David Appleyard helps to build fun things for the design community, including Design Shack, Theme Junkie, and Creative VIP.
GraphicStock have a big collection of stock resources for designers — backgrounds, concepts, icons, patterns, textures, templates, photos and more.
Today we’re featuring a great deal, which gives you seven days of completely unrestricted access to the GraphicStock library. Read on to find out more about the site, how to redeem the deal, and see a collection of different assets and resources from the site!
Having a wedding website or blog is all the rage, and it can be a great way to keep your friends and family up-to-date with your wedding planning for the special day.
There are lots of services out there to help, but many are quite expensive or complicated. Today we’re taking a look at how you can build your own wedding website in a few simple steps, using the Wedding Tumblr theme.
You’ll have a wedding website to be proud of, in no time at all (here’s an example). All for the price of a couple of wedding magazines!
There are thousands of Tumblr themes all over the web. To be perfectly frank, most of them aren’t great, and won’t do your creative work justice. Today we’ve collected thirty of our favourite premium Tumblr themes from across the web.
All of these cost a few dollars, but all of them will take your Tumblr blog to another level. From stylish, minimal Tumblr themes, through to those featuring big colours and bold images — we have a full selection. All of them are available to buy straight from Tumblr directly, and can be set up on your blog in a few minutes!
We’ve hosted Design Shack with Media Temple for years. So we were very pleased when they came to us, and asked us to take a look at their new managed WordPress hosting solution.
Media Temple’s new full-featured WordPress hosting solution features four new, customizable and scalable plans. Whether you’re a photographer, web designer or creative agency, there’s a plan that should work for you. Today we’re taking a look at this new hosting product, to see how it stacks up!
At first glance, minimalist websites might look like they’ve just been slapped together as quickly as possible. After all, they’re plain and simple, and most people tend to associate lots of detail with good craftsmanship. But the same rules just don’t apply to the online world.
It only takes a small amount of user interaction to quickly reveal the quality of a minimalist site. This is because the original idea that fueled the rise of minimalism was that functionality is inherently beautiful. A design that clarifies and reveals the structure of a website can be just as appealing as one that obscures its purposes behind fancy decorative additions. Furthermore, it often yields a much better user experience, because those unnecessary distractions are eliminated.
Of late, you may have noticed a crop of new site designs have a softer and lighter look. After all the rainbow brights and even neon or fluorescent hues that have been so popular of late, it seems that some designers are taking a more subtle approach by using lighter or muted colors.
Although the same basic treatments are still being utilized — like colorized photography or color blocking — the new hues are making for a more refined and understated variation on these themes. Today we’re going to delve into this trend a little more, and explore various design examples and approaches.
Weddings can be an expensive business. Photographers, venues, food, drink, entertainment, and all manner of other things to consider. But it’s also a fun opportunity for some design work! Wedding “branding” and stationery has the potential to be another big wedding expense, but by thinking a little creatively, you can not only give your special day a personal touch, but also cut down on the cost.
Today I’ll be sharing a little insight into how you can use your copy of Photoshop, and Moo.com, to create a fantastic array of different wedding stationery. We did it for our wedding a couple of weeks ago, and it went down brilliantly.
It’s no secret that the agile development process has been hurtling through the development world for several years now, swatting aside the older, clunkier waterfall development method. To be fair, whether it was agile or something else, waterfall really had it coming, as its risk-averse, top down approach just can’t keep pace with the demands of today’s marketplace.
While similar changes are occurring in the design world, the agile design process should necessarily look and feel a little different than agile development; they are, after all, different disciplines. Let’s take a deeper look first at what agile development is, and then at a few great ways to adapt the process to the design world.
Icons can be considered one of the universalities of web design; almost any website benefits from the addition of at least a few of them. So it’s tempting to assume that if you sprinkle in a handful of these little pictures, your job is done. But there’s a lot more to it than that: good icons should feel like they’re visually integrated into the group of images that they’re in, as well as into the site design as a whole. They need to have a conceptual clarity and purpose that goes beyond being mere eye candy. Any icon that doesn’t serve a stated purpose, or doesn’t convey the right concept in its imagery, is one that needs to be reconsidered.
Of course, there’s room for interpretation and generalization with any kind of imagery, but icons are not mere illustrations that are used purely to break up space and add interest: they’re visual metaphors that can invest meaning into a subject at a single glance; and as such, they’re a powerful tool for improving user experiences.
Sometimes it seems like every time you jump online, you read about a talented new designer who’s making it big with their latest project. There are a lot of wonderful designers out there, and the constant showcasing of others’ skills makes it feel all the more like you’re lost in the crowd. It’s not enough anymore to have a solid portfolio and work experience; if you really want to stand out in today’s market, going the extra mile in marketing yourself can make all the difference in landing the perfect job, or getting some great freelance projects going.
When you’re considering all the ways that you could market yourself, the most important thing to take into account is how much of a time commitment you can realistically make. Don’t overstretch yourself with a daily blog entry or illustration unless you think you’ll be able to do a great job on it. There are many different levels of requirement for projects that can make a difference in your career; choose what works for you.
Every site has a logo, and whether it’s a page filling feature or a small design element, it often forms the primary title feature of your page. This article will show you how to implement a logo using correct semantic markup and simple HTML code, with all the presentation done via CSS.
It’ll ensure that those browsing your site without images will see a decent alternative, and provide search engines with a correct representation of your page title.
Almost all websites contain some sort of copyright notice in their footer (e.g. Copyright © 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.). But what’s the best way to do this? We’re going to take you through the requirements for your copyright notice, and a nifty JS (or PHP) trick for ensuring that your copyright year is always up to date.