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Inspiration

Inspiration - Page 28

Beautiful, inspiring examples of graphic design, mockups, presentation templates, websites, fonts, icons, and more.

Articles / 23 Mar 2012

Big Design in Small Spaces

It’s easy to get caught up in the big picture sometimes – what your whole site looks like or the message it conveys. Just as important though, are the small spaces. The look of your banner, sidebars and even the dreaded-in-some-circles above the scroll presentation can bring people into or turn people away from your site.

Effective design in restricted, and even constricted spaces can be the key to adding just the right flair to your site. Simple design tools such as cropping, color, text display and contrast can make all the difference when planning the design for the boxed-in spaces of your next project.

Inspiration / 21 Mar 2012

105 Remarkable Retro Logos

It’s time for another massive logo collection. This time around we’ve sifted through thousands of great logos to find over one hundred that were designed in a retro or vintage style.

If you’re looking for some good old fashioned logo design inspiration, this post will surely get your creative brain firing on all cylinders. From robots to muscle cars, these logos are flat out cool.

Inspiration / 1 Mar 2012

Massive Inspiration Roundup: 140 Dribbble Debut Thank You Shots

Dribbble started as a very small, targeted way for a handful of designers to share the things they were working on. It has since grown into a fairly massive network that houses an unbelievable range of design related talent. Despite its growth, the network remains fairly closed. Unless you can score one of those rarely issued invites from a faithful user, you’re a mere spectator.

Those who do score invites are incredibly appreciative, so much so that it’s become an incredibly popular trend to spend your all important debut shot on a graphic that serves as a thank you message to the person that invited you. Browsing through all of the various ideas that designers come up with to visually thank each other is fascinating. We’ve spent hours looking through these shots and today bring you a massive collection of 140 of them. Enjoy!

Articles / 23 Feb 2012

Using Pinterest for Design Inspiration

Although Pinterest launched nearly two years ago, it has really hit the mainstream in the last couple months and is cracking top 10 website lists. The site, which allows users to “pin” or save their favorite images and videos on virtual boards by topic, had 40 times the number of visits in December than it did at mid-year, according to Mashable.

The site though can be a great place for designers to organize their thoughts and cobble together bits of inspiration. But you have to have a method to all the pinning so it does not become a time hog.

Inspiration / 17 Feb 2012

Developing a Color Scheme and Color Management Tips

Building a website can come with a few unexpected hiccups, one of those being color. Understanding color choices, and how colors may render on different computers is the first step to ensuring that your site has the look you intended.

In addition to finding and selecting colors that work for you, it is wise to develop and manage a color scheme for your project. It is simple to create a set of swatches in common image software such as Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator and organize colors in such a way that they are easy to find and use.

Inspiration / 14 Feb 2012

100 Awesome Logos With Script Typography

What do script typefaces suggest in a design? Will they make your design dainty or masculine? Timeless or retro? Goofy or sophisticated? Would you believe me if I said all of the above and more?

Today we’re going to look at a massive, handpicked selection of logos from Logopond that all use script and cursive writing in some form or another. The point is to showcase the incredible versatility of these types of fonts. The next time you’re designing a logo and wondering if a script is appropriate, you’ll be able to come back here and browse the various themes that different types of scripts can suggest.

Inspiration / 10 Nov 2011

Close Photoshop and Grab a Pencil: The Lost Art of Thumbnail Sketches

Long before web UI mockups came along, print designers would hone their ideas using a tried and true method called thumbnail sketching. This practice seems to be somewhat of a lost art so we’re going to shed some light on it!

Today we’ll briefly discuss what thumbnail sketches are, some tips for creating them and how to effectively implement them into your already busy workflow.

Inspiration / 9 Nov 2011

15 Great Gadgets and Gifts for Designers

The holidays are quickly approaching, which means it’s almost time for the annual awkward tradition of giving and getting gifts. Whether you’re shopping for a designer or you are a designer working on your wish list, these fifteen gadgets and gifts are so awesome that you won’t want anything else.

Chopsticks, pens, gloves, these all sound like every day boring items but wait until you see the amazing high tech versions we found!

Inspiration / 3 Nov 2011

101 Delightful Dribbble Character Illustrations for Inspiration

It’s no secret that we here at Design Shack are huge fans of Dribbble and the awesome community of designers that actively upload their work to the site.

Today we tip our hats to some of the wonderful illustration artists in the Dribbble community with a showcase of over one hundred amazing and quirky character illustrations. In this post you’ll find everything from angry monsters to beloved cereal mascots and beyond (Apple fans will find a special treat at the end of the post!). Let’s take a look!

Inspiration / 18 Oct 2011

50 More Beautifully Designed Tumblr Themes

Way back in 2009 we posted a collection of 30 Beautifully Designed Tumblr Themes. Back then the Tumblr library of themes was much smaller than it is today and in light of the huge growth in the platform as a whole we decided to bring you fifty more themes perfect for anyone with a designer’s eye.

This time we’ve switched things up by not only featuring a ton of great free themes, but an additional selection of premium themes for anyone who needs to go that extra mile. Let’s take a look!

Inspiration / 8 Sep 2011

30 Useful and Hilarious Lorem Ipsum Generators

Lorem ipsum represents a long-held tradition for designers, typographers and the like. Some people hate it and argue for its demise, but others ignore the hate as they create awesome tools to help create filler text for everyone from bacon lovers to Charlie Sheen fans.

Today we’re going to briefly discuss why lorem ipsum and its brethren still have legitimate uses and then we’ll have some fun as we check out thirty great dummy content generators that you’ll definitely want to bookmark.

Inspiration / 29 Aug 2011

Important Marketing Lessons From Outrageous Vintage Advertisements

I absolutely love looking at old ads from the early to mid 20th century. The themes covered and claims that are made are often so completely outrageous that you wonder how they ever made it to print. Looking at these, you can’t help but marvel how far advertising has come.

How much advancement have we really made in this area though? Aren’t the advertising ploys of past generations still the same tricks used by marketers today? Follow along as we take a look at some truly ridiculous ads and how they really aren’t so different from advertising we see today.