of amazing Apps for Designers and Bloggers. This prompted me to make a list of my favourite apps to share with you.

1. Wordpress

The wordpress App for iPhone lets you create, edit and view posts on your Wordpress blog directly from your iPhone anywhere at anytime. You can also upload and add photos taken from your iPhone’s built in camera to your posts. Once you have created your blog post you can preview it in a nifty little built in browser.

2. Twitterfon

After trying numerous Twitter Apps, Twitterfon is by far my favourite. There is really nothing it cannot do! It lets you clearly see how many @replies and Direct Messages you have so there is no chance of missing anything important. There is a built in browser to easily view links that your tweeps have posted. This app has a beautiful interface and is very enjoyable to use. 5 stars from me!

3. Mobile Photos

Mobile Photos is a great little flickr app that lets you log in to your flickr account and view your photostream, contacts, groups, tags, sets and more!  Now you can showcase your portfolio in the palm of your hand! Photos and designs are displayed beautifully on this app so this is a definate thumbs up!

4. Palettes

Stuck on a colour scheme for your new web design? Well this is the perfect app for you! Palettes lets you create beautiful colour palettes in RGB or CMYK right on your iPhone! Don’t know where to start? Well you can also choose any photo on your iPhone and it will create a palette from the colours in that photo! Your palettes can be simple with 2 or 3, or you can make large palettes with many different shades. You can also browse, search and import palettes from COLOURlovers.com! Wonderful App for any designer!

5. CliqCliq Colors

CliqCliq Colors is another colour palette app great for graphic and web designers. You can create palettes based on colours you like and easily convert between RGB, CMYK and grayscale. Once you are happy with your palettes you can email them to yourself in formats compatible with Photoshop, Illustrator and more! All up CliqCliq Colors is an easy enjoyable tool for discovering and managing colours! 5 Stars!

6. Jobs

Jobs is a wonderful timetracking and invoice tool for freelancers. You can create and manage your clients and the projects associated to them. There is an inbuilt timer so you can time your work on any given project. Set custom rates and apply them to different clients. Once you have your clients invoice recorded you can email it to yourself in many different formats including csv, plain .txt and txt csv! This way you or your client can easily import it into Excel or any csv compatible programs! Jobs has a clean interface and is a great way to manage your clients and projects.

7. Things

Things for iPhone is a wonderful and ituitive task manager. Freelancers often have a lot of things on their plate and it is often hard to keep up. Well Things is here to change all that. Things lets you effortlessly manage your projects, notes, to-dos and more! A smart scheduling feature helps you to work and be as efficient as possible. Wonderful App for freelancers who are pulling their hair out with to many things to do and remember!

8. CSS Cheatsheet

Even the most experienced web developers need a refresher course in CSS properties and values every now and then. No matter how much practice you get it is just impossible to remember them all. CSS Cheatsheet is a very handy little app includes descriptions, values and examples for an extensive range of properties including dimensions, backgrounds, borders, classes, margins, padding, fonts, pseudo-classes, pseudo-elements and many many more! This a great little app to help you revise your CSS properties - Thumbs Up!

9. Camera Bag

Camera Bag is an absolutely gorgeous app that lets you take photos and enhance them with the 10 different inbuilt styles. The styles include Helga - a square format toy camera feel with washed out highlights and old-school vignetting, Cinema - Dramatic, moody widescreen stills just like you,ve come from the cinema, 1962-Dynamic black and whites from the photojournalists from a bygone era, Lolo - Absolutely stunning vibrant colourful images and more! You will get great joy out of taking professional looking photos that make you look like a pro!

10. FTP On The Go

FTP On The Go is a portable FTP client enabling you to create, download and edit files on your website anywhere, anytime! A built in text editor lets you find and fix the text you need to fix and then quickly upload the file back on to the server! You can also upload photos taken right from your iPhones camera to your server! Great lil app for web designers!