M-Sign.nl » Articles

Inspirational – FontShop Education

Michiel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:16:12 +0000

Welcome on m-sign.nl’s next item of the week. This week item is a special website on fonts, where they have a very basic but good looking and good working education page in fonts. Besides they have .pdfs with tips and typeface anatomy. This is awesome because it is simple and quickly gives the basic information on fonts you want to know, without going to deep into the world of fonts or getting too difficult. Fontshop’s Meet your Type Guide This is the basic guide for understanding typefaces and fonts, and works good into your browserscreen (but uses flash). What else? [...]

Inspirational – Harmony Sketchtool

Michiel — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:59:11 +0000

While browsing through the web and converstating with others, a lot of interesting sites and resources are given and found, and every week I’m going to share some of my findings to you. Well, I try to do it weekly, but sometimes I’m on a holiday trip and not able to post or find something interesting. The first Item of the Week is the harmony sketchtool, which is an online basis sketchtool. It has a wonderful feeling and I’m showing you just the basics today.

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Online Printing Reviewed – Next Day Flyers

Michiel — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 15:58:49 +0000

I have several friends where I design posters and brochures for. However, most artwork is on my computer and needs to be printed out. The last time I designed a poster my client was asking where it could be printed, since I mostly only stick to the designing part. Travelling over the web reveals a great amount of online printing companies, and I came into contact with a particular one: nextdayflyers.com. In this post I’ll review this printing company. M-Sign.nl is starting to review!

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Speedtest: Blender 3D 32bit vs 64bit

Michiel — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:18:05 +0000

This post is mainly for the blender users, using windows. Blender is an open-source 3d editor which can be downloaded from www.blender3d.org. Even for windows, there are 2 versions of Blender3D. The 32bit version, which comes as an installer and the 64 bit version, which comes as a zipped package. The 64bit is adapted to serve 64bit computers more, and most new systems now are 64bit. But does the 64bit version really have differences in rendering and baking performance?

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IOR – Index of Refraction

Michiel — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:29:17 +0000

When using a 3D programma, and especially using transparant materials, and index of refreaction is used. In Blender 3D, the open source 3D package, an Index of Refraction can be set up when using ray transparancy, and this is also possible in other 3D packages. To achieve a realistic result, knowing the right refraction indexes is very useful. We see an example of refraction in the image on the left, but what exactly is transparancy, and what Refraction indexes do common materials have?
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Creativity – Inspiration & Tricks

Michiel — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:27:53 +0000

Sometimes it is really hard to get to working, or to get the right inspiration for one of your design works. The best idea’s also do not originate by hard-thinking and trying to get the right solution by forced thought; but they rather arise like a blinking spark on a sudden moment.

However there are some tricks and techniques, which can help you along solving designing problems, or starting up a design when you have no idea to do what. In this article we’ll look to some interesting designing techniques that can help you in your Graphic or Product Design, and I’ll add a few tricks I use by my own. Designing itself can be very intuitive, an I rather want it to be so, but when having an Artist Block, Creativity Techniques come in very handy!

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The Best HDRI Maps and Textures

Michiel — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:10:11 +0000

Texture & HDRI Sites Compared:

As a 2d and/or 3d artist, it is assumable that you use a wide range of resources. We are talking here about shapes, textures, brushes, and HDRI Maps. You can use textures from pictures that were taken by your own, or textures from dvd’s you can buy but many use the internet. Yep, that’s right, the internet. But where do we find them?. Here we will look up a few of those sites, that are providing HDRI-maps ore textures, and a short description of each site is given. First, for who textures are relatively new, textures and HDRI-Maps are explained in short. On the bottom a short list of all websites is shown.

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