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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.

Layouts / 8 Nov 2011

How to Design a Tour Page: Examples and Best Practices

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.

Layouts / 7 Nov 2011

Design History: The Art of Playing Cards

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.

Critique / 4 Nov 2011

Web Design Critique #67: StyleJam

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.

Today’s site is StyleJam, a site that hosts web designer portfolios. Let’s take a look and see what we think!

Freebies / 4 Nov 2011

Weekly Freebies: 30 Free Christmas Photos for Your Holiday Designs

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!

Inspiration / 3 Nov 2011

101 Delightful Dribbble Character Illustrations for Inspiration

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!

JavaScript / 2 Nov 2011

A Designer’s Introduction to Programming

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.

News / 1 Nov 2011

Mastering User Attention With Feng-Gui

Today we’re going to discuss the importance of intentionally directing user attention to the portions of the page merit it most. We’ll discuss how people are prone to read a page and how we can bend that tendency to our own will.

We’ll also take a look at an awesome product that will enable you to get a quick snapshot of how a typical user will view your designs so that you can begin to improve your layouts right away.

Layouts / 31 Oct 2011

Practical Design Considerations for Responsive Sites

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.

CSS / 27 Oct 2011

Build an Animated Sliding Menu With Pseudo Selectors and CSS3

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!

CSS / 24 Oct 2011

What Is CSS? Back to Basics

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?

Tumblr Themes / 18 Oct 2011

50 More Beautifully Designed Tumblr Themes

Way back in 2009 we posted a collection of 30 Beautifully Designed Tumblr Themes. Back then the Tumblr library of themes was much smaller than it is today and in light of the huge growth in the platform as a whole we decided to bring you fifty more themes perfect for anyone with a designer’s eye.

This time we’ve switched things up by not only featuring a ton of great free themes, but an additional selection of premium themes for anyone who needs to go that extra mile. Let’s take a look!

Business / 13 Oct 2011

Is This Spec Work? Should Designers Be Asked to Prove Their Worth?

Let’s discuss a topic that gets your blood boiling: spec work. What is it and why do designers hate it? This will give us a foundation to discuss some legitimate practices that many are labeling as spec work hiring tactics.

Do you think a designer should be asked to prove himself/herself before being hired? Is this debate an example of employers going too far or designers not willing to go far enough? Let’s find out.