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!
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.
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.
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.
I adore a good read. In a time where 90% of my life is spent staring at a digital screen, reading a physical book with real pages gives me an ephemeral illusion that life is simple again. To defy the age old adage, I will freely admit that I choose books to read based on their covers. I’m a designer, I simply can’t help it.
The question I’m exploring today is whether or not the rest of the world thinks like we designers do. Does everyone judge books by the quality of the cover design? If we take a look at the bestseller list, what will we find?
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.