Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
Today we’re going to examine one of the most basic principles in design: alignment. This deceptively simple topic is actually quite complex and is among the most notably lacking proficiencies in designers today.
A strong grasp of how and when to use certain alignments will instantly make you a better designer and will remain a foundational building block for everything you create throughout the rest of your career.
One of the principal functions of professional design, if not the central function, is to draw the attention of the viewer. Everyone has a message that they want to get across, but getting people to actually stop and take that message in is no easy task.
Designers are therefore tasked with attempting to use every human’s natural attraction to aesthetic beauty in such a way that it becomes possible to capture the attention of an audience almost without them even realizing it.
With this goal in mind, faces are a magic design element.
Today’s post will be an intense battle as we compare the design and usability of nine major American burger joints.
These corporations pull in millions making me obese with their irresistibly tasty grilled double heart attacks with cheese and should have plenty of revenue to invest into solid web designers. Let’s see how they fare against my inscrutable eye for ugly web design.
Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic application for crafting typographical masterpieces. However, whether you’re creating a simple paragraph for a print ad or a complex typographical piece of art for a website, there are several tips and techniques you should know for how to manipulate type within the program.
Below you’ll find a brief overview of some of the basic commands you should familiarize yourself with as well as some must-know keyboard shortcuts and even a few obscure features that you may not even know exist. Let’s get started!
I’ve mentioned several times before that photography is one of the most natural complements to your skills as a designer. We designers are in constant need of very specific imagery and this can and does lead to hours of searching, unnecessary stock fees and ultimately the use of imagery that has a high likelihood of being found on the projects of countless other designers.
Becoming a decent photographer can save you time and money and provide you with a serious competitive edge in the form of truly unique imagery that no one in the world possesses but you.
I know everybody and their brother does logo roundups so you’re probably sick of them, but I don’t believe I’ve ever done one and there is a particularly impressive brand of logo design that I wanted to point out.
Today we’ll look at 50 logos that are the result of going beyond the typical thought process and injecting a little wit and hidden symbolism into the design process.
Photography is the best thing to hit design since typography. A quality photograph can make a poor designer look good and a good designer look great. It can convey emotion, bring in color, provide and provide a strong focal point.
Today we’ll look at a few tips, techniques and ideas for designing around great photography.
If you’re thinking about starting a blog, there are a lot of technical details to consider when attempting the initial layout of your page. How large should your text be? What font should you use? Should your images have borders?
We’ll help you answer these questions and more by tearing apart the post designs of popular design blogs. Examining the work of others will give you insight into popular trends and what you think works best. Let’s get started!
I recently came across a neat tutorial at Woorkup pointing out a MooTools feature that allows you to turn any item on a web page into a positionable element.
Today we’re going to use this technique to create a simple and fun sticky note that a user can play with and move anywhere on the page. Along the way will be using lots of CSS3 so make sure you’ve got a decent browser!
The online design community is simply overflowing with inspiration. Every day countless blog posts are being published showcasing 30-100 amazing examples of “insert item here.” Further, CSS galleries like our own contain hundreds or even thousands of great site designs.
With all this inspiration being tossed at you all the time, you need a way to catalogue and store it. Today we’ll look at a few tools out there that do exceptionally well at this very thing.
Everyone loves 3D text.
Unfortunately, not everyone can afford the 3D modeling software necessary to build it. Today I’ll teach you how to create some awesome 3D text using only Photoshop and a free app from Google. Intrigued? Read on!
This article will briefly examine 5 physical notebooks that are perfectly suited for a number of designer workflows.
Before we get started, let’s take a brief look at some reasons you should be using a notebook as an integral part of your design process.