MyTFS
Ask TFS
Search
Close this search box.

Library Support

Graphic Design

Menu

Reference

Reference works typically consist of brief selections of facts, pictures, data, or definitions, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. However, in today’s networked society, there are many other types of reference works online that can link you to key information. We have provided here links to key online reference works that specifically support video game design.

Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias, glossaries

  • Artlex Dictionary: You’ll find definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing art / visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references.

 

Directories, Web Portals

 

History

  • Design is History: As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. 

 

Tutorials

  • Digital Arts Tutorials: Focuses on all things digital and creative, such as graphic design, 3D, animation, video, effects, Web design, and interactive design offering lessons on 3D printing, Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, as well as many other kinds of software and useful techniques.
  • Inclusive Design Toolkit: The toolkit was developed by the University of Cambridge, Engineering Design Centre to explain what inclusive design is, why it is worthwhile and how to do it.
  • TutorialZine: Offers a wide range of tutorials and resources for developers and designers focusing on Web development . Also supplies a demo for each tutorial so you can see what the end product will look like before you even begin.
  • W3Schools Online Web Tutorials: Everything you need to design and produce a website. Comprehensive, step-by-step tutorials cover all steps of website creation for all levels of developers, from beginner to advanced. Includes links for validating the code you write to make sure it’s compliant with the latest standards.

 

Visual Reference

  • Ad*Access: presents images and information on over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on several subject areas including Beauty and Hygiene.
  • AIGA Symbols & Signs: The complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian symbols developed by AIGA is available for all to use, free of charge. Signs are available here in EPS and GIF formats.
  • AIGA Design Archives: The archives of AIGA serve to identify, preserve and make available records of enduring value. AIGA’s aim is to make conditions suitable for access and to support research that will add to the literature of design and to safeguard its legacy.
  • Book Cover Archive: A source for new and historic book covers easily sortable by photographer, art director, designer, title, author, and genre. Check out Book Cover Archive’s blog for insightful commentary on designs and styles.
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art Image Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is offering 375,000 images of public domain art freely available under Creative Commons Zero. These images may be sorted and accessed by artist/culture, object type/material, geographic location, date/era, and-or department.
  • RIT Design Archives: The Rochester Institute of Technology’s archives are world-class with work from 25 designers and typographers. A must-see for any designer looking to expand their historic horizons.
  • Visual Arts Data Service (VADS): Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex U., UK – search a selection of themes including Graphic Design, Typography and Book Design, advertisements and posters.

Open Access Journals & eBooks

The following resources are open access free resources. The Open Access movement champions free, authoritative resources for academic achievement. Even though there are now high-quality resources available in Open-Access, you must always be critical in the assessment of any resource. Our goal is to post resources here that are primarily scholarly in nature as opposed to non-peer reviewed magazine articles and news.

eJournals

Associations, Agents, Boards, Councils

A major part of your professional career will include keeping updated on and participating in professional associations. Professional associations set benchmarks, link you to career resources, provide information on the latest developments. Other types of organizations may publish reports, newsletters, blogs, etc. that will assist you in career development and learning new skills.

Provincial

  • Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario (RGD Ontario): The Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) is a hub for the graphic design community, promoting knowledge sharing, continuous learning, research, advocacy, and mentorship. We work to establish professional standards, best practices and innovative thinking within our industry and beyond.
  • Interactive Ontario: Interactive Ontario’s mandate is to promote the interests of its members and to enlist the support of government and private sector partners with a vested interest in the growth of the digital media content industry.
  • Ontario Media Development Corporation, (OMDC), an agency of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport is the central catalyst for the province’s cultural media cluster including book publishing, film and television, interactive digital media, magazine publishing and music industries.

 

Canadian

  • Society of Graphic Designers of Canada: The GDC has been Canada’s national certification body for graphic and communication designers since 1956, establishing professional standards and actively regulating professional conduct. The GDC is a member-based organization of design professionals, educators, administrators, students and affiliates in communications, marketing, media and design-related fields. Our members come together to advance the profession, grow professionally, mentor each other, show off their work, and enjoy the camaraderie.

