Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
Designing a baby-centric site isn’t an easy task, especially for people like myself who usually favor masculine themes, colors and textures in their designs. Today we’ll tackle this task head on by creating a fun and unique baby announcement site that’s far from typical.
Feel free to follow along and be sure to download the PSD so you can have a look around or even use it in your own site.
Earlier this year, we put out an article outlining 5 Reasons Band Websites Suck. Today we’re going to follow up that post by creating a band web page design that steers clear of the problems encountered by most sites in this category.
We’ll create the mockup in Photoshop and learn about a few features as well as some solid design theory along the way. Let’s get started!
Today we’re going to examine a real-world issue that frequently faces designers. Updating and old design can be a daunting task, whether it’s your own or someone else’s. Once you see a design presented in a certain way, it’s hard to break out of that mental box, even if you don’t like the original.
The article below will tackle a number of touch issues for designers. We’ll be dealing with outdated graphics, readability on a dark background, information overload, working with textures and more. Keep reading to see how we tackle these problems.
Have you ever browsed through the postcards at your local grocery store and nearly gagged at the horrible design or cheesy photography adorning everything on the rack?
Fear not, the world need not live with poor postcard designs. Today we’ll walk through the process of designing and sending your own. You won’t even need a stamp!
Today I’ll attempt to demonstrate one way (of many) that you can use inspiration to create your own truly unique designs. This method allows designers to maintain integrity while still getting a little creativity boost when they need it.
To find our catalyst we’ll travel outside the world of commercial design into the world of art. Want to see how you can use Norman Rockwell to create an interesting design for a sushi restaurant? Read on!
Whether you’re trying to land that huge account or you want to make a good impression for a new client, there are few ways to stand out from the competition better than a few stellar 3D product mockups. The quality of 3D rendered products far surpasses anything most people can accomplish in Photoshop and though the work comes with a high price tag, it’s in high demand.
As a graphic designer, I highly recommend that you try your hand at 3D modeling just for the fun and experience, but realistically it takes a lot of time, effort and money (the applications are extremely expensive) to learn. However, just because you don’t personally possess the skill set doesn’t mean you should be turning down 3D work. You can easily find tons of talented 3D artists online willing to partner up with you on various projects.
Below you’ll find 20+ amazing 3D modelers from Coroflot, a popular portfolio site for designers looking for work. Bookmark this page and be sure to start here the next time you think you could use some 3D work!
The Internet has always been a great means of communication for businesses worldwide. It allows us to connect like never before and create amazing applications for easy usability. As design trends have evolved over the years we’ve seen a huge transition between many differing styles of design. Modern corporate websites are no exception and have seen massive growth over the past decade.
More business owners small and large are looking to own a powerful web presence. This helps to retain new business leads and spread the word about company’s products. The bonus here is the massive marketing and branding potential afforded to such a large audience.
I’ve outlined a few common trends for corporate site designs below. Not all corporations require cookie-cutter solutions and these are just some design concepts to include in the creative process. Keep the juices flowing by checking out some of the hundreds of thousands of professional layouts already available today.
In the past we and several other blogs have outlined some useful technical information for how to code and structure your HTML emails from a developer point of view. But much less discussion has been given to how to actually undertake the design component of email newsletters.
Today we’ll take a look at some of the top-selling email templates from Themeforest and see if we can decipher what their designers did right so you can mimic these basic principles in your own designs.
Today we’re going to take on a design project from start to finish using primarily resources that we create ourselves. We’ll walk through taking the photo, editing it in Adobe Lightroom, and using it as the main element of a flyer design that we’ll take on in Photoshop.
Along the way you’ll learn some great and practical techniques that you can apply immediately to your own work. Let’s get started!
Photoshop’s blending modes are a source of constant confusion for many designers. There aren’t really any sort of built-in examples for you to see and the blending mode names are no where near intuitive suggestions of what the effect actually does to the appearance of your document.
Today we’ll help remove a little of the mystery by discussing how a few key blending modes work in addition to some hints for how to use them effectively.
As web designers we have to take a lot into consideration when starting a project. One of the biggest segments working with layouts and systems to order spacing. Commonly designers will work with a grid-spaced CSS library but there are many ways to implement creative layouts.
Today we’ll be going over the Golden Ratio and how you can apply simple lessons into your design work. Most of the techniques discussed are applicable to a wide range of arts and design but we’ll be focusing on the digital aspect. Along with the Golden Ratio consider some other useful tools which can aid in the development of site layouts.
Beautiful typography goes much further than finding the right font.
Today’s post will help you break out of the nasty habit of simply typing out a headline and calling it a day by showing you how to craft standard text in Illustrator into something more interesting and unique.
Below you’ll find a fairly random collection of tricks that I’ve picked up in the last few years. Each method is highly open to interpretation and you should definitely try to tweak and customize them to your own preferences.