We could not have been more enthusiastic or unprepared for this turn of events. Never had we imagined that a message from Josh and Adelle from FUEL indicating they wanted to collaborate with us, would have ever yielded such a privilege! Talk about having the breath knocked out of you…by a conversation? That was a first for us.

What does this mean for our sites? Ah, therein lies the crux of this post. With us manning (and womanning) the helm at FYC, we will no longer be updating our blog here, and over at Arbenting and the Social Media Directory for Designers. The amazing content that we have amassed and fallen in love with over the past year from all of our sites will remain so that we do not break any of the links that were so kindly offered to our works. Also, and mind you this will take some time, we will be compiling all of our favorite posts into a free e-book that will eventually be available to download from the Fuel Your Creativity blog.

Also, both Arbenting and Dead Wings will remain as personal portfolios for Angie and I, respectively. So we will still be freelancing and updating the gallery of work we showcase at both of those sites. So you will still be able to find us around here, but as for the blogging that has made us fans and garnered us readers, you will have to follow us over to Fuel Your Creativity. We hope to see you there!

Below is an assemblage packed with useful information to aid in all your print design projects. We hope that they come in handy for you whether you are staring through unsure eyes at a pop quiz or not.

Cheat Sheets

I.D.E.A.S Graphic Cheat Sheet

Color Codes Matching Chart HTML (Convert CMYK, RGB Hex)

CMYK Color Chart

Standard Page Folds

Conversion Chart

Keyboard Shortcut Cards - Includes Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator CS, Macromedia Freehand, Cinema 4D and 3D Studio Max

QuarkXPress Cheat Sheets - Available for QuarkXPress 7 & 8 for Windows and Mac

Mixing Typefaces Cheat Sheet

27 Adobe Photoshop Cheat Sheets and Quick Reference Cards for Adobe Photoshop CS4, CS3, CS2 and Below

Illustrator CS4 and CS3 useful downloads

Illustrator Pen Tool Cheat Sheet

Illustrator Shortcuts - Available for CS3 & CS4 for both Windows and Mac

InDesign Cheat Sheet - the most important tools we will use with InDesign

InDesign CS4 and CS3 useful downloads

You’re Up!

Come on, we know there are other cheaters out there. What are some of your favorite cheat sheets for print design that we may have missed! Fire back in the comments and let us know!

That’s right, it’s time to step back into an era other than our own… figuratively speaking of course. Through design. That came across, right? No one actually thought that we were climbing into some sort of time travel device to take a hands on retro experience, right? I wanted to make sure. I know we took some unexpected time off, but I assure you, we were not working out the details of time travel and harnessing said abilities into a contraption of any kind. Though it would have been a productive, if not completely over our heads and beyond our payscale, use of our time, that is not what we did. So it’s just a throwback, not a go back.

Take a moment to see the toll time has taken on the art of print advertising.

Apple Then and Now

Levi’s Then and Now

VW Bug Then and Now

Coke Then and Now

Harley Davidson Then and Now

Colgate Then and Now

Nike Then and Now

Polaroid Then and Now

Smirnoff Then and Now

That’s that!

Hope you enjoyed this bit of inspiration. If you have any old favorites, leave us a link in the comments so we can check them out, an share in the fun.

In our attempt to give back to the community through the Dead, we landed on the idea of a quick screencast tutorial for those looking to learn a bit about Adobe Illustrator. After the success of our last freebie, we thought we would teach folks the simple process for making their own swirl vectors. So we decided to move forward with a basic introduction to the Twirl Tool, which makes those grunge swirls possible. This basic introduction, not only teaches you how to make your own swirls, but we are giving away the one created during the tutorial, so if you like, you can grab it too!

This is my first tutorial, and screencast, so hopefully it is useful and easy to follow (otherwise the hours spent doing the tutorial over and over again as I figured out, and fine tuned the screencast software we got could have been spent further upping my pro tennis ranking on Wii Sports…it’s off the chart. That’s right, I kick ass.). But I digress. So take a look at the tutorial if you like, or don’t. It’s really up to you…Also, due to the size restrictions of the site, we know that the video is a on the petite side and may not be the easiest to make out the toolbar, so we have included a full size downloadable version as well.

