Dirk Petzold Illustrations Poster Design

Welcome to the official blog of Dirk Petzold Illustrations. It's all about creative inspiration in graphic design and illustration art.    Artworks for sale by Dirk Petzold:

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Le Studio Nocturne Font Set by PeachCreme

Le Studio Nocturne is a handwritten font set by PeachCreme comprising six distinct styles: Standard (everyday use), Bold (headlines), Superfine (hairline titling), Aged (softly distressed), Thin Rough (pencil texture), and Cross Stitch (dotted, embroidery-adjacent). The set includes advanced OpenType features—one alternate per uppercase letter, two per lowercase, alternate numerals, 13 auto double-letter ligatures, and full Latin Extended-A coverage with diacritics and ß. Designed for perfume branding, weddings, editorial, menus, and artisan packaging, Le Studio Nocturne delivers a professional multi-weight typographic system rather than a single-style decorative script.

Download the fonts from Creative Market.

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Breakout #2—100 Posters by Cihan Tamti Proves That Daily Practice Builds a Design Language

Breakout #2—100 Posters by Cihan Tamti, published by Slanted Publishers in May 2026, collects 100 selected graphic design works created between 2022 and 2025. Building on Tamti's earlier Breakout—100 Posters, Homebound, and New Wave, this volume documents the evolution from self-initiated daily Instagram experiments to commissioned client work, community initiatives like the COVID-era "Local Support Posters," and collaborative projects with other designers. All 100 posters are presented with equal weight, regardless of origin or context. The book is printed in full-color offset, bound in softcover with flaps, thread stitching, and hot-foil embossing, and features a foreword by Götz Gramlich. A limited bundle adds a screen-printed tote bag and the custom Yolcu typeface. At 128 pages and 16 × 24 cm, it is both a collectible object and an essential reference for anyone serious about poster design, typography, and the development of a personal visual language in graphic design.

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Agentic AI in Adobe Creative Cloud Is Changing How Designers Actually Work

The article covers the April 2026 launch of Adobe's Firefly AI Assistant—the company's first fully agentic creative tool—and what it means for the design profession. It explains how agentic AI in Adobe Creative Cloud differs from earlier generative AI features: rather than responding to single commands, the creative agent plans and executes multi-step workflows autonomously across Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Illustrator, Express, and more from one conversational interface inside the Firefly app.

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Viale font family by ParaType

The article examines the Viale font family by ParaType—a 12-style text serif designed by Natalia Vasilyeva—through the lens of design criticism and practical typographic guidance. It introduces three original editorial frameworks: Elastic Stem Architecture (the concave vertical strokes that give the letterforms visual energy), Penographic Residue (the preserved calligraphic trace in the entry and exit strokes), and Crafted Authority (the typographic register that signals premium, handmade quality in branding contexts). A fourth framework, the Craft Signal Hypothesis, positions Viale within a forward-looking prediction: that visible typographic craft will become a premium differentiator as AI-generated aesthetics proliferate.

Get the typeface from MyFonts

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Interior Design Portfolio Brochure Template

26-Page InDesign Layout Built for Studio Pitches

Download the template from Adobe Stock.

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The Work of Art—A Book by Adam Moss About How Something Comes from Nothing

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss is a visually rich, 432-page nonfiction book that documents the creative process behind specific finished works by more than 40 leading artists across disciplines—among them Kara Walker, George Saunders, Sofia Coppola, Louise Glück, Stephen Sondheim, and Ira Glass. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival materials—napkin sketches, annotated manuscripts, journal entries, and preliminary drafts—Moss traces how each work evolved from first impulse to final form. A New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024, the book argues that creative greatness is not a product of inspiration but of rigorous, uncertain, often failure-laden work. Moss, himself a practicing painter and former editor-in-chief of New York magazine, brings both editorial precision and artistic empathy to a subject he has spent a lifetime studying.

The book is available on Amazon.

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Bauhaus-Inspired Home Decor Makes the Strongest Case for Modernist Living Right Now

Bauhaus-inspired home decor is more relevant in 2026 than at any prior moment—positioned against trend fatigue, fast furniture, and AI-generated aesthetics as a disciplined, sustainable, and intellectually coherent alternative.

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Cherry Merlot Font by AnMark

Cherry Merlot is a vintage ink script typeface designed by AnMark, available on Creative Market. It combines soft calligraphic movement with a confident structural foundation, creating a fluid yet disciplined letterform style with a subtle retro undertone. The font is positioned at the intersection of editorial elegance and handwritten warmth, making it well-suited for wedding stationery, signature branding, beauty and lifestyle packaging, boutique logos, cocktail menus, and fashion-inspired editorial layouts. Its clean ink simulation and fashion-forward sensibility give it strong performance across both print and digital applications.

Download the font from Creative Market.

