Inspiration - Page 74

Inspiration / 17 Jun 2011

50 Creative and Clever Examples of Outdoor Advertising

Outdoor advertising is an incredibly rich and diverse medium that allows a very unique spectrum of creativity for designers to play with. Sometimes you have to catch someone’s attention in a split second, other times you can do something fun and interactive.

Today we’ve scoured Ads of the World and come up with fifty particularly creative billboards, bus stops, subway ceilings and more. If you need a fresh blast of creativity to boost your next project, take a look!

Inspiration / 26 May 2011

50 Creative and Inspiring Thumbnail Galleries

Thumbnail galleries are one of the most common solutions on the web for showcasing multiple images. The efficiency of this tool can’t be beat, it allows for quick browsing and closer inspection when desired.

Whenever I build a thumbnail gallery, I like to look around the web to see what other designers are doing to make theirs unique. Today we’re collected fifty great galleries for you to check out. Along the way, we’ll also discuss some ideas that you can use in your own galleries.

Inspiration / 1 Apr 2011

20 Great Sign Up Form Examples to Learn From

Sign up forms come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are a single field, others are a multi-step process that stretch over several screens.

Today we’ll take a look at 20 attractive and functional forms to see if we can find any useful ideas that you can apply the next time you’re building a sign up form.

Inspiration / 3 Mar 2011

Tackling Online Menus: Tips and Examples

Restaurant websites are quite frequently disasters of both design and usability. Even good designers can go very wrong on this particularly tricky task.

Before you attempt your next restaurant website design, check out this article. We’ll go over some super practical tips for success in addition to a few pitfalls to avoid.

Inspiration / 13 Aug 2010

Designing in the Dark: 10 Dark Sites and Their Color Schemes

What goes well with a black website? Today we’ll find out but taking a look at some excellent examples of dark web design along with their primary color palettes.

Each website will have a screenshot along with a brief description, a visual representation of the color scheme, and a link to download the Photoshop color swatches from Pictaculous.

CSS / 15 Jul 2010

30+ Innovative Icon-Based Navigation Menus

Here at Design Shack we love a good navigation menu. Lately we’ve noticed a trend arising around menus that use icons either exclusively in place of text or as a support of additional textual information.

Adding icons to your navigation can not only give you an aesthetic boost but actually make for a quicker visual read of the link. Here’s a collection of over thirty icon-based navigation menus that we found online. We’ll conclude with a few resources you can use to snag some free icons to create your own fancy menus.

Graphics / 4 Jun 2010

6 Apps for Collecting Digital Inspiration

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.

Graphics / 25 May 2010

5 Fantastic Notebooks and Sketchbooks for Designers

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.

Graphics / 17 Mar 2010

30 Websites With Photographic Backgrounds

In design, the simplest of options are often among the best. Using a photographic background is an easy way to make your site beautifully eye-catching. Below you’ll find 30 examples of sites from all over the world using strong photographic elements as background pieces. Some use pure photography while others mix in illustrations, Photoshop effects, and text. Use these as a leaping point for your own ideas the next time you need a fresh design.

Business / 12 Mar 2010

What to Do if Someone Steals Your Design

Protecting your intellectual property has always been a difficult task and the Internet has only served to complicate matters. The web has become an unoriginal designer’s one stop shop for endless material to shamelessly ripoff. Today we’ll take a look into some of the reasons design theft is so rampant online and explore some answers to the essential question of what to do if someone steals your design. A big thanks to Von Glitschka for providing much of the content and advice seen below!

Graphics / 7 Mar 2010

5 Reasons Band Websites Suck (And Some That Don’t)

This post began purely as a showcase of well-designed band websites. Naturally, to begin my search I opened up my iTunes library and Safari and began checking out the sites of the bands in my collection. What I discovered shocked me; nearly every site I came across was profoundly lackluster or altogether horrid. I’m at a loss as to why record companies, who spend countless dollars promoting their big money makers, seem to be incapable of finding web designers that match the remarkable talent of their artists.

At this point the nature of the article changed entirely. Due to the wealth of ugly sites to choose from, today we’ll examine some of the reasons I think the band website industry really needs to step up and make some major changes. We’ll conclude by analyzing some examples to follow if you want to create a band site that doesn’t suck.

Business / 28 Feb 2010

10 Tips for Effective Creative Brainstorming

Brainstorming can either be a creative gold mine or a time wasting disaster.

Brainstorming is often discussed in relation to a business environment. In college, nearly every one of my business school textbooks had an entire chapter dedicated to the concept. Though creative brainstorming is in many ways a different beast due to its visual nature, many of the same concepts apply.

Today we’ll take a look at ten tips to consider before you pull your creative team into a brainstorming session. When applied properly, they can drastically increase productivity and quality of results.