Graphics - Page 24

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

Graphics / 4 Jan 2011

Designing Web Interfaces Scaled for Touchscreens

Gone are the days of convoluted javascript notation and countless plugins includes in your header. Layout design has taken a large step forward as we’re seeing designers creating some extravagant concepts. Touch screen devices currently hold the highest interest from a designer’s and developer’s point of view.

More people are using touchscreen enabled devices now than ever before. This includes tablet PCs and the entire list of mobile phone operating systems. These devices are all mobile and allow for access from most any remote location.

Graphics / 3 Jan 2011

Weekly Freebies: 10 Great Grunge Paper Textures

You can simply never have too many grungy paper backgrounds at your disposal. Unfortunately, many roundups shoot for quantity over quality in this area so it can be difficult to track down real, usable resources. We sifted through tons of paper textures to bring you ten of the best we could find.

All textures are sourced from Flickr Creative Commons and Lost and Taken. They’re all very large and ready to use. About half require simple attribution in the form of a link while the rest are usable with no restrictions. Enjoy!

Graphics / 20 Dec 2010

The Totally Made Up Design Awards for Design Blogs

Once upon a time, designers discovered blogging. This changed everything for many long-time designers like me who now pretend to be writers for a living. The rapid explosion of the design blog industry has brought about an unending flow of articles that essentially use 1,200 words to tell you how you should do your job. The question we’ll answer today is, which blogs actually take their own advice?

To highlight those blogs that feature the best design, we’ll be handing out very prestigious awards in several categories that I made up on the spot. All awards are based solely on visual appeal and give no consideration whatsoever to the actual quality of the blog content. Winners can claim their trophies at any trophy store for a small fee. Let’s get started!

Graphics / 9 Dec 2010

Design a Fun Baby Announcement Site in Photoshop

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.

Graphics / 2 Dec 2010

Design a Rockin’ Band Website

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!

Graphics / 19 Nov 2010

How to Revive an Outdated Design

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.

Graphics / 17 Nov 2010

Design and Mail a Custom Postcard Without Leaving Your Desk

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!

Graphics / 12 Nov 2010

Unlikely Inspiration: A Sushi Menu From Norman Rockwell?

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!

Graphics / 10 Nov 2010

20 Rockstar 3D Modelers You Should Hire for Product Mockups

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!

Graphics / 9 Nov 2010

Trends in Professionalism: Modern Business Website Designs

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.

Graphics / 4 Nov 2010

10 Design Lessons From HTML Email Templates That Actually Sell

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.