Design Articles, Inspiration & Guides

Inspiration / 24 Sep 2020

20+ Best Brand Manual & Style Guide Templates 2020 (Free + Premium)

Your brand is the key to a successful business. It’s what gives your business an identity and separates you from the competition. Your brand manual or style guide are the documents you need to help keep it consistent—they’re key to maintaining your brand identity.

Whether you’re a small business, agency, or a corporation, you should have a proper document that covers all the details of the brand. Such as the design of different logos you use, the color palette, fonts used for the brand design, etc.

Think about when you hire a third-party agency to run an ad campaign. To help them avoid misrepresenting your brand, you hand them your brand manual and style guide. So they can present your brand more accurately through the campaign.

If you’re working on a brand manual for your own business, these brand style guide templates will help you put together a more useful and professional document without an effort.

Inspiration / 23 Sep 2020

22+ Best Lookbook & Catalog Templates (Free & Premium)

Lookbooks and catalogs are an important element of promoting a business. They help you not only to showcase your products and services to customers but also to build trust and establish your brand.

Today, we share with you a way to create more professional and attractive lookbooks and catalogs at a very low cost using pre-made templates. With the help of lookbook and catalog templates, you can create amazing-looking brochures for your business without needing to hire expensive design agencies.

We handpicked some of the best catalog templates that suit all kinds of businesses and professionals. Whether you’re a business or a freelancer working on a catalog design, these templates will help you design a more effective brochure with minimum effort. Take a look.

Font Collections / 23 Sep 2020

Serif vs. Sans Serif Fonts: Is One Really Better Than the Other?

There is an ongoing debate among designers – both print and digital – about what makes an ideal typeface for a project. The debate almost always breaks down to a single question: serif or sans serif?

Before you answer that question, think about all of the things you know about serif and sans serif typefaces and all the myths associated with them.

Today, we’ll take a look at both categories of type and try to determine if one is really better than the other, and in what circumstance.

Font Collections / 22 Sep 2020

23+ Best Block Fonts (Free + Pro Block Letter Fonts)

Nothing beats a block letter font when it comes to designing titles and headings. They are the perfect font for attracting attention as well as making text readable from a distance.

Which is why block fonts are mostly used for everything from poster designs to flyer designs and even logo designs. Contrary to popular belief, block fonts come in all sorts of shapes and designs, and not just squared blocky designs.

You’ll find many styles and forms of block fonts in this post. We handpicked some of the best block letter fonts with modern and classic designs. There’s a font for everyone in this collection. Go have a look.

Font Collections / 21 Sep 2020

30+ Best YouTube Fonts (For Thumbnails + Videos) 2020

Designing the thumbnails and video titles is an important part of creating a professional YouTube channel. We’re here to guide you through the design process by helping you pick the best YouTube font for your channel branding, as well as individual videos.

In this post, we feature a collection of the best YouTube fonts you can use to design eye-catching video thumbnails, titles, YouTube covers, logos, and much more.

We made sure to handpick fonts with unique styles as well as professional character designs to make sure your YouTube titles look unlike any other on the video blogging platform.

Plus, we’re sharing a few YouTube font tips for finding just the right typeface for your next video.

Font Collections / 21 Sep 2020

20+ Typography Trends for 2020

Want to give your design a quick facelift? Using new and interesting typography trends might be the answer. Designers are opting for less elaborate typefaces and pairing them with bold color, cutouts, gradients, and even customizations to create lettering that stands out.

Changing typefaces or recreating an image or header in a trending style can give a design a fresh look without a full-scale overhaul. Not sure where to start? This list features typography trends with examples to use as inspiration for how to use them.

Here’s a look at the top typography trends for 2020.

Brochure Templates / 18 Sep 2020

70+ Modern Corporate Brochure Templates

Brochures are an incredibly important part of identity and branding for any type of business. Whether you’re keeping customers informed, marketing a new product, or selling your services. A beautiful, modern brochure template can be a great starting point.

We’ve tracked down some of the most beautiful, creative brochure designs to help you quickly get started with a professional template. They’re modern and stylish, and can help your business stand out from the crowd.

All these brochure designs come in the form of a ready-to-go template, fully print ready, and most just cost a few dollars.

We’re also sharing a few helpful tips for designing a corporate or business brochure, and a guide on how to choose your brochure design software to help get you started.

Procreate Brushes / 17 Sep 2020

30+ Best Procreate Brushes 2020 (Free & Pro)

If you’re a digital artist searching for the perfect Procreate brush to craft stunning illustrations or to design unique website header images, we’ve got a great collection of professional Procreate brushes just for you.

Procreate is amongst the most popular drawing apps available for iPad Pro. It’s actually more than just a simple drawing app. With the Apple Pencil stylus and the right set of brushes, this app can help you craft amazing digital drawings and paintings.

