Design Shack

Business / 30 Jul 2021

What Is a Lookbook? (+ 10 Stunning Examples)

Whether you’re a designer wanting to show off work or have a request to create one for a client, a lookbook can be an effective way to showcase a variety of elements in a single design.

A lookbook is a portfolio of sorts and has wide application in a number of fields, including website design, graphic design, and development.

Here’s a guide to what a lookbook is, what to include in one when you start designing it, and some examples that are sure to help you find a little lookbook inspiration.

Font Collections / 30 Jul 2021

50+ Best Slab Serif Fonts of 2021

Slab serif fonts can be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from general body text to headlines, to display copy. It’s a typography variant that has been used widely for digital as well as print purposes, and devices such as Amazon Kindle even use a slab serif as their default font.

In order to celebrate this amazing subtype, we have gathered 50+ amazing slab serif fonts that you can use for your next design project.

They’re bold, beautiful, and carry plenty of impact. All of the font packs included consist of different variants and weights that give you plenty of scope to experiment in your designs. Let’s take a look!

Reviews / 29 Jul 2021

LT Browser: A Simple, Free Tool for Mobile Website Testing

Testing the mobile responsiveness of websites and web apps is one of the most frustrating tasks every web designer and developer has to tackle.

It usually involves hiring expensive agencies and buying subscription plans. But there are now more affordable solutions as well, like the LT Browser.

LT Browser is a new browser made just for designers and developers for testing websites on more than 50 mobile devices. And it’s free to use!

In this review, we take a closer look at this great new tool to see how it can be beneficial in the mobile testing phase of website development. Let’s see what this browser has to offer.

Inspiration / 29 Jul 2021

10+ Best Web & Graphic Design Books for Beginners

Most designers are visual learners. You learn more from looking at another design than reading about it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn design from books.

In fact, books are the best source for learning techniques and gaining knowledge from experts. According to a report, reading physical books helps you to think outside the box, develop problem-solving skills, and enhance creativity, among many other benefits.

The knowledge you can gather from a great design book can’t be matched with a YouTube tutorial or even an online course. To show you how great books can be, we handpicked the best web design and graphic design books you can read to level up your skills.

Read them all if you can but even reading just one book from this list is enough to add more to your design knowledge. Have a look.

Background Textures / 28 Jul 2021

40+ Best Subtle Black & White Background Textures

Are you looking for a subtle black and white background texture to make your designs stand out from the crowd? In this collection, we’re featuring some of the most beautiful, simple, and modern black and white background textures you can use for your design projects.

A black and white texture is the ideal choice for crafting a background to better highlight the content of your design.

Whether it’s a website, a presentation slideshow, a poster, a book cover or a social media post, a B&W background will help emphasize the text and the content of your design above all else.

Inspiration / 28 Jul 2021

30+ Best YouTube Thumbnail Templates in 2021

With over 500 hours of video content being uploaded every minute, it’s now tougher than ever to build a successful channel on YouTube. Creating quality content is not enough, you also need to market your videos effectively to get more views.

Using high-quality video thumbnails is one of the best ways you can use to attract attention to your videos. Think of it like fancy packaging for your video content.

The thumbnail cover you use for your YouTube video is the first thing users see when browsing videos on YouTube or searching on Google. By using creative and descriptive thumbnail covers, you’ll have a higher chance of getting more clicks and views for your channel.

Big brand channels on YouTube have their own dedicated designers creating unique thumbnail covers for each video. But, you don’t have to spend any money on designers when you have YouTube thumbnail templates.

In this collection, we’re bringing you some of the best custom YouTube thumbnail templates you can use to create attractive thumbnail covers for all kinds of videos. Have a look.

Inspiration / 27 Jul 2021

40+ Best Number Fonts for Displaying Numbers

The style of numbers and digits is particularly important in graphic design, and no less so when designing a typeface. Although every font has a unique look-and-feel, very few stand out specifically when it comes to the design of their numbers and digits.

After scouring the web, we’ve tracked down a few great examples of number fonts, and typefaces that do something particularly unique with their numbers. Some of these fonts are directed only towards digits, while others are complete packs of alphabets and numbers. Hopefully, they’ll help you in your search for a great number font for your next project!

