From apps to actions, this month's round-up of the best new tools for graphic designers will speed up your workflow.
Whether you're feeling inspired this month and need tools to quickly mock-up your ideas, or you're lacking drive and looking for motivation, our round-up of the best graphic design tools for June has you covered.
Starting with highlights from Adobe's Creative Cloud 2015.5 update, June's round-up ranges from HypeForType's beautiful script font Local Brewery – one of 8,000 additions to the font shop's shiny new website, which is a worth a visit – to the next Typo Circle talk with Scandinavian design gurus Snask (tickets are just still available).
In between, you'll find all the latest actions, brushes and plugins you need to speed up your workflow.
So what's June got in store? Read on for our collection of this month's handy new tools for graphic designers...
Adobe Creative Cloud's 2015.5 June update brings performance and productivity boosts to its suite of creative apps, along with a sprinkling of new tools and features.
The big news for Adobe Stock is you can now search for stock inside an application and license an image directly from the layer you're working on. A new contributor portal is also in the works.
Of Photoshop's updates, the Face Aware Liquify tool – first introduced in Photoshop Fix – offers powerful facial editing capabilities, while the new Select and Mask functionality is particularly beneficial for anyone cutting out areas of high detail, such as hair.
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Small updates feature across all the main apps. For more information, read our full breakdown of the Adobe Creative Cloud 2015.5 update, and our analysis of what the installment means for designers.
02. Do Fly
Do Fly is published by the Do Book Company
The first book from prolific designer Gavin Strange flew straight into the number one spot in Amazon's graphic design section – and it isn't hard to see why.
Packed with advice on how to pursue your passion, Do Fly will inspire you to kickstart that side project and give you the courage to follow your creative dreams. A fantastic summer read.
Both styles of Local Brewery were hand-drawn with rough edges
Local Brewery is a vintage-inspired font family that includes six script styles and two sans-serif styles.
Designed by Vancouver-based foundry Cultivated – and for sale on the all-new HypeForType website for £9/font – it's bursting with personality, and perfect for packaging, branding and more.
If you're getting into lettering, RetroSupply's toolkit will help you on your way
A collection of 67 Photoshop brushes, the Hand Lettering Toolkit aims to help you create beautiful hand lettering. Ranging from pencils, pens, calligraphy filters and more, the collection from RetroSupply also includes time-lapse videos of hand-lettering projects showing you how it's done, plus a bonus set of carefully crafted crosshatching brushes.
Add depth to your cityscapes with The Artifex Forge's neon brush set. Sourced from real neon tubing – to avoid a flat, vector feel – this set of 28 flexible Illustrator brushes will bring realistic neon lighting effects to your work.
Also, thanks to a multiple highlight feature, when you group a number together they illuminate each other to create a brighter light.
The Snask team will be sharing their pearls of wisdom at the next Type Circle talk
In between rebranding an island in the Maldives and writing rock music, the crew from Swedish design studio Snask are heading over to London on 30 June to talk at Typo Circle about the power of saying yes – and they’re bringing their band. Held at Cargo in Shoreditch, the event kicks off at 7.30pm.
This collection of Photoshop actions will speed up your workflow for $19
Speed up your photo retouching with these 315 Photoshop actions from Supremer Studio. Sets range from sunlight, vintage, landscape and pinhole to monochrome and more, and the bundle is compatible with Photoshop Elements 8 to 14 and up, Photoshop CS2 and up, and Photoshop CC.
08. Draplin Design Co: Pretty Much Everything
Billed a "mid-career survey of work, case studies, inspiration, road stories, lists, maps, how-tos, and advice," Draplin Design Co. is a humorous, insightful account of how leading American designer Aaron Draplin built his practice.
With valuable tips alongside behind-the-scenes access to some of his best known work, the book offers an in depth look at what it takes to be a graphic designer today.
Forefathers' ultimate bundle of Photoshop actions and textures costs $29
Add dramatic filters, light leaks and hyper-texture overlays to your images in seconds with Design studio Forefathers' ultimate bundle of Photoshop actions and textures.
All actions are non-destructive to the original images, so you can experiment as much as you like.
As well as 21 new handcrafted fonts, you also get 60 Photoshop patterns, more than 200 doodles, a handy font guide and a font pairing guide in this bundle from Angie Makes, which costs $25.
Generate a video with Parallax effects from a static image with Qlilipn
Qlilipn is a Photoshop action that creates a parallax video for Instagram from a static image. Currently compatible with Photoshop CC only, WeirdStore's creation claims to change the way you post your photos to Instagram forever. We'll let you be the judge of that – but feedback from users has been positive so far.
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Julia is editor-in-chief, retail at Future Ltd, where she works in e-commerce across a number of consumer lifestyle brands. A former editor of design website Creative Bloq, she’s also worked on a variety of print titles, and was part of the team that launched consumer tech website TechRadar. She's been writing about art, design and technology for over 15 years.
