10 Genius Design Hacks in 10 Minutes 💥

Let's see if I can show you ten amazing hacks that will change your life for design in ten minutes or less. Let's go. The first one is a text transformation effect. It's going to write some text really quick. We're going to add a stroke to the text and i'm going to make sure the stroke is on the outside. What i'm going to do is flip this around make it into some sort of square. You want to group these together then go to effect, go to disrupt and transform, transform, make 20 copies. It's kind of like the blend mode and we're going to bring these down ever so slightly like so and then not only that we're going to go ahead and change the angle and you can go really crazy with this and create some really cool text effects. Some cool anti-design for you. The next one is all about morphing. I'm going to create a circle. I'm just going to make it, you know with the stroke. I'm going to take my knife which is found underneath this section here and we're just going to go ahead and make a cut in the middle. You can make as many as you want. This separates the shapes into two. We write a cheesy quote, block caps and we're going to go ahead and send this to the back. So we're going to go to arrange, send to back. It needs to be at the back because this needs to be in the front. We're going to select the first word and the first shape and we're going to go to object, envelope, distort and make with top object and you'll see that it just morphs itself getting rid of that shape. You can also select them and press option, command or control c and it'll do the same thing. Really easy way of creating what looks like custom type. The next one is a tool that you can use, anyone can use. You've designed a logo. You don't know if anyone else has designed it before so you just want to check google. Well, you can do an image reverse search. Go ahead to google images, click this camera thing. We're going to upload an image. I'm going to upload this screenshot and it'll upload it, search the whole internet and you'll see if your logo appears on here. By the looks of it, looks like mine is okay. The next one is another website which is called type-scale.com. A great way of having proper scaling for your typography. You can even get the css for it as well if you need to. Really easy, change the text. It's all google font based and you can change this all the way here. Major second, augmented fourth, golden ratio. There you go. This next one's in photoshop. You wanted to mask out a person and get the hair to be perfectly masked without having to use the pen tool. I've got you. Grab your image and put it in. Go ahead to this little button and press select subject and then we're going to go ahead and press select and mask. It's done a pretty good job already but as you can see here, it kind of looks a bit strange. So we're going to press a few more buttons. We're going to go to the refine edge brush tool, which is R. Then press refine hair and it'll do a bit of auto refining for you. And with this brush tool what we can do is actually refine the hair so it's perfectly there. We can change the color of the background and see what's coming through, what's not. The only problem is the color in the background of the hair is kind of like contaminated with the color of the background. So we can change that by pressing decontaminate colors and it will decontaminate it and you have a slider. Press okay, and we have got a new layer with the perfectly masked out person. Obviously you can spend a bit more time and it'll work better. This next one's a really cool one. One of my favorites and it is the match color. You've got an image of a dude that I found on Unsplash. Very nice. And we've also got an image on top of that of Tokyo at night with a really interesting sunset. Everything's purple. What if I wanted to bring this dude into this picture really quick? Well, all I'm going to do is I'm going to select this dude just like what we did last time. Select subject, select a mask. I'm going to go output to a new layer and we have got him right there. Pretty well selected. I like that. Then we're going to just drag him to the top here and we're going to scale him down to a more appropriate size. Now the only problem is the color isn't matched with him. So he's in a completely different scene with this image here. So what we need to do is match him really quickly. We do that by having him selected. We're going to go to image. We're going to go to adjustments and then match color. Select the background image that you just had, which is this one, and you'll see instantly the color will change. You've got these in settings here to change the intensity of the colors, the fade. So we're going to bring them up slightly like so. Change the luminance, make him more luminescent. Press okay, and the color has changed. Now all you need to do is really just create a shadow. The sun is behind him. So I'm going to duplicate him. I'm going to turn him around a little bit. We're going to just squish him a little bit. Bring his feet here. I'm going to change his color to black. I'm going to rasterize that layer. I'm going to go to filter. We're going to apply a gaussian blur to him. Take that opacity way down so we've got a bit of a shadow going on. And there you have it. You have a really quick way of changing the color of the dude or the person that's in the image without having to mess around too much. Great for photo manipulation. This next one is for anyone who wants to make and sell mock-ups or just have one for your portfolio or client. We've