Inspiration - Page 86

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

Business / 3 Nov 2009

The Ultimate Guide to CSS Gallery Inclusion

Design Shack started out as a simple CSS gallery, featuring well designed websites that caught my eye. Tens of thousands of designs have been submitted over the past few years, and each one has been considered carefully for inclusion. The sad fact is that only around 5% of submissions stand out from the crowd.

This could be due to any number of factors; the site didn’t get the basics right, didn’t have anything remarkable to show, or (occasionally) was let down by content. This guide will walk you through how to make sure you stand a great chance of inclusion, avoiding all the pitfalls so commonly stumbled into by designers. At each stage, we’ll take a look at one great example, and one that’s not so good.

Graphics / 2 Nov 2009

50 Outstanding Free Design Textures

A few good textures can take a boring design and turn into something stunning. As a designer, you should seek to build a library of all kinds of textures to complement a range of styles. Here are 50 completely free and ready to download textures to get you started.

Inspiration / 30 Oct 2009

Where to Find Inspiration Online

A trip to your local book store’s magazine rack used to be the quickest, easiest way to find rich, diverse inspiration without a significant fee. Recently, the web has completely changed the way designers, developers, artists, writers and photographers search for influence. Now anyone with an internet connection can access a virtually unending stream of content that saturates the senses and breeds innovation. The best part: most of it is free.

CSS / 12 Oct 2009

70 Beautiful Handpicked CSS Galleries

CSS Galleries are an amazingly rich source of web design inspiration, and a fantastic way to promote your design skills to the world. Although you shouldn’t worry too much about where you are (or are not) featured, it’s good to know where to look.

We’ve scoured the web and compiled a comprehensive list of 70 great CSS galleries. Some are incredibly popular, others represent smaller niches in the web design industry.

Inspiration / 5 Aug 2009

35 Marvelously Minimal Websites

Here’s to the design minimalists. Here’s to focusing on functionality, simplicity and basic design principles. Kick the tires all you want on these sites today – you’re still going to love using them tomorrow.

This is our roundup of 35 stunningly simple, marvelously minimal web designs. Enjoy!

Articles / 12 Jan 2009

Best of 2008 – JavaScript

In the last part of our summary series, it is time to see some of the JavaScript Goodies of 2008. Some of the following are resources, some are useful tutorials, some opinions and others just plain fun interesting stuff.

There is always a lesson or two to take away from these, and it could help you enter the New Year with a variety of new skills in your portfolio.

Articles / 22 Dec 2008

Best of 2008 – Typography

Typography is beginning to come to the fore as one of the most crucial elements of web design as people start to understand its importance. There’s no doubt that if you perfect the size, style and position of type on your page, the rest of the design will flow much easier.

In part one of our 2008 roundup, we saw some of the most useful graphic design tutorials of the year. This second section will walk you through a selection of the best typography related resources and articles of 2008 – tutorials, downloads, fonts, and everything you need to perfect the use of type in your design.

Articles / 16 Dec 2008

Best of 2008 – Graphic Design Tutorials

As we arrive at the last month of yet another year, it’s time we revise and reflect on all the goodies this year had to offer. At the same time  it’s great to practice the tips and lessons learnt for the years to come!  We have brought together a series of what we feel are some of the best tutorials of 2008 from around the web.

We’re starting off with the most useful graphic design tutorials of the past year. In no particular order, read on to see 33 that have stood out in particular.

Articles / 14 Nov 2008

Design Forums

I just thought I’d take a moment to mention a new designer forum which launched recently. Design Forums has had a really successful first month, with over 180 members and some 1500 posts. I’m not generally a huge forum fan, preferring to frequent design sites and blogs which have better ‘crafted’ content and articles. That said, I’ve read a few very well thought out posts with some excellent discussion over the past month.

It’s a UK based site, which means that it may not be perfectly suited to US readers (though to be perfectly honest, most of the content is very general).

Take a look and do let me know your thoughts. Are there any other design forums which you frequent regularly?

Inspiration / 3 Nov 2008

Announcing Design Top 10

A project we have been working on for a while launches today – Design Top 10. The site will be updated every month, featuring the best website designs, tutorials and resources published in that period. Hopefully it will grow into a great place to find inspiration and keep up to date with the best content produced online.

The design stems from a notebook style layout, as the site is a ‘scrapbook’ of discoveries and inspiration on a monthly basis. I feel that it fits the profile of the site well and I’m really happy with it.

Please take a look at the site and, if you find it appealing, write a post about it or drop me a comment – I’d love to hear what you think. I hope you find Design Top 10 a useful source of inspiration!

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Articles / 11 Jun 2008

Design Critique: Mobile Me

Apple have recently announced a new suite of online applications called MobileMe. The aim of the development is to allow you to keep all your information in sync between several devices (e.g. your iPhone, Mac and Windows PC). In addition, Apple have created a new online site at me.com, which will hold a suite of applications including email, calendar, address book and photos.

We’re going to take a quick look at the design and layout of this new online service, and explain what works well and what we think could have been done better.