Equal parts editor, writer, designer, and photographer. Hit me up on Twitter, or check out my photos.
Photography is the best thing to hit design since typography. A quality photograph can make a poor designer look good and a good designer look great. It can convey emotion, bring in color, provide and provide a strong focal point.
Today we’ll look at a few tips, techniques and ideas for designing around great photography.
It happens all the time. No sooner than you click the send button does the phone ring. At the other end is an angry client who just received an invoice. Despite the fact that all of your payment agreements were handled before the project ever started, he has still somehow managed to be surprised at the amount that he owes you.
Whether the description above typifies your client base or not, it can still be a good idea to soften the blow of an invoice by showcasing what you did and how it benefited them. There are also a few things you can do to make the whole process easier and therefore (hopefully) speed up payment. Below we’ll look at five things you can do to make your invoices both more useful and impressive.
Here at Design Shack we love a good navigation menu. Lately we’ve noticed a trend arising around menus that use icons either exclusively in place of text or as a support of additional textual information.
Adding icons to your navigation can not only give you an aesthetic boost but actually make for a quicker visual read of the link. Here’s a collection of over thirty icon-based navigation menus that we found online. We’ll conclude with a few resources you can use to snag some free icons to create your own fancy menus.
Today we’ll take a look at Boks, an awesome little tool that will help you spec out a basic site layout in no time flat.
We’ll go through what it is and how you can use it to speed up your development as well as what the limitations and downsides are that you’ll want to be aware of before you download the app.
Today we’re going to discuss the difference between designing for money and designing for a living because it’s what you love to do.
We’ll take a look at a few things that motivate designers who couldn’t be anything else if they tried and why design is more than a means to a financial end but is in fact a way of life.
In my daily search for design-related content I’ve come across tons of really stellar blogs. Recently I noticed that the list of sites I regularly check in on had far surpassed 100!
I know there’s no shortage of lists like this but I still wanted to share my discoveries with the Design Shack readers. Some of the blogs below are quite famous, others are fairly obscure. Most are specifically about design, others are more for supporting subjects like freelancing or photography. So without further adieu, here’s my list of over 100 must read (or watch for the video sites) design-related websites.
Last week we discussed the importance of copywriting in web design and today we’re showcasing twenty sites that got it right.
Below you’ll find a number of tricks that you can use to create convincing copy for your website. We’ll discuss how to use everything from hyperbole to sarcasm to snag users and score more conversions.
Today we’re going to look at a new project from the Enavu Network called 52 Framework.
It claims to be the first framework built specifically for HTML5 and CSS3. Below we’ll look at some of the basic features and dig into the code to see what we can find.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a huge buzzword among marketers for years. The reason for this is that search engines can be legitimate sources of mountains of traffic for your site and the higher you rank on them the better.
The problem that arose in the early days of SEO was a blatant abuse of the system. What began as a few innocent tricks to earn more visitors morphed into questions of etiquette and heated debates regarding what should and shouldn’t be allowed. The web design community has come a long way in the past decade but there are plenty of marketers that still follow the tactics of the 90s either through ignorance or defiance.
Today we’ll briefly look at how to engage in SEO in an ethical manner by pointing out five key techniques to avoid.
Everyone has a big idea.
The next Facebook or Twitter is being presented to potential funders by a hundred different startups every year. However, many or even most of these ideas never really get off the ground. So what’s standing between these companies and success?
Today we’re going to look at why many brilliant ideas fail to make an impact and one essential question that could’ve helped them succeed.
Love ’em or hate ’em, HTML emails are a wildly popular marketing tool and you will almost definitely come across clients that want you to build them.
If you don’t know anything about HTML emails, they’re annoying to develop and break all the rules you’ve ever learned as a web designer, but being able to code them is a valuable skill to possess. Today we’ll look at ten quick and easy tips to get beginners started on the road to creating beautiful and functional emails.
Running a website is can be a seemingly pointless and unfulfilling venture if you don’t take the proper steps to ensure advancement.
Today we’ll take a brutally honest look at how you should measure success and develop goals that actually lead to productivity.