Inspiring advice, tips, and suggestions for improving your graphic design skills, logo design, working with templates, and more.
An icon is a picture, image, or representation of another thing. So if you are looking to create a great icon, it needs to have a visual presence that’s understandable.
There’s more to designing a great icon than just a quick visual element. You have to think about shape, color, usage, and even what device or operating system it might appear on.
Here, we have 10 tips to help you make the most of icon design.
Minimalist logo design is an art. How can you convey your brand with a professional logo, but keep the simplicity of a minimal, clean, and simple design? Getting that balance right is the key to crafting an iconic logo.
One strategy is to try using a pre-designed minimal logo template to base your next logo mark or branding project on. Will it be as perfectly tailor-made as a high-end custom logo? Probably not. But it’s a great solution for getting your branding project started fast. To show you how amazing these logo templates can be, we picked some of the best minimalist logo designs from Envato Elements.
You can download any (or all) of these minimal logo templates to tweak, build upon, and use to design your own creative logo all by yourself. It’s a great, flexible way to experiment with your next logo project! If you think your company could use a beautiful minimal logo, this is a great place to start.
Are you in the middle of a logo design project? Don’t forget to check out our in-depth guide on how to design a logo! Or you can jump down this post to our specific minimal logo design tips for creating a simple, uncluttered logo.
Designing with bold color is a lot of fun.
It’s also a little dangerous.
Bold color choices can evoke emotion, draw attention, and create just the right vibe for a design. On the other hand, bold color can feel frenzied or off balance. Users are instantly drawn into color or turned off by it.
Here’s a look at a few ways to use bold color in web design. We’ll walk through how to bring personality and vivid style into your projects, while keeping a sense of balance and accessibility that makes the site easy to use.
You know it the minute you see it – a design that has so color that’s so impactful you can’t help but look at it.
These designs typically fall into one of two categories. Either it’s a great color palette that you want to find a way to replicate immediately. Or it’s a color palette so bizarre or bad that you can’t figure out why a designer would make that choice!
Since no one wants to fall in the latter category, learning to color match and develop palettes is a vital design skill.
It all starts with color theory but then goes a little further.
One of the most common uses of Photoshop is removing objects from photos. In fact, it’s one of the reasons the software was so popular back in the day.
If you’ve just bought a subscription to Photoshop, removing objects is a trick you must learn right away. In this quick guide, we’ll show you how.
Photoshop has come a long way over the years and removing objects in photos is now much easier thanks to advanced AI-powered technologies. You can easily remove most objects without any effort.
Let’s dive in and see how.
One of the biggest trends in web design these days is custom cursors. At first glance, a custom website cursor may look like just another stylistic element. But there’s much more to this design concept.
When viewing a website from a desktop device, the cursor is the main component that bridges the gap between the user and the website. If you’re creative enough, you can actually use this cursor to your advantage to boost website interaction and engagement rates like never before.
In this guide, we take a closer look at what custom cursors are all about, why you should use them, and offer you a few tutorials for designing your own custom cursors.
Let’s get started.
If you really want to create a design that will make people look, it has to be disruptive.
While “disruptive” can be a bit of a hackneyed catchphrase, it is also at the core of what you do when you create something new. The goal is to get people to stop, look, and interact.
Disruption works because it is different from the norm. This can include anything from being at the forefront of a new trend to designing with an interesting font, color palette, or design pattern.
This description from Layla Acaroglu explains it perfectly: “Design is about creating something that adds to or iterates on the existing, and disruption is about creating a disturbance with the intent of changing a system. When combined, the practice of Disruptive Design is to create intentional interventions into a pre-existing system with the specific objective to leverage a different outcome, and more importantly, an outcome that is likely to create positive social change.”
Now how can you do it? We have a few ideas (and examples) for you.
Data visualization is one of those design trends or techniques that just seems to keep growing in use and value. From simple infographics to full data stories, this informational format is almost everywhere.
And for good reason: A good data visualization makes complex content that much easier to understand.
Here, we are breaking down data visualization tools, examples, tips so you can design with data successfully.
Whether you are working on a design for a client at a major corporation or posting to your own social media account, a visual brand identity makes it easy for people to see – and know – a company or person at a glance.
Establishing a visual identity is more than popping a logo on something. It’s a collection of elements – from color to typography to imagery – that establishes who you are visually.
Plenty of companies take the time to set brand identity guidelines, but have you thought about how it all comes together visually? This set of tips can help.
If you aren’t taking advantage of Photoshop actions for editing and image effects, you’re missing out on one of Photoshop’s best features. Here, we’ll take you through how to use Photoshop Actions, and the best steps to install and apply them in seconds.
Photoshop actions can save you time when it comes to repeated tasks, and condense entire paths of editing into a single click. (While it might sound too good to be true, Photoshop actions are a very real thing.) We’ve previously hand-picked the best Photoshop actions out there, and today we’re explaining how to use them!
Everywhere you look in web design, the hero image seems to be replaced with a hero video. And many of these videos include some type of text elements to provide additional information that draws you into the design.
When done right, the result can be rather stunning. When done wrong, video and text elements fall short of conveying a proper message.
Here, we’re going to look at how to ensure your video and text combinations are understandable, readable, and functional in your next design project.
Let’s dive into our assessment of how to add text to a video online, and the rules you should aim to follow as you do so!
Every structure, every building, every design starts with a wireframe. It’s an important part of the design workflow that determines the success of the entire project.
Whether you’re working with digital user interface designs or banner designs, wireframes should be part of your design process. In this guide, we’ll help you understand what is a wireframe and why they’re important.
We made this guide for both beginners and advanced designers to convey the importance of wireframing. You’ll learn everything from how to design wireframes to the best tools for wireframing, tips for avoiding common mistakes, and more.
Let’s get started.