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The world is a widely varied place and it’s naive to imagine that a design that resonates well with one group of people will be equally effective with another group on the other side of the globe.
Today we’ll show you how to wield Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions to better tailor your designs to different cultures through a basic understanding of the values that they tend to pursue.
As a follow up to our 50 Wonderful Water and Ice Textures, we’ve wrangled up over twenty beautiful and fierce fire textures for you to use in your next design project.
Each image is licensed for commercial use so you can use them pretty much however you want, just be sure to check for attribution as many authors simply want you to give them credit in some small way. Enjoy!
Long before web UI mockups came along, print designers would hone their ideas using a tried and true method called thumbnail sketching. This practice seems to be somewhat of a lost art so we’re going to shed some light on it!
Today we’ll briefly discuss what thumbnail sketches are, some tips for creating them and how to effectively implement them into your already busy workflow.
The holidays are quickly approaching, which means it’s almost time for the annual awkward tradition of giving and getting gifts. Whether you’re shopping for a designer or you are a designer working on your wish list, these fifteen gadgets and gifts are so awesome that you won’t want anything else.
Chopsticks, pens, gloves, these all sound like every day boring items but wait until you see the amazing high tech versions we found!
Tour pages are one of the most important components for websites advertising apps and/or services. The tour page is often where interested users will either make the firm decision to sign up or move on to something else.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of pressure as a designer to get this right! Fear not however, many talented designers have gone before you and we can learn a lot by looking at their examples. We’ll dive into tour pages from giants like Mozilla, 37Signals and Mint.com and see what common tricks they all use to win conversions.
Great design inspiration is all around us. Sometimes the best examples are so common that we see them all the time without a second thought. The cars we drive, the advertisements in our mailbox, the cover art on that new album you just downloaded, all of these are teaching their own little design lessons and if we would but listen, we just might learn something.
Today’s subject is playing cards. At least one pack can be found in almost every home in America, which means they’re a perfect example of ubiquitous design that we take for granted. We’ll take a fresh look at why they’re so perfectly designed and learn a little history along the way.
In the design world, holidays come early. We know you have to start working on your holiday projects well before launch date so we wanted to help out by providing a list of thirty awesome photos that will be perfect for any Christmas designs you may be starting.
Each image is licensed for commercial use so you can use them pretty much however you want, just be sure to check for attribution as many authors simply want you to give them credit in some small way. Enjoy!
It’s no secret that we here at Design Shack are huge fans of Dribbble and the awesome community of designers that actively upload their work to the site.
Today we tip our hats to some of the wonderful illustration artists in the Dribbble community with a showcase of over one hundred amazing and quirky character illustrations. In this post you’ll find everything from angry monsters to beloved cereal mascots and beyond (Apple fans will find a special treat at the end of the post!). Let’s take a look!
Designers are often quite hesitant to venture beyond the realms of HTML and CSS into the territory of scripting and programming languages, and for good reason. Programming requires a very different set of skills than mocking up web pages. Further, there are so many different things to learn that most designers don’t even know where to begin: JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Rails, how can you possibly keep up?
However, in practice, programming turns out to be much less scary than designers imagine it to be. Today I’m going to show you how programming is a skill that you can learn once and then apply to each new language that you pick up. We’ll take a look at three different programming constructs in three different languages to see how similar they really are. If you’d like to get started in programming but don’t know a single thing about it, this article is for you.
Responsive design is our current best solution to the phenomenon of the ubiquitous web. The Internet is being accessed by people everywhere on countless incredibly varying devices and responsive pages provide an easy and functional way to account for these differences.
Today we’re going to take a step back from discussions of media queries and technical jargon and focus on the core aspects of how responsive techniques affect your design process. What major points do you need to keep in mind when approaching a responsive web design project? Read on to find out.
Today we’re going to have all kinds of fun. First we’ll build an animated menu using some shiny new CSS3 while learning how to implement pseudo selectors in a practical way on a real project. Then we’ll follow that up with how to build the same thing without pseudo selectors for better browser support. Finally, we’ll end with a look at how to scrap all that fancy CSS in favor of some good old fashioned jQuery.
Join us as we examine not one but three ways to tackle a CSS sliding navigation menu!
This is the third article in our back to basics series where we’re taking a look at the absolute beginning concepts of web development. If you’re a designer with little to no knowledge of web programming, this series is for you.
In our first article, we went over what HTML is and in our second article we outlined the basic anatomy of an HTML document. Today we’ll jump to a new topic and answer a very important question: What is CSS?