Our latest free RF stock photo is an abstract fractal art illustration – a great art element or background for anything you can see fit. Download this stock illustration free for a limited time!

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The move towards one price per stock photo (no matter what the size) is something many in the industry are warming up to. With the internet age we’re currently living in of ebooks, tablets, smartphones, digital billboards, and other low-resolution screen applications, we sometimes wonder if the megapixel race is dead, at least for now.  Soon enough tablets and smartphones’ screen resolutions will increasingly grow, but no matter what, as long as the screen sizes stay around 4-10 inches, there really isn’t a need for images much over 1 or 2 megapixels to use effective and clean page designs or advertising.

Currently, smaller web image sizes are sometimes just of as much value as a larger high-resolution size, depending on the application. Whoever started the whole, “smaller sizes are worth less money” concept, was obviously from the time when print media was still king. New medias have changed that. Due to these facts in this ever changing marketplace, stock artists may be soon to realize that it is probably the time to adjust our pricing models.  Does it really matter how large an image is, that determines its worth?  Or the content / subject / theme of the image itself?

What do you think? Would you still buy a stock image at a smaller web size if it was the image you needed, regardless of whether the price was the same as the largest, high-resolution size?  Is there still a market for the cheap, $1 to $2, tiny size stock photo model?

Ever find a cell phone app so cool that you wish you could also run it from your desktop pc?  That’s what I wanted to do, so I started googling.  The first few things I found were complicated, required multiple installations of different programs, etc etc.  I didn’t want to really fart around.  I found a great free app now in beta that does exactly what I wanted to.  Give BlueStacks a try, and I’m sure you’ll love it.  Even if you’ve never owned an Android powered tablet, cell phone, or device, you can still run Android through your PC with BlueStacks, and not miss out on anything.  Or, maybe you own an iphone and have Android app envy?  Yes, there actually are some Android apps not available on iOS.  If you are an app designer / UI designer, you may also enjoy this piece of software for testing out your apps on your desktop or laptop pc.

This opens a world of possibilities for you.  You now will have the ability to play Android games on your pc, to use Voxer, and any other app that is only available through your smartphone.  Yes, Google chrome runs some of them, but not all.  The apps FLY from your computer’s processing power (especially on my i7 desktop, compared to my little LG smartphone with its chincy slow processor) and bandwidth speeds are as fast as your pc’s as well.

I’m not a referral or endorser of this app, I just though it was so amazing that I wanted to share.  Chime in with a comment below, and let me know what you think of it.

Here are two of the most recent tv commercials put out by internet giants Google and Facebook.   They are both noteworthy in their own right, as commercials from these two companies are not put out very frequently.  If you haven’t seen them yet, you can watch both TV ad spots below.  I’m not even 100% sure that facebook has placed theirs on network TV, but I did see it on the facebook homepage.

Google’s commercial is based around their incredible web browser, Google Chrome… but their entire brand is being utilized here.  They also of course included product placement of their chrome book, google plus, and everything else google.  Whether or not you care about their new notebook, their browser, or even google plus… this ad is outstanding.  It tugs on the heart strings.  It’s a story told in a brief 60 seconds of a young woman going off to college, who is still keeping in close touch with her father.  This family was recently affected by a loss.  The daughter lost her mother to death, and her father lost his bride.  They are both working through their situation by relying on the strength of one another to build each other up.  This is what we as families do in real life.  What they’re introducing is the fact that you can use everything Google to keep in touch with one another.  The live hangouts and video chats, the emails, and the social media aspect of the internet.  The ad spot is sad, it’s funny, it feels real, and it’s probably one of our favorite Google ads ever made, to date.  Google has always gone this method, trying to tug on those heart strings, and on the relationships we have with our friends and families.  Bravo, to Google’s marketing and advertising team.  Keep up the good work.  This Google “Jess Time” ad gets our vote.

Here in facebook’s “The Things That Connect Us” ad spot, not once is the product shown – only their logo at the end of the commercial.  It’s done in the style of a public service announcement, where they talk about chairs and liken them to a way that everyone connects.  Then they sort of go out in left field at one point, talking about how we wonder if there is any more life out there in the universe (this is where I was wondering where they were going with this), and that either way we know we aren’t alone.  We all have the need and desire for human interaction, communication, encouragement; whether it be with our friends, families, or anyone else.  This is what facebook was playing on, sort of a similar style of commercial to Google’s, but presented in a different way.

What do you think of each?  Which was more touching to you, which was better exectuted, and which do you think was more effective?

Graphic design really is a field that pretty much has a minimum of a four year Bachelor of Arts degree in order to work anywhere.  Even then, the competition is fierce.  It’s going to be hard to land anything other than a dead end job as a corporate peon, earning a whopping $25-35k per year salary, to start (depending on where you live in the US).  I’m not trying to depress you design students, but you need to have a realistic outlook of the industry, no matter how enthused you might be about designing pretty things.  I was once in your shoes!

Many of us today step back for a minute and wonder… where would I be right now if I had gone a different route?  Would I still be in this field if I hadn’t gone to college?  How much worse of (or better off) might I be?  There are definitely perks to both sides.

It’s going to be up to you to decide whether or not you have enough general wisdom to be able to skip college altogether.  You might think you do, but you also might be missing something major. You’ll learn a lot of vital things you thought you already had a good enough grasp on while in school, like good use of negative space, typography, and projection lines. Forget learning more about software in school; as they only briefly brush on it for a few weeks. If you can read a software training book, you can learn more than what they’re going to briefly brush on.  Learning the software is basically up to you, but they don’t tell you that.  The training in school is less focuses on the software, but more on the principles of design. I’ve learned the most just by playing around with Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator, on my own time and while I was on my first design jobs and internships.  Don’t forget that college is cheap… not even community college is cheap anymore.  I worked my way through by squirreling my grocery store job paychecks away, and was able to avoid any student loan debt, but that wasn’t easy either.  Working 20+ hours a week plus full time load of college classes and trying to still have a life… it’s a lot to handle. Read the rest of this entry »