40+ Useful Cheat Sheets for Designers

Nov 30 2008 by Jacob Gube | 22 Comments

Whether you need to learn something quickly or need a quick refresher on how to do certain tasks, cheat sheets allow you to do either one with relative ease. Print them out and decorate your workspace or save/bookmark them for later use, whichever way suits you best.

In this collection, you’ll find 40+ of the best cheat for graphic designers for either the Mac or the Windows operating systems. You’ll find cheat sheets for popular graphic design applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. These cheat sheets available in various formats including PDF, PNG, and web-based (HTML) formats.

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements cheat sheets

Adobe Photoshop Shortcuts

Photoshop Quick Reference Card (Mac, Windows)

Black & White Cheatsheet For Photoshop

Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac, Windows)

Photoshop Secret Shortcuts

Adobe Photoshop Cheat Sheet

Adobe Photoshop Elements Cheat Sheet

Photoshop Elements 5

Photoshop Toolbox Reference

Adobe CS4 Help

Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac, Windows)

Photoshop Cheat Sheet (Brown University, MS Word format)

Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Quick Reference Card for Windows

Illustrator cheat sheets

Illustrator CS3 Useful Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac, Windows)

Illustrator CS2 Useful Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac, Windows)

Adobe Illustrator Shortcuts

Computer Arts – Keyboard shortcut cards

(also includes a variety of other cheat sheets such as Freehand and InDesign).

Fireworks cheat sheets

Fireworks CS3 Quick Reference Card (Mac, Windows)

Fireworks MX Quick Reference Card (Mac, Windows)

Print Design cheat sheets

Designers Toolbox: Commercial Envelopes

Color Codes Matching Chart HTML (CMYK, RGB Hex)

cyro pantone foldout

Designers Toolbox: Postcard Sizes

Designers Toolbox: Proof Reading Marks

Designers Toolbox: Standard Foldings

Designers Toolbox: Paper Sizes

Designers Toolbox: Conversion Chart

Designers Toolbox: Binding Styles

Designers Toolbox: Standard Web Banners

I.D.E.A.S. Graphics Cheatsheet

InDesign cheat sheets

Adobe InDesign CS2 Useful Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac, Windows)

InDesign Cheat Sheet – Tools you’ll always use

GIMP cheat sheets

Gimp Quick Reference Card v.1.0

The Gimp Cheat Sheet

Got one that’s not on the list?

There’s a ton of useful cheat sheets out there, and if you know of one that’s not included above, please share it with the rest of us in the comments!

22 Comments

Jim Gaudet

November 30th, 2008

Very nice. I am using CS4 and really need the cheat sheets.

Thanks,

insic

December 1st, 2008

nice compilation you have here. thanks for the nice article

mark

December 1st, 2008

Great list, but wtf, look at the ‘Photoshop Elements 5′-sheet, do some guys think you’ll really forget how the titlebar/toolbar looks like?!

Simon

December 1st, 2008

Cheat sheets in design is like the Google of the internet – they just save so much time and increase efficiency so well.
They’re especially helpful because the limits with design programs today are endless

Winardi

December 1st, 2008

Thanks for including Gimp cheat Sheet, that’s help me a lot.

Detox Media

December 1st, 2008

I’ve always found these cheat sheets quite helpful also:

http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/

George

December 1st, 2008

Re-tweeting this. Great stuff!

Timothy

December 1st, 2008

Yea, the CS4 cheat sheet is really handy. Thanks!

Dietmar

December 1st, 2008

Very helpful! Although the first thing I do after setting up my computer new, is to customize the PS-Shortcuts. I’ve learned Photoshop with Ps7 and I really like the shortcut “.” and “,” to decrease/increase the size of a brush. Unfortunally this shortcuts disappeared in Photoshop CS…

Randall

December 1st, 2008

Useful set. I am a proud GIMP user and was pleased to see all the Adobe products sharing space with the tiny open source dynamo (even if one of those sheets was published in 2003!!!)

Thanks for compiling this list.

Chris W.

December 1st, 2008

Thanks Jacob, very good list. I’ve posted some useful javascript library cheat sheets on my blog.

http://www.chris-wallace.com/2008/12/01/5-useful-javascript-library-cheat-sheets/

bill

December 2nd, 2008

Good, useful things. Thanks!

Gelay

December 2nd, 2008

very good list. thanks.

Poster Printing | PrintPlace.com

December 2nd, 2008

Thanks for the cheat sheets. It’s so easy to forget certain buttons and functions when you don’t use them on a daily/weekly basis. It’s horrible when you’re on a designing “roll” and you have to stop to look up a shortcut which can put the brakes on your idea, so these are really helpful. Thanks!