Hey Creative Adventurers, it's Video of the Week again. Time to learn something new today!

Ever wondered how to get your hand lettering or your outline drawings as a vector? Then this video by lettering artist Sean McCabe is for you. Don't have a scanner? No problem! Sean will guide you at a healthy pace on how to utilise Photoshop and Illustrator so you can use your phone to digitise your pictures. Oh, yeah!

But hey, you might ask "Romica, why do you give me such a long video to watch?" Here is why I think this video is worth your time:

healthy pace, so you can pick up everything without re-watching
detailed explanaitions & little secrets you might not have known
free lesson by a successful hand lettering professional

Things I learned from this video:

Tracing in Illustrator in no time using Image Trace
Turning any shape/path into a guide - right click / "Make guides"
Modifying only parts of a letter/shape with the direct selection tool. Only select the parts that you want to drag/change, the rest of the shape will stay the same.
Changing the fill for a stroke: Shortcut: Shift X
Selecting everything with the same colour: Menu "Select" / "Same" / "Fill colour"

Hope you liked it & Keep on learning :)

MOOCs and Tapping into Design Thinking

I have to admit - I love studying things that inspire me.

So discovering MOOCs (massive open online courses) is almost like a revelation. There are several places to start finding interesting courses for free and so far I've signed up for iversity.org and futurelearn.com.

which brought me to the TED Talk (2009) by Tim Brown who asks Designers to "think big" again. What I found especially inspiring about his talk: In very simple terms, design is not just selling stuff - or making stuff look good enough to be more desireable to be bought. He describes a different notion of design I haven't heard before (or I am not so familiar with) but which really resonates with my idea of how I want to be a designer in the future.

Instead of seeing its primary objective as consumption, design thinking is beginning to explore the potential of participation -- the shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer to the active engagement of everyone in experiences that are meaningful, productive and profitable. [08:41 Transcript, Tim Brown]

[ted id=646]