Design Shack

Reviews / 24 Jun 2021

Looka: An AI-Powered Platform to Design Your Own Logo

Using artificial intelligence, Looka is an online design tool that can help you create anything from a logo to a full branding suite.

It’s designed to use keywords and a little machine-learning magic to help jumpstart your creative process when you are ready to launch a business or brand now, but don’t have the materials to get started.

Here, we’ll look at Looka and the set of tools that make it a pretty robust platform for quick brand building.

After Effects Templates / 23 Jun 2021

40+ Best After Effects Title Templates 2021

Today we’re bringing you a collection of After Effects title templates featuring stunning visual effects and animations you can use in your own videos.

We handpicked these After Effects templates to feature titles of all kinds, including title scenes for YouTube openers, product promotions, social media videos, business videos, trailers, and much more.

All of these templates are from Envato Elements, where you can download all of these templates and more than a million other design elements for a single monthly subscription.

Have a look and start downloading.

Premiere Pro Templates / 23 Jun 2021

50+ Best Premiere Pro Templates 2021

Today we’re featuring a collection of easy to use Adobe Premiere Pro templates you can use to quickly craft professional-looking scenes for your videos.

Whether you’re looking to make an opening scene for your YouTube channel, a title sequence for a video, slideshows, or even product promotions, this list of Adobe Premiere Pro templates has it all.

We’ve included a mix of free Premiere Pro templates and top-notch premium options too. So there’s something for every budget!

Features / 22 Jun 2021

How to Design a Logo

On average, hiring an agency to design a logo could cost you around $1,000 – $10,000 or even more. At this point, you might even consider designing the logo yourself, right? Well, let’s make that happen!

Some designers and agencies make logo design seem like a herculean task. The truth is it’s not that difficult to learn how to design a logo by yourself because there are many different tools and easy methods for crafting a logo.

In this guide, we’re going to walk you through a few of those beginner-friendly strategies to show you how easy it is to craft a logo no matter what kind of a budget you have.

We also made the guide more comprehensive and useful to business owners and entrepreneurs who don’t have any design experience. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to design a professional logo all by yourself. That’s our guarantee. Let’s get started, shall we?

Lightroom Presets / 22 Jun 2021

60+ Best Free Lightroom Presets 2021

Adobe Lightroom is one of the most useful tools you can use to optimize your photos and graphics. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, it has features suitable for everyone.

What makes Lightroom more powerful is its ability to extend its features with third-party presets. These presets allow you to instantly apply effects, enhance photos, adjust tone and mood, and much with just a few clicks.

Finding amazing Lightroom presets is not difficult. There are plenty available on platforms like Envato Elements. But, for those of you who are on a tight budget and can’t afford premium presets, we made this list of best free Lightroom presets you can download and use to enhance all kinds of photos.

Inspiration / 21 Jun 2021

25+ Best Brand Manual & Style Guide Templates 2021 (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.

Trends / 21 Jun 2021

Design Trend: Abstract Art Compositions

When you don’t know what to use to illustrate a design, the answer might be abstract art.

It’s a growing design trend that – when done well – uses interesting shapes, colors, and combinations to create something that means almost nothing but is visually interesting.

There’s no wonder that designers are using this concept.

For startup websites without photography to designs for companies that aren’t sure how to represent an almost-post-COVID world visually and everything in between, abstract can be a workable choice.

Instagram Templates / 18 Jun 2021

Instagram Grid Templates: 10 Examples + Tips

A secret used by some of the boldest visual brands on Instagram is to use a grid or puzzle template. What this style of template does is create 12 cohesive panels that come together as a single image when someone visits your Instagram profile page.

The trick here is that the panels have to work equally well as single image posts and together as a whole. It can be difficult to pull off if you are not careful.

A template can make it a lot easier to figure out and manage. You can create one yourself, or download a ready-made option (best if you are looking for quick and easy). Here, we are looking at 10 great Instagram grid templates with tips for how you can take the inspiration from each and use it with your images on your social media account.

Brochure Templates / 18 Jun 2021

Brochure Design Software: 3 Options Compared

So, you need to design a brochure? Where do you start? We’re comparing three different pieces of brochure design software to see how they stack up.

For web and digital designers creating a printed brochure for the first time, to designers that have been making print pieces for a while, using the right tool can make brochure design a more efficient task.

Choosing the right software, and sticking with it over time, is a sure-fire way to speed up your design workflow.

Adobe tools are the common starting place. Today, we’ll compare using InDesign, Illustrator and Adobe Spark (a free offering) as different options creating a brochure design.

We’ll look at the pros and cons of each (including the cost), and suggest which options are best for different types of brochure design project.

Instagram Templates / 18 Jun 2021

50+ Best Instagram Post & Story Templates 2021

We’ve handpicked a collection of Instagram post and Story templates with professional designs. You can easily customize these templates to add your own text and images to create a more successful Instagram content strategy.

Instagram is one of the best platforms for promoting brands and businesses. But, with millions of posts being added every day, you need to think outside the box to attract your followers’ attention.

If you’re tired of using the same old designs to promote your brand and products on Instagram and looking for a better way to get more followers, you should consider using more professional post layouts and designs, especially for creating attractive Instagram Stories.

To help you find the right design to promote your business, we’ve curated some of our favorite Instagram post and Story templates, designed to wow your audience.

PowerPoint Templates / 17 Jun 2021

25+ Simple PowerPoint Templates (With Clutter-Free Design)

When it comes to creating PowerPoint slideshows, using a simple PowerPoint template can be a key approach. It may seem like a good idea to throw the kitchen sink: data, stats, charts, and shapes into every slide, but you’ll never be able to win over your audience with a cluttered slideshow design.

That’s why professionals always use simple slide designs to highlight only the most important parts of a presentation. Of course, you don’t have to be an expert designer to create these professional slideshows. There are pre-made templates you can download and customize with a few clicks.

To help you get started, we handpicked a collection of simple PowerPoint templates with clean and clutter-free designs for creating professional looking PowerPoint slideshow presentations.

We’re also sharing some simple presentation tips to get you started with a clear, simple talk.

Layouts / 17 Jun 2021

How to Design a Captivating Web Questionnaire

We’ve all run across them – web questionnaires or surveys that were so simple and delightful that they were actually fun to fill out.

Sadly, that’s the exception to the rule. More often than, surveys are clunky and cumbersome.

You can design a captivating web questionnaire with the right thought process. It’s a mix of question planning with visual elements and cues to make the process user-friendly and somewhat seamless.

Here’s how you do it.

Poster Design / 17 Jun 2021

25+ Best Poster & Photo Frame Mockup Templates

Whether it’s showcasing a project in your portfolio or presenting a design to a client, a mockup goes a long way to make your work of art look more professional. And of course, as a designer, you can never have enough mockups.

Today, we’re bringing you a collection of poster frame mockups and photo frame mockups for showing off your work in a more exciting way.

There are many different styles of photo and poster frame mockups in this list with realistic scenes.

You can use them to present your poster designs, flyers, artworks, and much more.

CV & Resume Templates / 16 Jun 2021

How Do You List Freelance Work on Your Resume? (We Have the Answer)

Congratulations, your freelance business is proving successful. But how do you handle talking about it or explaining freelance work to potential employers, or on your resume? It can be a hard subject to explain as a single entry on paper, and you don’t want freelance work to look like an employment gap.

There are some things you can do to on paper (and on LinkedIn) to help present freelance work in a way that is more understandable to others. The key for many freelancers – especially those working part-time – is remembering to include freelance work as part of your resume and design portfolio. Sometimes those jobs can be just the thing you need to help land the next big gig!