 

United States & International

  • American Institute of Graphic Artists: Founded in 1914 as the American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA remains the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design and is now known simply as “AIGA, the professional association for design.”
  • International Council of Graphic Design Associations: Icograda is a world body for professional design. It is a non-profit, non-partisan, member-based network of independent organisations and stakeholders working within the multidisciplinary scope of design. Founded in 1963, Icograda actively promotes the value of design practice, thinking, education, research and policy, representing more than 200 organisations in 67 countries and regions globally. 

Online & Print Magazines

Magazines (or online websites with specific design themes) are provided here for review. Online resources may not be peer-reviewed, but are an excellent source of news in your field of study.

  • Flipster: The Library is now offering access to Flipster. Flipster is an EBSCO product that provides access to magazine content as it appears in the print version. You’ll be able to access magazines with all of the content, such as pictures, included in the online version. We currently subscribe to the following on Flipster: American Cinematographer, Architectural Digest, Cinema Scope, Discover, Dwell, Interior, Newsweek Global, Popular Science, Robot, Wallpaper, The Walrus, and Writers Digest.

 

Print Collection

[To be added]

 

Online Magazines, Groups, etc.

  • AdAge: Recognized as the leading global source of news, analysis and inspiration for the marketing and media community. Advertising Age includes ongoing coverage of strategic topics for marketers from mid to large companies complemented by breaking news and a database of the world’s best creative.
  • Applied Arts: Applied Arts is Canada’s premier magazine of visual communications. Since 1986, we have delivered gorgeous imagery, strong opinion, timely information and essential industry insight to our readership of creative and marketing professionals.
  • Communication Arts: Founded in 1959, Communication Arts is the premier source of inspiration for graphic designers, art directors, design firms, corporate design departments, advertising agencies, interactive designers, illustrators and photographers—everyone involved in visual communication.
  • Dezeen Magazine | Graphics: Our mission is simple: to bring you a carefully edited selection of the best architecture, design and interiors projects from around the world.
  • Design Edge Canada: Designedgecanada.com, launched in February 2006, serves the Canadian graphic design industry with up-to-the-minute news, a national job board (Jobedge), blogs, links and resources. With more than 55,000 site visits per month, the site is known for its engaged audience, not afraid to express its views in lively reader commentary.
  • Design Observer: Change Observer is a channel of Design Observer devoted to the many dimensions of design for social innovation, developed by Winterhouse Institute with support from Rockefeller Foundation. It provides timely information about design strategies aimed globally at improving health, education, housing, and the environment, and features reportage, interviews, opinion pieces, book and exhibition reviews, a photo gallery, and a resource center compiling information about key organizations and events.
  • Digital Arts: Focuses on all things digital and creative, such as graphic design, 3D, animation, video, effects, Web design, and interactive design.
  • Eye Magazine: Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about design and visual culture.
  • How Magazine: HOW Magazine helps designers, whether they work for a design firm, for an in-house design department or for themselves, be more inspired, more creative and more successful.
  • Gestalten: Gestalten specializes in developing content for aficionados of cutting-edge visual culture worldwide. For us, visual culture is the output resulting from the interrelationship of design, art, architecture, photography, and other visual disciplines with each other as well as other areas such as popular culture and music.
  • Marketing Magazine: Marketing magazine is the voice of Canada’s marketing industry. Marketing is comprised of special reports emphasizing insight, analysis, context and debate. From media planning and buying, digital marketing, and television to reports on multicultural marketing, agency rankings and the out of home industry it’s all there to keep the industry informed and inspired.
  • Print Magazine: Print is a bimonthly magazine about visual culture and design. Founded in 1940 by William Edwin Rudge, Print is dedicated to showcasing the extraordinary in design on and off the page. Covering a field as broad as communication itself—publication and book design, animation and motion graphics, corporate branding and rock posters, exhibitions and street art—Print covers commercial, social, and environmental design from every angle. 
  • Typofile: Includes new typefaces, Web fonts, techniques, technology, opinions and essays.
  • Six Revisions: Six Revisions is a website that publishes practical and useful articles for designers and web developers. We seek to present exceptional, noteworthy tips, tutorials, and resources that the modern web professional will appreciate.

