Twitter For Creatives: A Helpful Resource Or A Distraction?

Twitter is most definitely one of the best forms of online marketing, and we all know it. It offers a way to mingle with your fans in short and sweet messages, as well as promote your sites content, your companies promotional deals or something completely different! For this reason, it is generally a good idea to have an account. But is Twitter for designers really a helpful resource that we need, or is it just another way to get distracted and find excuses to not do work?

Gorgeous Packaging Designs and Concepts

Packaging design is all around us. On a day-to-day basis we probably see hundreds of different packaging designs, a high percentage of them being food or drink products; especially when making breakfast, lunch and dinner. Walking through the grocery store we’ll see thousands of different packaging designs, some good, some bad and some just generally average. If you want your product to stand out from the norm, you need to create something special.

This post features a handful of beautiful packaging designs, from music EP’s to snack food products and alcohol bottles to disposable “take out” coffee cups. Let us know what your favorites are, and why!

Like this post? Check these out…

• Vintage vs Modern: Chocolate Bar Wrappers and Packaging
• 25 Inspirational Package Designs
• The Use of Character Design in Packaging: 20+ Wonderful Examples

Brittany Bosco – Spectrum EP

Inspiration: Interesting & Unique Typographic Book Covers

Books offer graphic designers, illustrators and typographers a great way to expand their portfolios. There are endless possibilities that can be explored when designing for book covers, and often are explored, as can be seen in this post.

I’ve had an increased interest in book covers recently after putting together another showcase at The Inspiration Blog on minimalistic book covers, since then I have been browsing for book cover inspiration daily so thought I would share some of my findings here at DesignM.ag. This showcase presents a collection of 64 typographic book covers, all of which are interesting and are genuinely unique. The books themselves are crossed between a number of

Coney Island of the Mind

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Collection of Wonderful Vintage Beer Advertisements and Posters

Beer advertisements have always been pretty inspirational. From the 1900′s all the way up to today, photographers, artists and designers have always experimented and found new ways to come up with some wonderful advertising campaigns. We have collected a bunch of vintage beer ads that were used throughout the twentieth century, from well-known beers and [...]

Collection of Superb, Inspirational Design Books

Sure, there are hundreds of great resources to seek inspiration on the web, but it is never quite the same of holding a book in your hands and getting to flick through the pages. This collection of inspirational design books features a handful of categories, from illustration to t-shirts, infographics to letterpress products and much more in between! It’s time to splash some cash and start growing your graphic design library!

Images 33 2009

Author(s): AOI Editors

Images 33 is a superb book, featuring the very best British contemporary illustration from 2009. In total, the book features around 600 illustrations over 360 pages, as well as 8 editorial essays about various illustration categories.

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30 Influential House and Techno Album Art Covers

Everyone loves experimenting with new techniques and styles, but it’s not everyday we land commissioned projects that allow us to put our creative minds to their best use – in fact, we rarely ever find clients that let you do whatever you want, we’re always restricted by some kind of brief, detailed or not.

However, not all jobs are the same. Designing and illustrating artwork for an album cover for example can be incredibly pleasing, exciting and allows yourself to really push yourself to the limit. Below we have an incredible collection of thirty album covers, all of which are albums from house and electronic music producers from the 2000′s and onwards. So, if you’re missing the days when you use to have time to experiment, why not get in touch with some upcoming music producers, bands and solo artists? The benefits are unbelievable if you manage to land a project – you only need to look at the examples below to see for yourself!

The Chemical Brothers – We Are At The Night

Freebie: Tea-Stained Paper Texture Set

Today we’re releasing a set of 14 tea-stained paper textures. The textures can be used for personal or commercial projects. You can download them from the Flickr set. Five of the images are shown below, and you can view the others on Flickr.

The A-Z List of Free Grungy & Dirty Fonts for Commercial Design

With Halloween coming up now is a great time to add a few grungy and dirty based typefaces to your font collection. Here we have a large A-Z list of some of the best free grungy and dirty fonts to use in your designs from the ever-popular dafont.com!

A is for Ambulance Shotgun

The A-Z List of Free Serif Fonts for Design

It’s almost impossible to have too many fonts installed on your system, especially when it comes to Serif fonts. So to help you add a few fonts to your font collection, I’ve made an A-Z List of some of the very best free serif fonts out there on the web. You can download all the fonts for free and use most of them in your personal and commercial design work. This is my first post for DesignM.ag – if all goes well hopefully you’ll be seeing more of me in the future!

A is for Apple Garamond