Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
Is your design starting to look old? Old and out-of-date user interface elements can make a site feel much more dated than it actually is.
Here, we look at eight UI elements that you should eliminate from your design plan. But that’s not all; each “don’t” comes with a suggestion for modernizing your website. We’ll get that design looking up-to-date in no time!
Although the format is not particularly new, SVG images are increasingly popular in the design of websites. All major web browsers support the format and SVG is changing the way we think about and render images for the web.
Why at they so popular? And what exactly is different about an SVG file? Today, we have the answers and everything else you need to know to get started with this file type. (As a little bonus, all of the images in this post are available in SVG from Creative Market.)
There’s been a lot of recent chatter about banner ads. Are they fading? Are users actually clicking them? Are they dead? Are there better options available?
While it is true that banner ad clicks are in decline, that’s not the end of the popular online advertising format. While you can’t measure it, just seeing an ad helps create a user preference for that item, product or service. (Remember, ads have appeared on TV and in printed materials for decades without clicks to prove their success rates.) Today, we’ll look at 15 ways you can create banner ads that simply don’t suck. Take a look at the examples as well. They are 2015 winner of The Webby Awards for ad and website design. You can click through the images to learn more about each one.
It’s an undeniable fact: using blurred images is a trending web design technique in 2015. It seems like everywhere you look there’s some element of blur.
But this is not a solution to some of your photo problems. It’s a distinct technique that takes practice to perfect and attention to detail to get it right. So before you jump on the trend, think about the options for using blurred images to decide if it is right for you and how you can make the best use of this technique in your projects.
Negative space is an inspiring field in the design world, where designers use the alternative color in a graphic to make a dual imagery and representation of a product. When it comes to negative space logo designs, agencies can incorporate multiple meanings in to their logo designs.
It’s a great way to capture a customers attention, and make them think twice. We’ve conducted a thorough search for some of the most interesting negative space logos, and collected 80 inspiring designs to give you an idea of what’s possible. Enjoy!
From patterns, to videos, to images, there are a lot of things to choose from when it comes to selecting the perfect backdrop to any design project. While the texture or image you choose is not necessarily intended to be a main part of the overall message, it can have quite an impact.
Backgrounds can be subtle, bold, static, dynamic or non-existent. And backgrounds in today’s projects are often more than just a beige canvas, and are an integral – and integrated – part of the overall design scheme. The trend in background design may even lead some to ask where the background ends and the foreground begins. Today we’re sharing a few tips and tricks for how to choose an effective background.
With more than 302 million monthly users and 500 million tweets per day, chances are you are using Twitter to promote yourself, brand or business. (And if you aren’t using the 140-character platform, what are you waiting for?)
Twitter customization is a big part of your social media strategy. As a designer, creating a great header photo is an important part of the puzzle. Here we’ll take a look at ways to create a header photo and overall profile that stand out among the millions of other Twitter personalities out there and showcase a few pages for design inspiration.
It happens to all of us at some point: you have been tasked with a design project that just does not have any art. That’s when the idea of using stock images creeps into your mind. But you have to use them in a way that, frankly, doesn’t suck.
The good news is that you can use stock images in projects without looking cheesy or fake. There are a lot of good places to find great stock images that you can use in a number of ways. Your mission is to make sure they integrate with your final design and don’t suck.
It’s an hour before deadline and your boss just handed you a design project to finish up. And it’s bad. Very bad. It has problems ranging from poor images to crazy color, typography choices to general sloppiness. What should you do? Can it be fixed?
There are a few things you can do to help salvage a bad design with the understanding that it won’t be perfect. But making it passable as a design project for your company might well still be an option. Here’s how!
Interaction design might be the most talked about design concept of 2015. It’s something you should be thinking about and planning for in all of your digital projects.
But how can you make the most of interaction design? How can you design something people want to interact with? While some of those answers are changing with technology, one element remains the same – people want to use design that is intuitive, functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Good design is not something the average user look at and says “wow, that’s a great design!” Good design is something that is easy to use, read and interact with. It makes users want to engage and experience your website, app or physical material and evokes a specific emotional response.
As a designer you may spend days, weeks or months working on a project that does not look like anything especially spectacular to those outside the design community, and that is probably a good thing. Good design is pretty much invisible.
We all have them – design projects we’d like to take back. Some of them you can attribute to a bad design brief or youth; others you just want to hide forever. The good news is that you can often avoid design mistakes; the bad news is that every designer will fall in at least one of these traps at some point in his or her career.
But part of the key to avoiding designer mishaps is knowing what they are, so you can be aware if you feel yourself slipping into one of these bad habits.