Graphics - Page 21

Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.

Graphics / 9 Aug 2011

Tips for Designing With Multiple Photos

Photography is one of your most powerful resources as a designer. Here we’ll take a look at some clever and unique ways to create photo-centric designs using multiple images.

Graphics / 5 Aug 2011

Separating Content: 10 Ways to Draw the Line

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.

Graphics / 3 Aug 2011

Designers, Do You Really Know Anything About Design?

Does learning the requisite software make you a designer? Just because you know CSS and HTML, can you really call yourself a web designer?

Today we’re going to explore the idea that, while you may be a Photoshop wizard, you might lack in fundamental design training that could drastically help you in your every day career.

Graphics / 28 Jul 2011

Three Quick Design Tricks: Sliced Text, Metal Knobs and Curled Stickers

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.

How to Design an Awesome Flyer (Even if You’re Not a Designer)

Flyer Templates / 19 Jul 2011

How to Design an Awesome Flyer (Even if You’re Not a Designer)

This article will walk you through the process and logic of designing a basic but attractive flyer. We’ll look at how you can plan your content, find and implement some quality images and handle the alignment of a significant amount of content while not sacrificing too much of the visual appeal.

Design Shack reader Abigail submitted a Design Dilemma to ask about flyer design. After reading through our tips on designing presentations, she wanted to know how she could apply similar advice to flyer design. In our presentation article, we advised designers to keep their slides painfully simple, but flyers understandably must contain more information than a simple headline.

We’re going to answer Abigail’s question with a full-on flyer design project that you can either browse through for general design advice or follow along with for some solid experience.

Graphics / 14 Jul 2011

Build Awesome Color Palettes Effortlessly in Illustrator

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.

Graphics / 12 Jul 2011

5 Quick & Simple Design Tricks to Liven Up Any Project

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!

Graphics / 27 Jun 2011

Standard Trends in New-Age Minimalist Logo Designs

Graphic designers have evolved an amazing trade. With so much information readily available it’s possible for high school students and even younger artists to buckle down and study the digital arts. From this we’ve seen a massive collection of astounding logos and trends in recent years.

More commonly it has become popular to portray minimalist trends in logos by slimming down content. These include solid-color backgrounds, basic text effects, vector shapes, and low-res icons. Pixel designs have also become popular amongst the techie crowd.

Below I’ve examined some of the new-age trends emerging with logo design. Hopefully these ideas can inspire a new generation of designers to pick up the trade. Most of these effects can be recreated in Adobe Photoshop, or Illustrator if you’re more comfortable. Spend some time browsing logo galleries for more in-depth inspiration.

Graphics / 23 Jun 2011

Say Hello: 50 Simple and Effective Website Greeting Messages

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.

Graphics / 21 Jun 2011

5 Logo Design Lessons From Fast Food Joints

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.

Graphics / 16 Jun 2011

Awesome and Unusual Places to Steal Color Palettes From

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.

Graphics / 14 Jun 2011

Designing News: How Top News Sites Handle Tons of Content

If I had my way, along with just about every other web designer, web pages would always contain a fairly limited amount of content in order to keep the focus clear and the line of communication easy to follow.

Unfortunately, real world situations call for web pages with immense amounts of content. To learn to tackle the issues that arise in this arena, we’re going to look at a particular section of websites that are perhaps more overcrowded than any other: news websites. How do the designers at CNN, MSNBC, Fox and others handle the layout of so much information? Find out after the jump.