Download the 960x540 version of the tutorial

Adobe Twirl Tool Tutorial

Below, you can download the swirl that we made in the tutorial. Like all of our other freebies, you can use it however you like, personally or commercially.

As I mentioned before, we have been wanting to take Dead Wings in a new direction, and part of that, is making it a resource hub for cool original vectors for the community to use in their design projects. So I have been building up a few different sets of vectors to give to our readers for supporting and sticking with us. We decided to go ahead and launch this next set, because they compliment the Abstract Circle set we just released, not to mention they stand on their own as well. So here they are, and we hope you enjoy these 10 free vectors to use however you like, for either personal or commercial projects.

Do not repackage, redistribute or direct link to the download.
If you would like to share this vector pack please link back to this page.

Preview

The Flickr Group

If you do use any of them, we would love to see the end result, and you can submit it to the Dead Wings Flickr group. We will occasionally be doing a showcase from the pieces shared through the group here on the blog, if you are interested.

So as I was wondering what kind of freebies I wanted to make for the Wings, I opened up Illustrator and started playing around to kickstart the old imagination. Then I started making the circles we are giving you now, and it wasn’t until I finished them, and Angie agreed that they should be our freebie, that I realized we had just given away circle brushes on Arbenting this week. Dammit! So a bit of a fail on my part, even though, these vectors are completely different from the Dripping Circle Brushes that Angie made. Maybe it is just a circular kind of week… Anyway, we hope you enjoy these 5 free vectors and use them however you like, for either personal or commercial projects.

Do not repackage, redistribute or direct link to the download.
If you would like to share this vector pack please link back to this page.

Preview

The Flickr Group

If you do use any of them, we would love to see the end result, and you can submit it to the Dead Wings Flickr group. We will occasionally be doing a showcase from the pieces shared through the group here on the blog, if you are interested.

…‘For the return of the Wings!’ Okay, so that’s not really what the Walrus said, I took a little poetic license to aid in the announcing of Dead Wings being back in full throttle. Well, back may be technically inaccurate since we were never really in full throttle, so to speak, but we were definitely idling, and then had a bit of a stall.

Now we never stopped working on the brand or the blog, just stepped back from it for a bit while we reevaluated what we were going to make of it. What direction we wanted to take the site became a bit up in the air for a while, as we discussed a number of ways to go with it. While some of that is still up for discussion, we knew there we elements that were going to remain, such as the blog and the boards. So we knew it was time to get back to it, and roll on towards the future of the Wings.

To that end, we wanted to announce that we are back with regular blog posts, an expanded portfolio that now includes a couple of t-shirt and skateboard designs (what? did you think we weren’t working in our time away?), and more freebies coming down the line. Not to mention an upcoming addition to the toolbox collection. Oops, I guess I kind of did just mention it, huh? Wait, what the hell does that phrase mean? How do you announce something with your direct statement of unintention of doing just that? That’s either grammatical genius, or clever and catchy idiocy. Currently I am undecided as to which, so I’ll move on.

So, basically, we’ve reloaded and returned once more with feeling to deliver a little dead into the design world, backed with attitude and perhaps a bit of bite. (though you should be warned that our bite beats out our bark, as far as ferocity, by a sizable margin…). So welcome, once again to Dead Wings Designs.

So we thought we would pull out the special template toolbox for all of the print designers out there across the spectrum of the field. From snowboards to magazines, we have assembled a handful of useful templates to use in your design workings. Hope you enjoy what the box has to offer!

Snowboards and Skateboads

Snowboard Template

Skateboard Template

Skate Longboard Template

Clothing

T-shirt and Hoodie Templates

Long Sleeve T - Side View

DVDs and CDs

DVD Plastic Case

DVD Label

DVD Case Inlay

DVD Case+Art

Jewel Case

Books and Magazines

Magazine Template

Interior Book Template

Book Cover Templates

Comic Layout Page

Miscellaneous

Product Package Template

Regardless of your position on snowboarding, I think that we could all agree that the following designs are simply amazing. It makes no difference that these talented artists have chosen the board for their canvas, their work stands out against any design horizon they are put up against. We saw a post last month that inspired us on Kyle’s design blog observin, 28 Snowboard Designs for Inspiration, and we thought it was time we paid it forward.