Social Media & Web 2.0 Tools

In addition to journals and magazines on the web, there many Web 2.0 tools and applications that will help you become a more efficient researcher. From Facebook to Academia.edu, there are many social media tools online to help connect you to information you need. 

Blogs

  • Awwwards: Users vote on designs and crown top designs of the day, month, and year. In addition to getting your work in front of thousands of people, you can also browse through a seemingly endless amount of sites for some awwwe-inspiring designs.
  • Brain Pickings: More of a resource for general creative news and inspiration than solely graphic design, Brain Pickings is still extremely relevant to any designer looking for inspiration and motivation.
  • Creative Applications Network: Nurtures creative intersections, exchanges and networks between practitioners in art, media, design and technology.
  • HypeForType: HypeForType is a growing hotbed of top typographic talent. UK blog/site and small font foundry. Lots of samples of fonts and lots of links.
  • Hongkiat: Design weblog for designers, bloggers and tech users. Covering useful tools, tutorials, tips and inspirational artworks.
  • Information Aesthetics: Andrew Vande Moere curates his site with the best infographics, offering many sources of inspiration for your next data viz piece and boasts a shop complete with necessary reading (think Tufte and DataFlow) for information designers.
  • Inspiration Lab: A blog to inspire graphic designers. Very current portfolio site.
  • It’s Nice That: Features events, printed publications, and designers’ works covering everything creative.
  • The DieLine: Established in 2007, The Dieline is the brainchild of Andrew Gibbs, who sought daily inspiration while working as a packaging production artist. Noticing a void for package design inspiration on the web, he began to catalogue packaging by googling images or snapping pictures of packaging on shelf – often leading to his removal from stores. The Dieline provides a First-rate international blog for all things packaging and branding. All featured projects provide further information, pictures, and links to the site of the firm responsible for that job.

 

Productivity Software Online

  • Trello: Trello is a free project management software tool. It allows you to create ‘To Do’ lists, collaborate with groups, set deadlines, and attach documents…and many more functions. It is an excellent way to organize your term of study.

 

Social Media

  • Academia.edu: This site not only allows you to create a Facebook-like profile, but the focus is on academics and sharing knowledge. You will be able to connect with other professionals in your area, review their posted research…and it is a completely FREE resource.
  • Pinterest: Pinterest contains a wealth of images to follow on a variety of fashion design themes. Sign up and start following different boards today!
  • Flickr: Online photo management system that allows you to search millions of photos. You can search by creative commons license in order to find images that you can use for assignments.

Statistics & Career Information

Statistical information is provided on graphic design, as well as career information and trends.

  • The Creative Group 2016 Salary Guide: Salary data for more than 120 creative positions, an overview of the current hiring environment, skills that are in demand, and more. Toronto is included..
  • Graphic Design Employment, Advice, Resources & Training: Includes graphic design employment advice, how-to articles on preparing images correctly for print, setting up documents in InDesign and Quark, artwork press-preparation, best practices and general workflow, links to other graphic design sites, and much more.
  • Graphic Designers and illustrators: Graphic designers conceptualize and produce graphic art and visual materials to effectively communicate information for publications, advertising, films, packaging, posters, signs and interactive media such as web sites and CD-ROMs. Graphic designers who are also supervisors, project managers or consultants are included in this unit group. Illustrators conceptualize and create illustrations to represent information through images.

Image, Fonts Collection

In this section we have provided links to available online font and image collections.

