I use a large graphics tablet for drawing images on my computer in the studio, but I felt I needed a small pen tablet to have at my desk at home. This weekend, I finally got round to getting a Wacom Bamboo tablet and setting it up.

Though I have had a Wacom tablet for quite a while, I suspected I wasn’t really getting the most out of it and I wanted to find out what I was missing out on...

Luckily, you don’t have to set your tablet up very often and luckily, I found two really helpful tutorials on how to set up your Wacom tablet.

How to Set up Your Wacom for Awesome Results from GoMediaZine
This is a great tutorial on how to get started with the Wacom tablet and use it in Adobe Photoshop.

Wacom Settings In Illustrator from Vectips
An informative guide on to how to set up a pen tablet to get the most out of using it Adobe Illustrator.

Tags: design resources

I came across this wonderful, funny, serious and free resource for female designers and thought you might be interested!

She Says is a group of female top designers who hold events and one-to-one mentoring by some of the industry's best. The organisation operates in the UK and the US, but is opening more chapters internationally. 

“The world is pretty much half men, half women. So why are there so few of them at the top on ad agencies, digital or not? We decided to stop chatting about it and do something - hold events, where top females in the industry would share their thoughts and help people to either get started or work their way up. To the attractive pay packets, private car parking spaces and buckets of champers at the top.”

Oh, and She Says will even feed you with wine, beer, and a black olive or three! So what are you waiting for!?

Tags: network, events, mentorship, design resources

I am so excited that xScope 2.0 is being released!

This handy tool really is a “Swiss Army knife” for designers and developers. xScope is a powerful set of tools to measure, compare, and contrast literally anything on the screen. xScope will increase your productivity and free you from mundane tasks like measuring on screen elements.

Version 2.0 introduces Dimensions. This tool is like laser tape measure for the screen that projects a beam out from your cursor instantly finding the edges of images, margins and blocks of text. The days of taking screen shots, opening them and measuring them by hand are finally over!

xScope will change the way you work and take all the effort out of measuring onscreen elements.

An Iconfactory and ARTIS Software production.

Tags: gui, interface, productivity, software, design resources, review