The app comes with over 130 basic brushes. But, many people don’t realize that they can expand this collection with custom brushes that have been carefully created by professionals. We’ve handpicked some of the best custom brushes you can use with your Procreate app.

Mockup Templates / 16 Sep 2020

40+ Best Website PSD Mockups & Tools 2020

A great website mockup design can help to present your web design in a beautiful, unique way. This collection of website mockup PSDs is perfect for doing just that, and we’ll also share our favorite website mockup tools, and tips for creating your website mockup!

Proper presentation is the key to delighting your clients. Whether you’re working on a website design or a logo design, the way you present your designs to your client determines your level of professionalism. When choosing a mockup template to showcase your design, you ideally want to choose a mockup design that looks out of the ordinary. Something that helps you display your website design uniquely and attractively that renders your clients speechless.

Perspective website mockups let you showcase your layouts from different angles, making your designs look more like real products instead of just a static mockup.

We’ve collected some of the best free and premium website mockups you can use to present your next website design to your clients.

Affinity Designer Templates / 16 Sep 2020

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator: Pros & Cons Compared

It’s been more than three decades since Adobe introduced us to Illustrator. All this time, Illustrator has been the go-to software for vector graphics design.

Ask any expert designer and they’ll tell you how they can’t even think of switching software. Illustrator is now part of their workflow and career. Adobe used this loyalty to their advantage, by converting their software licensing to a subscription plan.

You now have to pay a monthly price to keep using the software. For some people, it’ll still be a great deal. But for others, you’ll likely ask yourself if it’s still a good investment. That’s why you’re here, right?

Affinity Designer is everything that you want a graphic design software to be. Needless to say, it’s the best Illustrator alternative available today.

But, is it powerful enough to provide all the tools you need to do your work? Does it have all the essential features of Illustrator? To answer these questions, we compared Affinity Designer against Adobe Illustrator. Let’s find out which software is best.

Email Templates / 15 Sep 2020

15+ Best Responsive & HTML Email Design Tutorials

How do you design an email that will result in plenty of opens and strong click-through rates? There’s a little art – and luck – that goes into email design.

Whether you’re looking at the graphic and visual design, or the responsive HTML development side, email design can be a tricky business.

Here, we’re going to look at some tutorials to help you learn everything you need to know about email design, from some basics to more advanced techniques to help you make this most of this digital marketing tool.

Procreate Brushes / 15 Sep 2020

5 Procreate Tips for Pro iPad Design

Procreate is the main reason artists fell in love with the iPad Pro. It’s the app that transformed the iPad into the portable drawing pad that every artist dreamed of.

Procreate is an app full of amazing features and possibilities. Today we share with you some of the best Procreate tips to help you make the most of this app.

Whether you’re just getting started with iPad Pro and Procreate or an expert looking for useful tips, this guide will surely help you create professional art using the popular iOS app.

Lightroom Presets / 14 Sep 2020

50+ Best Lightroom Presets of 2020

If you’re looking to supercharge your design workflow this year, updating your Lightroom presets with a new, powerful collection is a good idea! Lightroom presets let you instantly fix, improve, and enhance your photos with a single click. And we’ve found the perfect set of presets just for you.

Having the right set of Lightroom presets can be a huge time-saver for designers. Everything from retouching portrait photos, to adding stunning visual effects, enhancing interior photos, optimizing HDR photos, adding retro effects, and much more is possible with the Lightroom presets we’ve included in this list.

We’re also answering the most common Lightroom preset FAQs, to help you learn more about presets, use them on desktop or mobile, and more.

How to Design a Logo / 14 Sep 2020

15+ Key Logo Design Trends of 2020

Need a new logo? Whether you’re starting from scratch or just planning a tweak to a current mark, understanding shifts in logo design trends can help you create a design with a modern touch.

The theme in logo design is to create something simple and distinctive. With so many new websites and brands and companies coming online almost every day, it’s no wonder that logos are trending toward designs that stand out.

Here’s a look at a few logo design trends for 2020, and how you can make them work for you (and while you’re at it, be sure to look through our full guide on how to design a logo!)

PowerPoint Templates / 11 Sep 2020

50+ Best Free PowerPoint Templates (PPT) 2020

Not everyone can afford to buy premium PowerPoint templates to create their slideshows. But, that doesn’t mean you have to settle for a default template. There are dozens of incredible free PowerPoint templates to try out!

A great thing about the design community is that there are designers out there who willingly share their amazing work for free of charge, including gorgeous free PowerPoint templates.

To help you save some money, we scoured the web and handpicked a collection of the best free PowerPoint templates with modern and professional designs that you can use to make various types of presentations. Good luck with your presentation!