Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
Today we have a small collection of completely random but very useful design tricks that you should keep in the back of your mind the next time you need a new idea.
We’ll be showing you how to slice up some text in Illustrator to give it an edgy feel and how to build a metal slider and a curled sticker in Photoshop.
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.
Sometimes you have a perfectly good layout, but your design needs a bit something extra to finish it off. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get stuck and become completely void of ideas.
Today we’re going to help you solve this problem by highlighting five random design ideas that you can incorporate into your back of design tricks. Let’s get started!
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.
Few logos have the power to immediately draw forth feelings from us more than those of fast food restaurants that we’ve seen and eaten at for decades. Just the sight of those golden arches can bring a smile to the face of children and adults alike.
What makes these logos effective and how can you put these ideas into practice in your own work? Today we’re going to see what we can learn by exploring the logos of several famous American fast food restaurants.
A good color palette can make or break a design. It sets the tone, conveys emotion and can even drastically affect usability. With all this pressure, choosing a color palette is tricky business.
Today we’re going to think outside the box and explore some fresh and interesting ways to select the colors for your project by pointing out some great sources of inspiration. Let’s get started.
Everyone loves a good t-shirt. Today, we’ve got 55 of them that were specifically designed to appeal to graphic designers, web designer and coders.
We’ve scoured the web to find the coolest, funniest and most ridiculous designer-themed shirts and split them into five categories: Photoshop & Illustrator, Color, Typography, CSS & Code and Design. Enjoy!
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.
The web is completely over-saturated with apps that help you connect with a social network, make grocery lists, manage large projects, decide who will make tea and every other crazy task you can imagine.
With all of this competition, how can you possibly convince visitors that your app is a the proverbial needle among the hay? Today we’ll look at some real examples to see if we can learn which strategies to mimic and which to avoid.
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.
Realism in UI design is a hot topic right now. Every design blog worth anything is openly telling Apple that they are way off in their suggestion that iPad apps should mimic reality.
Join us as we add some life to the debate by tackling some of these notions head on. We’ll go over when realism is effective and when it is destructive and how you can wield it in your own designs without ruining your interface.
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.