got this lovely picture of a paper, but we want our work to be in it. And we also want to be able to reuse this all the time. Well, I've got you covered. All you need to do is go and make a rectangle just like any old rectangle. I'm going to change the color here. I'm going to go ahead and right click and convert it to a smart object. Really important. Then I'm going to change this to about 90 percent, something like that, just so I can see the paper in the background. Now we're going to free transform this. So press ctrl or command t and hold command down. And what that will do is it allow you to warp it around and just move it and change the perspective. I'm, just going to roughly get it into all these corners here as best as possible. Get it into the corners and you'll see that there's some white left and that's where the paper is sort of like not perfectly square. It's like warped. So what we need to do is warp it. Press this button up at the top and this will bring these little handles where we can just warp ever so slightly these corners wherever we need them. We can warp them. Press okay or enter. We're going to change this opacity back up. Now when you double click on this rectangle, you can change the color of it, obviously. So we'll change it to white. We can also take something like this in, press command save. And when you go back, because it's a smart object, it'll be automatically there in the exact proportion that it needs to be in the exact way it should look. Let's see if I can do the sponsor segment as well as show you 10 in under 10 minutes. FreshBooks has got you covered when you're invoicing. You're a freelance designer. You've got time you need. You're wasting time on gathering up all your expenses for the taxman. You're wasting time invoicing people and worst of all, you're wasting your time chasing payments. Well, FreshBooks has got you covered. With FreshBooks, it's easier than ever to send invoices. You can actually set up reoccurring invoices if that's something that you need. But not only that, the best feature of FreshBooks is that it will automatically chase up your clients and not only that, it will automatically, it will actually charge them more. It'll put late fees on if you so desire. That will stop any pesky client from forgetting to pay you. With FreshBooks, you'll save hours every week. You won't need to do as much of that nitty-gritty invoicings. But if you don't believe me, go ahead and try it yourself. There's a link in the description with 30 days completely free. Go and check it out. It's really good. You won't be disappointed. Thank you FreshBooks for sponsoring the video. The next mind-blowing hack that I found is this website called designinspiration.com. It is jam-packed. With inspiring images, inspiring logo designs, everything that you need as a designer to feel inspired. I've heard it being called the Pinterest for designers. So it's specifically for designers, graphic designers. You can even submit your own work on there. Logo inspiration. Here we go. Loads of logos to look at. Really cool. Neat little website. Another must-know website, and I know it's a lot of websites, is this one. It's gridcalculator.dk. This is a genius website. If you've ever struggled with coming up with grids in Illustrator, then this will help you. Simply type in your grid, whatever you want, gutter width. Yeah, make sure it's in green. And then you can download it for Illustrator, Photoshop, or just as a PNG image. Let's download it as an Illustrator file. Simple as that. Open it up. Boom. It has created the guides for us straight away. Straight away. That is insane. No more worrying about your gridding. But before we go on the last one, make sure you subscribe if you enjoy this video content. We bring you videos every week, twice a week. The last one is the brand guidelines template. If you're a logo designer or you design brand identities for people, maybe you're freelance, you know that the worst part of the project is creating the guidelines at the end. It's so boring. Don't you just wish there was a way that you could just literally just drag and drop what you wanted in and not have to worry too much. Maybe change some text. We've got you covered. We created this website called Assets4D. It's premium design assets for a really good price. What we've got here is a figma file, but this is going to work in other systems as well, like Illustrator. All you need to do is literally put in your logo and it will update everywhere. It's all made for you as a template to give to your client at the end. So you don't have to worry about the composition and the layout or what if you've missed something within the brand guidelines. And also it looks really professional to have branding guidelines for your clients. It makes the client feel like not only they've got this amazing service, but you've given them a product at the end. You can see here we've got part of the imagery. So that's the photography, the logo, the do's and don'ts of the logo. You can add your own in. This is the logo. Obviously, we've just used the Assets4D really simple logo here, but you can add yours in. Colors and this isn't everything. We're actually currently working on more, but go ahead, check it out. And because you're watching this video, you get 50% of the branding guidelines template because it is just released. So go ahead, follow the link. You get 50% off. What's there to worry about? Thank you so much for watching this video. This has been me. Hopefully I've done it in 10 minutes or under and I'll catch you in the next video. Goodbye.