Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
Designing out in the open can be quite intimidating.
You’re basically swinging the doors open wide and hanging up a huge sign that says “Harsh Criticism Wanted.” However, the benefits of utilizing this particularly transparent method of design can often outweigh the grievances.
Today we’ll look at seven reasons to consider designing your next project in the open.
Getting noticed in an industry as competitive and overcrowded as web design is no mean feat. In order to stand out, first impressions need to be both targeted and executed to perfection.
To provide an insight into how it should be done, we’ve compiled a list of 25 of the most beautifully designed web agency sites. These amazing sites all have that “wow factor”, displaying cutting edge design alongside marketing savoir-faire. They are conscious of their target clientele, whether it’s large corporations or personal clients, presenting an understanding of their needs.
There is no shortage of companies that follow popular design trends to appeal to a mass market. Much more rare is the breed of company that actually sets design trends. Today we’ll examine the techniques of a company that occupies the top of the design food chain: Apple.
Below you’ll find 15 practical ways to follow Apple’s example in creating beautiful interfaces.
E-commerce sites are notoriously busy and overcrowded.
Today we’ll be examining a ton of online stores that break this trend by being both functional and attractive. Each of the examples below has a unique lesson to teach us about good e-commerce design. Let’s get started!
A strong footer can leave your visitors with a lasting positive impression.
There are tons of creative ways to boost the cool factor of your footers by focusing on both form and function. Below you’ll find 10 simple ideas to inspire you towards footer greatness.
As a designer, color management should be an integral part of your workflow. A website’s color scheme helps shape its identity and therefore should not be carelessly thrown together. Here are 25 online, desktop and iPhone applications to help you live and breathe color management no matter where you are.
A few good textures can take a boring design and turn into something stunning. As a designer, you should seek to build a library of all kinds of textures to complement a range of styles. Here are 50 completely free and ready to download textures to get you started.
As we arrive at the last month of yet another year, it’s time we revise and reflect on all the goodies this year had to offer. At the same time it’s great to practice the tips and lessons learnt for the years to come! We have brought together a series of what we feel are some of the best tutorials of 2008 from around the web.
We’re starting off with the most useful graphic design tutorials of the past year. In no particular order, read on to see 33 that have stood out in particular.
You might have seen these fading dividers/separators on various sites, which seem to fade both horizontally and vertically. Here is an example of what I mean:
They provide a great way to split content up, doing so in a subtle and non-intrusive manner. I would like to share a simple way to create these fading dividers using Photoshop.
The RSS feed icon has become somewhat iconic in web design, and is arguably one of the most recognized symbols. This great article has a huge collection of RSS feed icons – from a photorealistic style as shown here, to small buttons to hand-drawn sketches.
With the latest software update to the iPhone, it is now possible to add ‘WebClips’ to your home screen. This is essentially a quick bookmark to a website, complete with an icon. By default, the iPhone will take a tiny screenshot of the site to use as an icon – with a little work however, you can customize the icon used to make it look just as you’d like.
There are many complicated methods to create transparency effects across the various browsers available (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer), but it can be simple to achieve this effect using a few CSS tricks. Albeit with a couple of limitations.