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What Good Architecture Actually Looks Like: ARRCC’s Michele Rhoda on the WAN Awards Jury Room

Michele Rhoda, Principal at ARRCC, reflects on her experience judging the WAN Awards across the Adaptive Reuse and Future Leisure categories. The article extracts three original frameworks from her observations: Operational Legibility (designing for long-term use, not opening-day imagery), Disciplined Comfort (minimalism that genuinely serves occupants rather than just photographs well), and Social Infrastructure Thinking (treating shared space as deliberate public infrastructure rather than a symbolic gesture). The piece grounds these frameworks in specific jury insights, references ARRCC's Wave Villa and a Neri&Hu project as illustrative examples, and argues that these three criteria should reshape how the architecture profession evaluates and rewards built work.

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Best Logo Design Trends of 2026

The article introduces the Recognition Pressure Framework—the idea that every 2026 logo must achieve structural legibility, behavioral coherence, and emotional specificity simultaneously.

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Marina Capdevila’s La Malika del regateo Mural Turns a Market Negotiation into Monumental Art

Marina Capdevila’s mural on a building facade in Rabat, Morocco.

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Job Application Template Set for Adobe InDesign — Resume, Cover Letter, Portfolio & References

This four-piece Adobe InDesign job application template set includes a resume, cover letter, portfolio page, and references sheet—all sharing a unified visual design system. Built in CMYK color mode and available in both US Letter and A4 formats, the set is fully customizable and print-ready. It is suited for designers, creatives, and professionals in competitive fields who want their application package to reflect the same level of craft as their work itself.

Download the template from Adobe Stock.

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Adobe Express vs. Canva in 2026

The Adobe Express vs. Canva competition in 2026 has split into two distinct markets. Canva, with 265 million monthly active users and $4 billion ARR, dominates accessibility-focused design for non-professionals. Adobe Express, backed by a 96% quarter-over-quarter MAU growth surge and deep Creative Cloud integration, is recapturing professional designers who need Firefly AI's commercial safety, 30,000+ Adobe Fonts, native PSD/AI file editing, and the December 2025 ChatGPT integration. Two original frameworks—the Ecosystem Lock-In Index and the Creative Continuity Score—frame the comparison beyond template counts. The article concludes that for designers already inside Creative Cloud, Adobe Express Premium is the logical consolidation choice, with the 30-day free trial positioned as a practical evaluation step for professionals who haven't revisited the product recently.

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How to Create Variable Fonts

Variable fonts are single OpenType files that store a continuous range of design variants across one or more axes (weight, width, slant, optical size, and more). To create one, you define your design axes first, build compatible masters at the extremes of each axis (identical node structures required), interpolate and test instances across the full design space, complete spacing and OpenType features, then export to variable TTF and convert to WOFF2 for web. The primary professional tools are FontLab 8 and Glyphs 3. Key examples include Helvetica Now Variable by Monotype (3 axes, 1.2+ million styles) and Gotham Variable by Hoefler & Co. The article introduces the Axis-Master-Instance Pipeline (AMIP) as a five-phase production framework and the Node Compatibility Principle as the core technical constraint that makes or breaks interpolation.

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Principles of Logo Design by George Bokhua

Principles of Logo Design: A Practical Guide to Creating Effective Signs, Symbols, and Icons by George Bokhua is a 224-page design education text published by Rockport Publishers in 2022. Drawing on the foundational theories of Josef Müller-Brockmann and Wucius Wong, Bokhua outlines a complete process for creating effective logos using simple, monochromatic geometric shapes and grid-based construction. The book covers sketching, tracing, and Adobe Illustrator execution, with dedicated attention to the golden ratio, optical compensation, and fine-tuning for visual integrity. Suitable for designers at all levels, it connects contemporary logo practice to the enduring principles of Swiss typographic design.

The book is available on Amazon.

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These Adobe Illustrator Liner Brushes Replicate the Real Feel of Fine Liners

This brush set from brushapes.com brings the tactile logic of physical fine liners—Uni PIN, Pigma Micron, Winsor & Newton—into Adobe Illustrator as a fully vector-based toolkit. It includes 8 ink liner brushes, 18 seamless pattern brushes, 8 stipple brushes, and 18 pattern line brushes (52 tools total), all infinitely scalable and compatible with Illustrator's native brush engine. Aimed at illustrators, pattern designers, and brand designers who need analog-feeling linework at professional output quality, the set ships with a how-to-use video and written guidelines.

Download the brushes from Creative Market.

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This Adobe InDesign Furniture Catalog Design Template Provides a Modern Brochure-Magazine Style

This furniture catalog design template for Adobe InDesign was created by Adobe Stock contributor Refresh in a clean, minimalist brochure-magazine style. It includes 12 fully customizable pages, set in US Letter format with CMYK color mode for professional print production. All text, colors, and layout elements are editable within InDesign. Preview photography and decorative design elements are for display purposes only and are not included in the downloaded file. The template is available for licensing through Adobe Stock.

Download the template from Adobe Stock.

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