Choosing Design Content to Awe Your Audience

Hi all its' Lady T and let me tell you as a designer I am constantly on the hunt for visual digital content that is new, fresh, and will awe my guest, (customer) . I look for something that not only grabs the eye but takes your breath away. Something that makes you say 'I wish I had thought of that or I can't live without that'. If I haven't accomplished that then I haven't done my job very well as a designer. And that would be “AWE”ful.

I create a lot of my content but not all of it. It takes a lot of time to be your own art director, artist, marketing department, and publicist. So how does one go about finding good content that not only inspires, but also fits within your budget and lets you wear the hat of many roles?  Buying art from other people to use in your own products can be very expensive can't it? And what about creative licenses, that can be sticky too.

The answer is to do a lot of research on the internet and occasionally you get extremely lucky and trip over a phenomenal find like DesignCuts. What is extraordinary about this company in particular is they bundle design packages by top Artists in the country that can be used together or separately. They offer an amazing amount of content in the bundle and the bundles usually are only $29 USD.  The best thing of all is that they offer an extended license on their bundles which means I can use their content from these bundles over and again commercially. That makes it extremely valuable to me because this content can be used in so many ways from creating backgrounds to foregrounds to digital papers, letters and more you name it AND I can sell what I make with it, not just for personal use.

Because we use a lot of content from DesignCuts they have asked us to try out and do an honest review of their most current bundle “The Inspiring Artistic Design Collection”. Are you kidding?! Bring it on!

First lets start with what came in the collection and then I will show you some samples of what I did.   I will then also share our guest artist; Angel's personal opinion as she worked with one portion of the bundle in particular and rocked it out.

This creative collection knocked my panties off featuring thousands of assets built to save serious time in my creative work. Professional logos with a super epic Feminine Logo Creator, realistic brush details with GrutBrushes and Retro Supply Co, and gorgeous watercolor touches and kits. There is a Woody texture design kit to change your text to wood and Cloud effect brushes unlike any I have ever seen. Vintage constellation and Medical kits, and and...ok I am loosing my breath because I got so excited! But there is a lot of stuff. So lets look at some of the things we played with!

First I created an exclusive freebie for my newsletter followers called Yesteryear, (shown here) which features several elements I pulled from the “The Inspiring Artistic Design Collection”.  I used the included Pattern Pop collection for the washi samples which were in PNG formats with clear backgrounds.  I was able to pull those in and size them down to half inch strips.  Even though the Pattern Pop washi comes with gold, silver and rose gold pieces, they were very easy to re-colorize in Corel/Phototshop to match the freebie color tones so that is what I did.

I then used the Eclectic Anthology kit for creating the actual post cards with ripped edges, corners, the vintage paper creator, and the huge collection of antique stamps and cancellation stamps. It was a dream to use and very easy to put the images together to make these vintage looking pieces using layers. I also re-colorized some of these pieces as well which was super easy to do as the PNG's are super clean images and a dream to work with. The hard part was choosing which stamp. There were well over 60 beautiful ones to choose from.

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The third kit I used from this bundle for the note cards was from Vector Hut, whose focus is to collect, restore and re-purpose old and forgotten artwork that they find within pre-1900s books and ephemera. I chose a Marigold but decided to go with the scientific name when creating the card because that would have been more typical to the era found in printed items.

Well I am going to run off to play with some more stuff, I am going to create some 12X12 300 DPI digital papers now with the Sky Box Creative set. Want to see two so far? Stay tuned and see Below!  Go check out the bundle...and see you around the intergalactic water-cooler ;)

I will let Angel take it from here, well...ok actually in two more paragraphs  I will!
Angel has been working on an extensive 5 page planner sticker set with well over 400 stickers for planners, journals and bullet planners. This set is absolutely heart stopping, brain altering, breath capturing goodness and she did it by choosing the Mix Pix Box's collection of Lights & Stars from “The Inspiring Artistic Design Collection”. So what does Angel say? Ok Angel NOW its' your turn.


Hi GrafXQuest guests, I am Angel Koch; President, Co Owner and designer of Flamango Door the Planner store here on GrafXQuest.  I had the opportunity this week to play around with some graphics from DesignCuts. There were really so many to choose from in the bundle that is on sale right now, I had a hard time choosing what to start with! I decided to go with the Lights and Stars pack, focusing on the 22 backgrounds and leaving the layering pngs for another time. I had plenty to work with!

I created 5 planner sticker sets that I totally love! I cannot choose a favorite. I wanted to highlight the patterns as much as possible, so I didn't use any solid colors for full boxes, half boxes, ombre boxes, headers, checklists, or movie marquees. 

I printed them all out onto full sheet label stickers using my color inkjet printer at home, and kiss-cut them using an Xacto blade and a bit of patience. I put them to use in my bullet journal using my go-to vertical layout reminiscent of Eric Condren and Happy Planner style. 

Here is my personal review of the graphics product from DesignCuts:
You get so much to play with for a tremendously good price! I was able to use the images without trouble, they easily fit into my Silhouette Studio program, no resizing or touching up at all, no converting to other file types, either. Working with them was a dream, and my planner stickers are beautiful! I would definitely recommend this bundle. The sale won't last long, though, so you'd better hurry!

Angel is right there is an end date on this super cool bundle and it ends in a couple of days.   Just think of all the things you can do with it, cards, stationary, gift wrap, zazzle material, T-shirts and it just doesn't end there.   Why am I telling you this? Because I use their product all the time and I wouldn't tell you about someone unless I used them first and approved.  It is high quality and the waiting list for high end artists to submit material to DesignCuts is long.  Even I have tried to get on it and have been turned down for now.  The list has some heavy hitters on it.  But that is puuurrrfectly fine with me I will just continue to lick up the cream. ;)  If you create something with this bundle by the way I want to see it.  Submit it to us through our contact form to share with others, we want to show your talent.  God Bless!

PS  I almost forgot! I wanted to show you how versatile these bundles are and why I am a raving fan.  Way above earlier Angel used the Mix Pix Box Light & Stars to create her 5 page sticker package.  To give you an idea of how versatile these design collections are for using with your own products I used that same package but on this photo on the right.  See how I was able to add a more magical and whimsical touch to the image on the right just by overlaying some of the PNG's from the Mix Pix Box set and then going back over the model and the Hawk with an eraser.  This gave them a more glorious and shining appeal don't you think?  Fun stuff!