Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
The story is as old as graphic design itself: you have two different sections and you need a way to visually separate them. As a designer, I frequently spot myself reverting to the same old one or two tricks to pull this off. Why not mix it up a bit?
Today we’ll show you ten awesome ways to create two distinct sections of content. Each example is from a real website so you can click through to see it in action.
Here at Design Shack we can’t get enough of good color schemes. We recently discussed some Awesome and Unusual Places to Steal Color Palettes From and today we’ll follow up that discussion with some tips on how to build your own awesome color sets in Adobe Illustrator.
We’ll go over the extreme basics of working with color in Illustrator and jump into how to use the excellent built-in Color Guide to get you on the path to lightning-fast generation and manipulation of custom color schemes.
Placing a large greeting message at the top of your site is a great way to create a welcoming environment and provides the perfect opportunity to clearly state your purpose for being.
Today we’ve rounded up over fifty such messages for inspiration on both the message and visual appearance fronts. The greetings has been divided up into clear categories so you can analyze the different popular techniques being used by designers today.
Always eager to jump into a debate, today I tackle the concept that artsy eye candy is currently too prevalent in design. Design inspiration galleries and communities are constantly critiqued for displaying art when their focus should be on design.
Can we cut through the biases and assumptions of the common rhetoric and discover the proper place for artistic talent in relation to functional design? Let’s find out.
Several years ago a friend of mine asked me to teach him how masks work in Photoshop. This is my incredibly late response.
We’ll go over the basics of what masks are, what they’re used for and how wielding them properly will take your Photoshop skills to an entirely new level.
This week has been all about branding and package design. We’ve gone over some tips for creating effective packaging and taken an in-depth view of the branding histories of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to see what we could learn about the power of a good brand.
Today we’ll finish off the week with a roundup of awesome packaging concepts from Behance and Packaging of the World.
Today we’re going to jump into an age old rivalry between the two biggest soft drink companies on the planet and their flagship products: Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
The main theme will be brand evolution. We’ll take a look at how both brands have changed over the years and which seems to have the better strategy.
The web is full of free texture resources. Unfortunately, we’ve all used them before and hate all the inherent restrictions that come as a result of using borrowed art. For your next project, why not just use textures that you make yourself from scratch? You skip the restrictions and the end product is much more unique because you’re not using the same resources used by everyone else.
Today we’re going to get you started by teaching you how to use a couple of basic Photoshop filters to create five completely different textures. Each texture should only take you anywhere from one to three minutes to bust out and can therefore be quickly applied without eating up your crucial design time. Let’s get started!
I have a dirty little secret, I hate slicing Photoshop files. By that I don’t mean that I hate turning PSD comps into websites, I mean that I hate Photoshop’s slicing tools. The whole process makes my PSD look busy, cluttered and overly complicated so I usually skip it altogether and instead opt to manually crop and save out images individually as needed.
In order to fight this tendency and attempt to see the true usefulness of Photoshop’s slicing tools, I embarked on a mission to learn all the intricacies of how slicing works. Below is a collection of tips and tricks that resulted from this journey. Hopefully, you’ll learn a thing or two you never knew!
Business cards are a constant point of creativity for designers. This little personalized piece of marketing holds an impressive amount of potential for capturing the attention of potential customers and many businesses are willing to spend plenty of money to make sure their cards make a lasting statement.
Today we’ve collected over fifty business card designs and concepts that not only have aesthetic appeal, but really go that extra mile to increase impact. Some pop up into 3D shapes, others glow in the dark or even serve a lasting useful purpose. All of them are sure to inspire you in your own endeavors to create amazing business cards.
I’m constantly trying to convince designers that SketchUp is a tool they should have in their arsenal. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about or even have no interest in 3D modeling, SketchUp can plug right into your workflow as a designer in a number of helpful ways. And hey, it’s free!
Today we’re going to use SketchUp to build an extremely simple but stylish city skyline from scratch. The whole process should take you less than an hour and can be mere minutes if you’re already familiar with the application.
Color has always been a popular topic on the web. We used to throw around terms like “web safe colors” a lot more than we do now simply because the computer displays back then weren’t as great as they are now. In place of these discussions, design blogs revert mostly to discussions of color theory and of course, free tools to help you build color palettes.
However, color was a hot topic long before the web was around. Once upon a time, my discussions about color revolved around printing presses and processes for applying ink. I’d wager there are plenty of readers out there who are either interested in learning about print or still work in print today so in this article I’ll teach you all about the magic of ink.