The Best of the Boards

There is more where that came from…

Yes, we said that these were the best of the boards, and while we stand by that statement, we understand that we have not seen all that the snowboard design community has to offer. There are more designers and designs that we are eagerly wanting to discover. Please let us know which of your favorites we missed, so that we can follow up in the future with more exciting inspirational posts.

So we returned to the proverbial toolshed and opened up the InDesign Toolbox, and what do you know, we found room for more! So we crammed every corner of the box full until we felt this follow-up was not only a worthy enough next chapter, but we also felt that we could call it The Ultimate Adobe InDesign Toolbox. And here it is, friends. We hope this resource full toolbox is useful for the InDesigners out there.

Tutorials

Lets start out by getting your learn on! Here are a handful of great tutorials for the InDesign crowd. Some you may know, some you may not. Some may teach you things you do not know. Some may not. I thought I had a point to this. Turns out, I do not. So…moving on.

30 Tutorials That Will Teach You InDesign

Layers Magazine InDesign Tutorials

A Complete List of InDesign CS4 Video Tutorials

Tutsbuzz InDesign Tutorials

Answers to Reader Questions on InDesign - A great overview of InDesign with links to some of the sites quality InDesign articles.

Step-by-Step Guide to Designing InDesign Templates

Design Business Cards in Adobe InDesign

Simple Steps to Create a Newsletter from Scratch in Adobe InDesign

How to Create a Music Magazine Cover in InDesign

Scroll magazine design - Not specifically an InDesign tutorial but still a damn fine tutorial when used along with InDesign.

Scripts and Plug-Ins

The Army wants you to be all that you can be. We hold less lofty goals here at Dead Wings. We just want your design projects to be the best they can be. Such as those you create in InDesign. So here are some handy scripts and plugins to give you all the edge you need.

InDesign Secrets Plug-Ins and Scripts

PlugIns World - PlugIns for InDesign

Third-party plug-ins for InDesign from the official Adobe site

Pattern Maker

Style Flocker

MultiDo

Lightning Brain FrameReporter

Templates

Who doesn’t love a good template? We do, and we think that we are not alone in this. Here are several for InDesign that we thought you might want to add to your collection. Or, consequently, if you do not have a collection, these could get you started.

The Grid System Templates for InDesign

Free Templates from Stock Layouts

InDesign Templates from Poster Garden

InDesign Templates from WeBrand

InDesign Layout Templates

Print Ready Templates

Free Templates from the Paper Millstore

InDesign Templates for Chinese and Japanese Text

Free Fonts

Here are some good free fonts that we have found that we think are ideal for both body copy and headlines. Never hurts to have a few more fonts to choose from, and these we figure will fit good in the mix.

Exljbris Font Foundry - These 9 fonts are the best free fonts we’ve found.

Day Roman

District Thin

Geo Sans Light

Portland

Liberation Serif

Oxford

Grandesign Neue Serif

Gentium

Bienetresocial

Websites, Blogs and Podcasts… Oh My!

We knew the toolbox wouldn’t be complete without a couple of podcasts, a few blogs, and some websites tossed in to the mix. So we found some of the finest Adobe InDesign related stops on the web for you, and packed them in. And that will just about do ya!

The Adobe InDesign Exchange - Pages of free templates, tutorials, scripts and plugins for InDesign.

The InDesigner

Tim Cole’s InDesign BackChannel

InDesign Secrets

Instant Indesign

InDesign User Group

InDesign Docs

InDesign Magazine

Cheat Sheets

Now we here at Dead Wings do not condone cheating in any way, but since we forgot to mention that there may be a pop quiz, we thought one or two cheat sheets wouldn’t be out of order. Though if you get caught using them, we will deny ever having given them out!

InDesign Cheat Sheet

Shortcut Shindig – InDesign

Noble Desktop Keyboard Shortcut Guides

The Pop Quiz

What tools would you add to the mix?