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Joshua Johnson

Joshua Johnson

Equal parts editor, writer, designer, and photographer. Hit me up on Twitter, or check out my photos.

Graphics / 12 Jul 2011

5 Quick & Simple Design Tricks to Liven Up Any Project

Sometimes you have a perfectly good layout, but your design needs a bit something extra to finish it off. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get stuck and become completely void of ideas.

Today we’re going to help you solve this problem by highlighting five random design ideas that you can incorporate into your back of design tricks. Let’s get started!

Business / 11 Jul 2011

How to Teach Someone Graphic Design

Do you have a friend, family member or colleague who is considering design as a profession and looks to you for guidance? Your instruction could mean the difference between a meaningful career and a non-starter.

Today we’ll offer up some basic advice that everyone should consider before attempting to teach someone to be a graphic designer.

Inspiration / 8 Jul 2011

10 Unbeatable Premium Memberships and Courses for Professional Design Training

As a professional designer, it’s absolutely crucial for you to stay up to date with your skill set. With web design moving along at a rate so fast that even the best quickly fall behind, it’s helpful to have a solid lifeline to quality educational resources.

Today we’re going to look at ten awesome premium design memberships and sources for training courses that will help you learn a plethora of new skills and help you stay current on the topics that you’re already versed in.

CSS / 6 Jul 2011

Rolling Your Own Grid Layouts on the Fly Without a Framework

Do you hate CSS grid frameworks but love the rapid layout benefits that they provide? Do you struggle with the math and code necessary to create your own flexible multi-column layouts on the fly?

Today we’re going to walk you through creating your own basic, reusable system for creating multiple columns that you can implement anywhere any time with only a few lines of code. No bloated code or non-sematic class names required!

Graphics / 23 Jun 2011

Say Hello: 50 Simple and Effective Website Greeting Messages

Placing a large greeting message at the top of your site is a great way to create a welcoming environment and provides the perfect opportunity to clearly state your purpose for being.

Today we’ve rounded up over fifty such messages for inspiration on both the message and visual appearance fronts. The greetings has been divided up into clear categories so you can analyze the different popular techniques being used by designers today.

Business / 22 Jun 2011

Using the Black Box Model to Design Better Websites

Today we’re going to introduce you to a popular model used in marketing to understand consumer behavior. We’ll then discuss how you as a designer can use this model to structure your designs to encourage action from users.

By becoming more equipped to analyze your visitors, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about how to design more persuasive websites.

Graphics / 21 Jun 2011

5 Logo Design Lessons From Fast Food Joints

Few logos have the power to immediately draw forth feelings from us more than those of fast food restaurants that we’ve seen and eaten at for decades. Just the sight of those golden arches can bring a smile to the face of children and adults alike.

What makes these logos effective and how can you put these ideas into practice in your own work? Today we’re going to see what we can learn by exploring the logos of several famous American fast food restaurants.

Inspiration / 17 Jun 2011

50 Creative and Clever Examples of Outdoor Advertising

Outdoor advertising is an incredibly rich and diverse medium that allows a very unique spectrum of creativity for designers to play with. Sometimes you have to catch someone’s attention in a split second, other times you can do something fun and interactive.

Today we’ve scoured Ads of the World and come up with fifty particularly creative billboards, bus stops, subway ceilings and more. If you need a fresh blast of creativity to boost your next project, take a look!

Graphics / 16 Jun 2011

Awesome and Unusual Places to Steal Color Palettes From

A good color palette can make or break a design. It sets the tone, conveys emotion and can even drastically affect usability. With all this pressure, choosing a color palette is tricky business.

Today we’re going to think outside the box and explore some fresh and interesting ways to select the colors for your project by pointing out some great sources of inspiration. Let’s get started.

Software / 15 Jun 2011

Adobe Illustrator 101: 10 Things You Should Know About Ai

Adobe Illustrator is one of my absolute favorite applications. For vector work, Illustrator simply can’t be beat and you should really set your reservations aside and give it a shot. Even if you’re commonly creating raster graphics for the web, there are a number of things that Illustrator simply does better than Photoshop so getting to know both apps and their strengths/weaknesses is a must.

Today’s article is for the extreme Illustrator newbies. You have the Adobe Creative Suite installed on your computer and have seen Illustrator sitting there quietly begging to be played with but you’ve never jumped in. We’ll go over ten basic things you should know before starting.

Business / 10 Jun 2011

What to Do With Your Portfolio’s Contact Form: 3 Popular Solutions

You’ve got your portfolio site almost finished and it’s time to tackle that task you’ve been putting off: the contact form. Some designers love forms, but many of us find them boring and annoying and would rather spend our day creating anything else.

One of the most difficult parts of this task is simply deciding what fields and questions to place in your contact form. What information should you be gathering from potential clients? Today we’ll answer that question by looking at three different common solutions.

CSS / 3 Jun 2011

Mastering CSS Reflections in Webkit

The box-reflect property is just one of many awesome new CSS3 effects that Webkit brings to the table. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest to use. There’s a lot of syntax that can be confusing and today we’re going to sift through it and explain it in detail so you can get the hang of it.

It’s important to note that, at this point, box-reflect is only supported by Webkit browsers. It’s a superfluous visual effect so you can use it as long as you accept that it’s not going to render in anything but Chrome and Safari.