Art Images

  • AMICA Library: The AMICA Library contains over 108,000 works of art from the collections of contributing museums worldwide. Cultures and time periods range from contemporary art, Native American and Inuit art, to ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian works, along with Japanese and Chinese works.
  • Art Images for College Teaching: AICT is intended to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large.
  • Art Resource: High quality images of painting, sculpture, architecture and the minor arts from most of the world’s major museums, monuments, and commercial archives.
  • Artcyclopedia:Comprehensive index to over 7,000 artists and links to approximately 80,000 works, primarily painting and sculpture.
  • Artsy: Artsy Education offers 25,000+ downloadable open-access images. Powered by The Art Genome Project, Artsy is a free website with a library of 50,000+ images from 650+ museum, nonprofit, and gallery partners.
  • Bridgeman Art: Access to thousands of fine arts images and browsable by subject; registration required to save images and high resolution, watermark-free images available with purchase.
  • Digital Image Collections Wikispaces: Free and fair-use digital image collections; searchable and browsable by art historical movement, geographic location, or medium; created by Wellesley College.
  • Google Art Project: Explore selected galleries virtually, through a kind of “interior” street view; offers extremely high resolution images of artworks contained within those galleries/museums;form virtual collections of artworks that can be shared and annotated.
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art Image Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is offering 375,000 images of public domain art freely available under Creative Commons Zero. These images may be sorted and accessed by artist/culture, object type/material, geographic location, date/era, and-or department.
  • Visual Collections– Images of Art, History, and Culture: Contains dozens of digital image collections from museums, universities, and private collections throughout the world. Includes fine artwork, photographs, maps, architecture and other items. Some copyright restrictions may apply.
  • Web Gallery of Art: Searchable database of European painting and sculpture from 11th to mid-19th centuries; dual mode allows you to view images side-by-side to compare and contrast.

 

Fonts

  • Behance: Online portfolios to showcase and discover great work.
  • Fonts in Use : The site takes images and identifies the typefaces used.
  • Font Shop: Online font sales but provides Free PDF specimens of all typefaces for sale. Browse by name, designer or foundry. Provides a type glossary and a lot of information in the Education section.
  • Garage Fonts: The GarageFonts library consists of over 650 typefaces, ranging from outrageous experimental display styles to interesting and highly legible text families.
  • HypeForType: HypeForType is a growing hotbed of top typographic talent. UK blog/site and small font foundry. Lots of samples of fonts and lots of links.
  • Linotype: Contains more than 4000 typefaces, a know-how section, and magazine.
  • Microsoft Typography: Microsoft’s Typography group researches and develops fonts and font technologies, and supports the development of TrueType and OpenType formatted fonts by independent type vendors. Includes a database of articles, information, and instructional guides on typography.
  • Typewolf: Will show you the fonts used on various real websites and recommend fonts for you to use for free.
  • What the Font!: Send a screenshot to find the closest match to the fonts you like, at no cost.
  • Veer: Fonts, books, vector art, illustrations with links to contemporary design sites.

Photography & Video

  • Camera Quest: Lists of cameras, lenses, and accessories. Provides pictures and information on capabilities, production, design, original price and popularity.
  • Flickr Creative Commons: Use it to organize photos, share images with others, or discover new photography but it is also a great place to explore inspirational imagery for everything from layouts to Photoshop textures.
  • ImagingInfo.com: Comprehensive online guide to photography with industry news, technique tips, etc.

 

Free Stock Photography

Attribution and licenses

When searching Google for images most photos are not necessarily free to use and are still by the photographers’ copyrights.

To keep yourself out of copyright trouble use websites that explicitly define the copyright license of each image. Normally there’s a description of the license on every page or a link to a description. Here are two license types to look for –
Creative Commons zero means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
creative commons public domain

Creative Commons with attribution means that you can use the photo in any way you want but must credit the creator of the photo. Attribution means that if you include a photo on a web page you must cite the photographer (“Photo by ?”) and include a link to his or her site, if there’s one.

 

Free Video Clips

Colour

  • Colour Lovers : More than three million free color pallets which you can use to inspire you.
  • Dribble: Lets you upload your work for other to see, but is excellent for creating colour pallets. If you see a design on the site and want to explore more projects with similar colors, you select that color and see all other projects on the site that use the same color.
  • Kuler: The go-to source for all things color related. By moving the dots around the Adobe color wheel you’re able to select a wide range of complimentary, analogous, triad, shades, or custom colors, and Kuler will give you the RGB and HEX codes so you can go back to creating your masterpiece.

Ontario

460 Yonge Street,
Toronto, ON
Canada, M4Y 1W9

© 2003 – 2025 Toronto Film School