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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.

CSS / 15 Sep 2011

20 Awesome Responsive Templates and Themes (Free and Premium)

Responsive web design is all the rage at the moment, but as a full-time designer it’s hard to make time to pick up on new trends no matter how useful and perhaps even necessary they may be.

Pre-built themes and templates provide you with a quick and easy way to get started with responsive web design. Many of them do all the work for you and provide a simple plug and play workflow, others just take care of the heavy lifting by taking care of the media queries and give you complete control over design. This post contains 20 free and premium templates, all of which are fully responsive right out of the box.

Business / 14 Sep 2011

The Best Online Portfolio Service: Three Free Options Compared

Whether you’re a freelance designer, a full-time-employee or an out of work designer actively seeking a position, it’s a good idea to increase your web presence as much as possible. It’s always great to have your own site and domain, but you can easily supplement that with some awesome free online services created specifically to host creative portfolios.

Rather than give you another roundup of twenty of these services and force you to do the research yourself, I’ve gone through and picked three of my favorites for comparison so you can quickly see which is best for you. Let’s get started!

Layouts / 13 Sep 2011

Is Content Always King? Thoughts on Real World Constraints in Design

Content should precede design. It’s a basic and essential piece of advice that you’ll hear from me as well as countless other designers. But what about the situations where this idea breaks down? We’d like to imagine that it’s never the case that design must take place before certainty about content can be reached, but in truth this simply isn’t the case.

What circumstances are there that force designers to proceed with a lack of content? How should you respond to such scenarios? Keep reading as we explore these ideas.

Inspiration / 8 Sep 2011

30 Useful and Hilarious Lorem Ipsum Generators

Lorem ipsum represents a long-held tradition for designers, typographers and the like. Some people hate it and argue for its demise, but others ignore the hate as they create awesome tools to help create filler text for everyone from bacon lovers to Charlie Sheen fans.

Today we’re going to briefly discuss why lorem ipsum and its brethren still have legitimate uses and then we’ll have some fun as we check out thirty great dummy content generators that you’ll definitely want to bookmark.

Software / 7 Sep 2011

8 Ways to Get the Selection You Want in Photoshop

Mastering different forms of selection creation is one of the fundamental aspects of becoming a Photoshop professional. If you don’t know half a dozen techniques or more to create a usable selection, your toolbox of skills is unnecessarily limited.

Today we’re going to take a quick look at eight popular methods for creating selections in Photoshop and where each is the most applicable.

Typography / 6 Sep 2011

Script Tips: 50 Examples of Script Headlines and Logos

Today we’re going to talk about script fonts. We’ll examine how they’re commonly used on the web, offer up some tips for incorporating them into your own designs and see fifty sites that use scripts in a big way.

We’ll also take a close look at one of the most commonly used scripts on the web today, can you guess what it is?

Graphics / 5 Sep 2011

An Easy Design Trick: Using a Photo’s Natural Lines

Today we’re going to explore a super easy design trick for combining text and photos in interesting ways. I’ll teach you four methods for using the directionality of a photograph to determine a corresponding design layout.

This one will be fun and is sure to challenge the way you think about images in your designs so sit back and come along for the ride!

Typography / 31 Aug 2011

8 Simple and Useful Tips for Kerning Type

Kerning is fun! All right, unless you’re a serious type nerd like me, that’s definitely not going to be a true statement. However, it is an absolutely essential part of your typographical education and implementation.

If you’ve been ignoring kerning or simply aren’t sure how to do it properly, take a look at these eight quick tips and get started on the road to becoming a kerning master.

Mobile / 30 Aug 2011

More Than Scaling: How to Make the Leap From Mobile to Desktop

In the last decade, much discussion time has been given to how both interfaces and user experiences translate from desktops to smaller mobile devices. Recently however, the conversation has switched and we’re now seeing trends begin in the mobile environment and make the leap back to the desktop.

This leap is deceptively simple and merits significant inspection as to the fundamental differences between mobile and desktop platforms and how that can and should affect how interfaces and experiences are crafted.

Inspiration / 29 Aug 2011

Important Marketing Lessons From Outrageous Vintage Advertisements

I absolutely love looking at old ads from the early to mid 20th century. The themes covered and claims that are made are often so completely outrageous that you wonder how they ever made it to print. Looking at these, you can’t help but marvel how far advertising has come.

How much advancement have we really made in this area though? Aren’t the advertising ploys of past generations still the same tricks used by marketers today? Follow along as we take a look at some truly ridiculous ads and how they really aren’t so different from advertising we see today.

Graphics / 26 Aug 2011

The Illusive Click: Structuring Designs to Influence Behavior

Click. That sound means you’ve done your job. The user has viewed your page and taken the action that you wanted them to.

How is this achieved? Should you be thinking about this goal more as you structure your designs? What mistakes should you be careful about avoiding? Read on to find out.