Authors ›
Joshua Johnson

Joshua Johnson

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

CSS / 8 Nov 2012

A Beginner’s Guide to Zurb Foundation 3: The Grid

In the past, we’ve discussed Twitter Bootstrap quite a bit. Much more so than its most worthy competitor: Zurb’s Foundation. Now on its third iteration, Foundation is a robust and responsive front end framework used by hundreds of developers every day.

Over the course of several articles, we’re going to jump in and take a look at its various aspects from a complete beginner’s perspective. Today’s topic is my favorite part: the grid. Follow along to see how it works!

Software / 1 Nov 2012

WebZap: Beautiful Photoshop Web Mockups at Light Speed

WebZap is an awesome Photoshop plugin for helping designers create high fidelity web design mockups faster than you ever thought possible. By combining simple one-click actions with robust customization options, this tool makes the entire layout process not only painless, but actually fun.

Follow along as we take a look at what WebZap does and put it through the paces to see how it performs. I promise, it’s the coolest Photoshop plugin that you’ve seen for web designers since GuideGuide.

Inspiration / 30 Oct 2012

The New Wendy’s Logo: What Went Right

Logo updates are a precarious business. One wrong move and you’ll have an angry mob calling for your head. This is especially true with brands that people have literally interacted with for the majority of their lives.

Today we’re going to take a look at just such a brand. Wendy’s, the self-proclaimed old fashioned hamburger joint, has a brand new logo. Spoiler alert: it’s great, especially when compared to the recent Arby’s update. So what went right here compared with what we saw with Arby’s? Let’s take a look.

Business / 25 Oct 2012

Meet Creative Market: A New Platform for Buying and Selling Creative Resources

The folks that brought you COLOURlovers have cooked up something new and exciting: Creative Market, a beautiful and simple way to buy and sell digital creative goods online.

Join us as we jump in to see what Creative Market is all about and how they’re uniquely positioning themselves in this market.

Inspiration / 22 Oct 2012

15 Great Gadgets and Gifts for Designers: 2012

It’s that time of year again. The weather is cooling down, everything from candles to coffee smells like pumpkin, and the holidays are right around the corner. Before you know it, you’ll be standing in a shopping mall with absolutely no idea what to purchase for the lovable but oh so nerdy designers on your list. Hint: they don’t want another “fancy” pen set from Staples.

Fear not, my fellow geeks have elected me to inform you of all the things that they’d love to see under the tree this year. Just like last year, I’ve put together a list of fifteen awesome gifts for designers. Take a look and start crossing off some names.

Inspiration / 15 Oct 2012

The New Arby’s Logo: Better or Boring?

Everyone’s favorite roast beef sandwich fast food chain (ok, maybe the only roast beef fast food chain anyone can name) just jumped headlong into a brand refresh. Their new logo, menu and website is meant to bring the admittedly old-timey restaurant into the 21st century.

The question of course is, did they succeed? Follow along as we take a look at the logo and website to see what we think.

Software / 11 Oct 2012

50 Amazing Resources for Dribbble Lovers

Here at Design Shack, we’re huge Dribbble fans. Sort of a Twitter for design, this awesome site is home to beautiful bite-sized work samples from the web’s best designers.

To showcase our love for Dribbble, we’ve put together a collection of fifty fantastic resources for anyone and everyone who uses Dribbble. From open source developer projects and quirky web projects to desktop and mobile applications, we’ve got enough Dribbble goodness to keep you occupied for months.

CSS / 8 Oct 2012

Battle of the LESS Mixin Libraries: LESS Elements vs. LESS Hat vs. Bootstrap

LESS is a friendly, easily-approachable CSS preprocessor. Though ultimately, Sass and Stylus are more powerful and robust, LESS has a certain charm that keeps it as a forerunner in the battle of the preprocessors.

If you’re a Sass fan, then you can take advantage of Compass, an incredible framework that makes coding with complex CSS3 properties a breeze. But what about LESS users? Where’s their Compass? Today we’ll look at three awesome mixin libraries that will help fill that void.

CSS / 4 Oct 2012

How to Use Adobe Edge Web Fonts on Your Site

Adobe recently launched a free web font service to complement Typekit, their amazing premium service. Adobe Edge Web Fonts currently gives you around 500 free font families that you can use on your site today with little effort. How great is that?

The process for implementing these fonts isn’t quite as straightforward as some of the other services that you might be used to, so today we’re going to dive in and take a look at how it all works.

JavaScript / 2 Oct 2012

40 Awesome MooTools Plugins You Need to Check Out

Recently, we published an outstanding collection of 40 jQuery plugins that every developer should check out. Today we’re following that up with some love for the MooTools crowd.

Like jQuery, MooTools has an awesome community of developers that constantly churn out stellar free plugins for all types of tasks and interfaces. In this collection you’ll find plugins for sliders, lightboxes, tags, navigation and a lot more.

Software / 1 Oct 2012

How to Avoid Stupid Screw-Ups With Adobe Template Files

Don’t you hate it when you use some important file as a template and then accidentally save over it? I used to do this all the time and it frustrated me to no end.

Fortunately, Adobe has invented these great little template file types that fundamentally function differently than your normal files to make sure you don’t screw anything up. Read on to see how they work.

Inspiration / 27 Sep 2012

Design a Vintage Typographic Wedding Invitation

Today we’re going to take a step back from the web to embark on a good old fashioned print design project. Wedding invitations have become a major target for home-grown design experiments so we’re going to dive into one and see what we can come up with.

We’ll use a major typography focus combined with some simple icons to give the finished product a sophisticated vintage appeal. We’ll also do the whole thing using just two spot colors.