Joshua Johnson

PowerPoint Templates / 27 Dec 2024

How to Design a Professional PowerPoint Presentation

Our series of tips on presentation design outlined some generic rules and ideas that you can live by to create better, more professional presentations. 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.

Using a pre-built PowerPoint template can be a good starting point for many people (we collected some of the best PowerPoint templates for you!). But if you’re wanting to design your own from start-to-finish, you’re in the right place!

Flyer Templates / 13 Dec 2024

How to Design an Awesome Flyer (Even if You’re Not a Designer)

This article will walk you through the process and logic of designing a basic but attractive flyer. We’ll look at how you can plan your content, find and implement some quality images and handle the alignment of a significant amount of content while not sacrificing too much of the visual appeal.

Design Shack reader Abigail submitted a Design Dilemma to ask about flyer design. After reading through our tips on designing presentations, she wanted to know how she could apply similar advice to flyer design. In our presentation article, we advised designers to keep their slides painfully simple, but flyers understandably must contain more information than a simple headline.

We’re going to answer Abigail’s question with a full-on flyer design project that you can either browse through for general design advice or follow along with for some solid experience.

Graphics / 15 Nov 2024

Design an Ambigram Logo With Your Name

Ambigrams are a particularly complex type of typographical art that can be read identically in different orientations. They typically take the form of a word that reads the same way upside down as it does right side up.

Today we’re going to see what’s involved in creating ambigrams and walk through creating a basic one on our own.

How to Design a Logo / 8 Nov 2024

10 Tips for Designing Logos That Don’t Suck

So you’re designing a logo. It sounds like an easy enough task, right? Draw a circle, type in the company name and you’re done (I’ve literally heard a designer suggest that very process). Unfortunately, if you’re really worth the money the client is paying you, there’s a lot more to it than that.

There are a million people in the logo design industry today dishing out crappy logos in bulk for crowdsourcing sites. How do you as a serious professional stand out from the crowd and produce quality logos that don’t suck? Read on to find out.

Are you in the middle of a logo design project? Don’t forget to check out our in-depth guide on how to design a logo!

Layouts / 26 Jan 2024

10 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.

Google Fonts / 9 Nov 2023

The 10 Best Script and Handwritten Google Fonts

A good script font is hard to find. I’m extremely picky when it comes to this particular area of typefaces and tend to hate most of what I see. With this post, you can skip the work of sorting through the junk, and cut straight to the best script and handwritten Google Fonts that are readable, attractive and perfect for your site.

All of the fonts are shown with a unique CSS treatment (and provided with the code you need for quick implementation!) They’re also all served up with Google Fonts so you’ll be up and running with a quick copy and paste, no downloads required!

Inspiration / 27 Oct 2023

10 Free Color Palettes From 10 Famous Paintings

If you want to learn a thing or two about color, why not look to the true masters whose artistic work has stood the test of time? Great painters almost always possess a keen understanding of color that is truly impressive when you stop to appreciate it.

Follow along as we pull color palettes from ten of my favorite artists and paintings and learn a thing or two about art history in the process. You’ll be able to see each palette as an Adobe Color CC swatch, and drop it right into Photoshop!

Graphics / 12 Oct 2023

8 Rules for Creating Effective Typography

Today we’re going to discuss something that is both a hot trend and timeless art: typography. The basic rules outlined below will help you become more aware of how you structure and use typography in your designs.

Being conscious of these rules can improve nearly everything you create that contains a headline or major typographic element. Let’s get started!

Photoshop Brushes / 25 Jul 2023

30+ Brushes and Images for Creating Grungy Edges

Creating complex edges manually in Photoshop can be an arduous task. Fortunately, there are tons of free brushes and images online that will make this process a breeze.

Giving your design a unique edge can go a long way towards framing the rest of the graphic, and creating an effect that stands out.

If you’re going “grungy”, try to make sure that this effect extends across every part of your image.

Keep reading to see our collection of 20 brushes and images with torn, burned and grungy edges!

Graphics / 14 Mar 2023

15+ Awesome Places to Download Free Vector Art

Despite what many would think, the term web designer does not always imply an artist. There are many very capable web developers and designers that are lucky to pull off a quality stick figure on most days. For those that are able to create complicated artwork, there are plenty of times when you’re up against a deadline need something generic.

For either of these situations, you can’t beat free vectors. Though the quality varies dramatically depending on the source, there’s no shortage of great work out there that you can download and use in your projects immediately. Below we’ll take a look at a collection of websites offering free vectors of various types.

Wedding Design / 7 Mar 2023

60+ Wonderful Wedding Invitation & Card Design Samples

It’s astounding how many people weddings employ: photographers, caterers, florists, and even designers can make a great living by focusing partially or even completely on clients planning their marriage.

Wedding invitation card design is one of the most creative areas of print design today. Talented designers pull out all the stops and create some amazingly inspirational pieces. Keep reading to see fifty astounding examples of wedding invitation design (and a few trends to watch out for).

Software / 9 Oct 2019

25+ Best Google Chrome Extensions for Designers and Developers

Browser extensions can speed up design workflows, helping you do everything from identifying a font, to pulling a color swatch, to inspecting the code of an element. Google Chrome has edged out all other browsers with the top market share among users, on more than 58 percent of all computers.

And there are plenty of extensions out there to help you optimize the performance of Chrome in your design workflows.

We compiled an awesome collection of 25 extremely useful Google Chrome Extensions for designers and developers.