Graphics

Graphics / 14 Sep 2010

Designing a Professional Business Card

Before websites, email blasts and banner ads, business cards were the central piece of design work for countless small businesses. This simple little piece of cardstock was a major representation of your company. In China, business cards are so highly regarded that it’s considered poor etiquette to write on someone’s card or even put it in your wallet! Typically upon exchange business cards will be placed into a small card case.

Though the digital age has dawned, business cards remain a fairly popular way to quickly provide someone with information about how to reach you or find out more information about your company. Today we’ll go over some common mistakes in business card design and explore a few practical techniques you can use to bring style and professionalism to your cards.

Graphics / 9 Sep 2010

15+ Beautiful and Classy Headline Designs

Creating beautiful type treatments is hard work.

Though it has become quite trendy to claim that typography is ignored on the web, the reality is that typography is a booming fad at the height of its game in the online realm.

Countless web designers have really stepped up in recent years and created some absolutely beautiful typographical works, particularly in website headlines. Below we’ll look at over fifteen meticulously crafted headline designs that are sure to inspire you to think twice before slapping some boring type wrapped in an h1 tag on your site.

Graphics / 7 Sep 2010

10 Tips for Designing Presentations That Don’t Suck: Part 2

Last week we looked at part one of our two part series on designing better presentations. We learned practical tips on using photography, typography, color and more to create stunning results.

Today we’ll wrap things up with tips six through ten and teach you how simplifying your designs can lead to drastically improved results. Let’s get started!

Graphics / 3 Sep 2010

10 Tips for Designing Presentations That Don’t Suck

PowerPoint has produced more bad design in its day that perhaps any other digital tool in history with the possible exception of Microsoft paint.

In this post we’re going to address the epidemic of bad presentation design with ten super practical tips for designer better looking and more professional presentations. Along the way we’ll see a number of awesome slide designs from Note & Point along with some custom examples built by yours truly. Let’s get started!

Graphics / 3 Sep 2010

10 Tips for Designing Presentations That Don’t Suck: Pt.1

Powerpoint has produced more bad design in its day that perhaps any other digital tool in history with the possible exception of Microsoft paint.

In this post we’re going to address the epidemic of bad presentation design with ten super practical tips for designer better looking and more professional presentations. Along the way we’ll see a number of awesome slide designs from Note & Point along with some custom examples built by yours truly. Let’s get started!

Graphics / 2 Sep 2010

25 Brilliantly Simple Web Page Designs

Sometimes a site can be visually stunning not so much because of the content but because of the lack of content. Though often attractive, this is a tricky style to pull off correctly without just looking like you’ve got a boring page.

Today we’ll look at 25 sites that we think got it right. First we’ll discuss why these designs work well under certain circumstances and then we’ll jump into the examples.

Graphics / 27 Aug 2010

Design101: Utilizing Strong Alignments

Today we’re going to examine one of the most basic principles in design: alignment. This deceptively simple topic is actually quite complex and is among the most notably lacking proficiencies in designers today.

A strong grasp of how and when to use certain alignments will instantly make you a better designer and will remain a foundational building block for everything you create throughout the rest of your career.

Graphics / 20 Aug 2010

A Practical Guide to Designing With Faces

One of the principal functions of professional design, if not the central function, is to draw the attention of the viewer. Everyone has a message that they want to get across, but getting people to actually stop and take that message in is no easy task.

Designers are therefore tasked with attempting to use every human’s natural attraction to aesthetic beauty in such a way that it becomes possible to capture the attention of an audience almost without them even realizing it.

With this goal in mind, faces are a magic design element.

Graphics / 10 Aug 2010

Battle of the Burgers: American Fast Food Sites Compared

Today’s post will be an intense battle as we compare the design and usability of nine major American burger joints.

These corporations pull in millions making me obese with their irresistibly tasty grilled double heart attacks with cheese and should have plenty of revenue to invest into solid web designers. Let’s see how they fare against my inscrutable eye for ugly web design.

Graphics / 6 Aug 2010

An in-Depth Guide to Working With Typography in Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic application for crafting typographical masterpieces. However, whether you’re creating a simple paragraph for a print ad or a complex typographical piece of art for a website, there are several tips and techniques you should know for how to manipulate type within the program.

Below you’ll find a brief overview of some of the basic commands you should familiarize yourself with as well as some must-know keyboard shortcuts and even a few obscure features that you may not even know exist. Let’s get started!

Graphics / 29 Jul 2010

The Designer’s Guide to Taking Better Photos

I’ve mentioned several times before that photography is one of the most natural complements to your skills as a designer. We designers are in constant need of very specific imagery and this can and does lead to hours of searching, unnecessary stock fees and ultimately the use of imagery that has a high likelihood of being found on the projects of countless other designers.

Becoming a decent photographer can save you time and money and provide you with a serious competitive edge in the form of truly unique imagery that no one in the world possesses but you.

Graphics / 23 Jul 2010

50 Fantastically Clever Logos

I know everybody and their brother does logo roundups so you’re probably sick of them, but I don’t believe I’ve ever done one and there is a particularly impressive brand of logo design that I wanted to point out.

Today we’ll look at 50 logos that are the result of going beyond the typical thought process and injecting a little wit and hidden symbolism into the design process.