Winners Announced: Win One of Three $300 LemonStand Licenses!
Congratulations so our three winners! Jano, Dave and Lance will be receiving emails soon from the good people at LemonStand with more details.
Jano Garcia: @janogarcia
Dave Mozdzanowski: @dave_moz
Lance Heiskell: @lheiskell
Thanks to everyone who entered!
February 21st, 2011 Posted in CompetitionsThis Week’s Deal: Wireframe Toolkit for Keynote – 50% Off
This week’s deal gives you a fantastic saving on the Keynote Wireframe Toolkit. This Keynote/PowerPoint package contains all the elements you need for mocking up and designing iPhone, iPad and Web applications.
It will make your wireframes look incredibly professional, and saves hours over creating each graphic manually. Not a Keynote user? Don’t worry – the wireframe kit also functions perfectly in PowerPoint!
Usually priced at $12, today you can download the wireframing kit for just $6!
Web Design Critique #38: Domains4Less
Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.
Today’s site is Domains4Less, an Australian domain name company.
February 19th, 2011 Posted in CritiqueHow to Make Slicing Suck Less: Tips and Tricks for Slicing a PSD
I have a dirty little secret, I hate slicing Photoshop files. By that I don’t mean that I hate turning PSD comps into websites, I mean that I hate Photoshop’s slicing tools. The whole process makes my PSD look busy, cluttered and overly complicated so I usually skip it altogether and instead opt to manually crop and save out images individually as needed.
In order to fight this tendency and attempt to see the true usefulness of Photoshop’s slicing tools, I embarked on a mission to learn all the intricacies of how slicing works. Below is a collection of tips and tricks that resulted from this journey. Hopefully, you’ll learn a thing or two you never knew!
February 17th, 2011 Posted in Graphics10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples
Layout can both be one of the easiest and one of the trickiest facets of web design. Sometimes a designer can bust out an amazing layout in minutes and sometimes that same designer can struggle for the better part of day with the same task.
Each project is unique and calls for a unique solution, but I’ve found it helpful to keep a few rock solid and incredibly versatile alignments in mind that I can bust out when I get stuck. The ten layouts below should be enough to get you through even the worst cases of designer’s block when you can’t figure out the best way to arrange the content on your page.
February 16th, 2011 Posted in LayoutsWeekly Freebies: 30 Beautiful Bokeh Textures
On a technical level, the term “bokeh” refers to the aesthetic quality of the blur in a photograph. Photos and even lenses are often judged by this factor and points of light in the distance are one of the most commonly seen tests and experiments in this area.
The images that result from these experimentations are quite beautiful and have really captured the attention of designers in recent years. Today we’ve rounded up thirty of our favorite free bokeh textures for you to use in your designs. Enjoy!
February 15th, 2011 Posted in InspirationThis Week’s Deal: 300+ Pictos Interface Icons – 73% Off!
This week’s deal gives you a fantastic saving on the Pictos Icon Set. These beautifully hand crafted, royalty free icons make your website or interface stand out from the crowd. Containing 324 individual icons, it’s a really versatile set of graphics!
The icon set is provided as a PNG pack, with each icon available in ten different sizes: 512px, 256px, 128px, 96px, 80px, 64px, 48px, 32px, 24px, and 16px!
Usually priced at $49, today you can pick up a copy for just $13!
Web Design Critique # 37: Aaron Storry Photography
Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.
Today’s site is Aaron Storry Photography.
February 12th, 2011 Posted in Critique50 Incredibly Clever Business Card Designs
Business cards are a constant point of creativity for designers. This little personalized piece of marketing holds an impressive amount of potential for capturing the attention of potential customers and many businesses are willing to spend plenty of money to make sure their cards make a lasting statement.
Today we’ve collected over fifty business card designs and concepts that not only have aesthetic appeal, but really go that extra mile to increase impact. Some pop up into 3D shapes, others glow in the dark or even serve a lasting useful purpose. All of them are sure to inspire you in your own endeavors to create amazing business cards.
February 11th, 2011 Posted in GraphicsHow to Design a Professional PowerPoint Presentation
Our recent series of tips on presentation design outlined some generic rules and ideas that you can live by to create better, more professional presentation. Today we want to follow that up by taking you through the actual process of designing a presentation from start to finish.
We’ll break down every step of the design process, from choosing colors and images to using whitespace properly. After reading through this you should be all set to design your own beautiful presentation slides that will put your coworkers to shame.
February 10th, 2011 Posted in Graphics