Inspiration / 27 Jul 2021

15+ Best Web Design Communities & Discussion Spaces in 2021

Networking is an important part of almost every career, especially web design. And being part of a community related to your industry can bring many benefits.

When you join a community, you’ll always have a place to turn to when you want to seek advice, get feedback on projects, find a solution to a problem, or even stay on top of the latest trends.

If you’re a web designer looking for the right community to join, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we showcase some of the best web design communities and discussions forums you can use to ask, learn, and share your design knowledge.

Whether you’re an experienced web developer or just getting started as a web designer, these communities will help you connect with fellow professionals and learn from their experiences.

PowerPoint Templates / 27 Jul 2021

40+ Startup & Business Proposal PowerPoint Templates 2021

Presenting a project proposal or startup idea in a slideshow can be a daunting task. But it gets easier when you have the right PowerPoint proposal template at your side.

PowerPoint proposal templates allow you to design more attractive and persuasive slideshows to present your various business proposals, ideas, and projects in your meetings.

In this post, we bring you a collection of startup and business proposal PowerPoint templates, handcrafted by professional designers. All you have to do is download the template, open it in PowerPoint, and copy-paste your own content into the slides. And you’ll have yourself a high-quality PowerPoint presentation within minutes.

Mockup Templates / 26 Jul 2021

60+ Stunning Food, Drink & Packaging Design Mockups

Part of your job as a designer is to make sure you present your final design to your clients in a way that they expect (and that makes your hard work shine!). Clearly, they will want to see how your design looks and feels on their actual product — that’s where product mockups can be incredibly helpful.

This week we’re taking a look at food, drink, and packaging design mockups. We’ve tracked down some beautiful examples on Envato Elements so, if you’re currently designing a label or package design for a client, some of these might be the perfect way to present your design when it’s done. Enjoy!

Wedding Design / 23 Jul 2021

12+ Best Baby & Bridal Shower Invitation Templates

Throwing a bridal shower or a baby shower can be as stressful as planning the wedding itself. It can be even more frustrating when you have to design an invitation to invite everyone to the party as well.

To help take some weight off your shoulder, we handpicked a collection of beautiful baby shower and bridal shower invitation templates you can use to quickly create a stylish and creative flyer to invite everyone to the event in a fashionable way.

These templates are easily customizable. If you have Photoshop or Illustrator on your computer, you can simply download the template and open it in your favorite app to edit the text, change colors, and add images as you like. Then you can print it out all by yourself. Check out the invitation templates below and start downloading.

Font Collections / 23 Jul 2021

25+ Best Fonts for Books (Cover, Titles, and Body Text)

Finding the right font is the most important part of book design. It not only plays a key role in improving readability but also helps make your book look more professional.

In this collection, we’re featuring some of the best fonts you can use to design books. It’s always good practice to use at least two different fonts for your titles and body text. Of course, the cover design requires an entirely different font as well.

We made sure to cover all these aspects in this collection by listing fonts for covers, titles, and body text.

Sans-serif fonts are proven to improve readability. It’s ideal to use a sans font for body text. For titles, you can use both serif and sans fonts. However, there are times you may want to mix and match. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.

Font Collections / 23 Jul 2021

25+ Best Cursive Fonts (With Fancy, Pretty Styling)

If you’re working on a greeting card or a wedding invitation design, chances are you’re still looking for that perfect cursive font for your project. No need to look any further because we’ve rounded up a collection of the best cursive fonts just for you.

In this post, we’re featuring some of the best free and premium cursive fonts with elegant and fancy styles you can use with your various print and digital design projects. We guarantee you’ll find a font for every creative project on this list!

We’re also sharing a few tips for designing with cursive fonts to help you with your project.

Trends / 23 Jul 2021

Design Trend: Soft UI

There’s a website and app design trend that’s so subtle you almost don’t see it.

Soft UI creates a frost-style or glassy blur where elements sink and extrude from the background to create varying levels of depth and dimension.

Combine this effect with a softer, more pastel color palette, and the result is a light, “soft” interface with depth in shadows and subtle overall effects.

Here, we’ll look at the trend with examples.