Articles - Page 127

Graphics / 13 May 2013

How to Build a Brand Bible & Visual Style Guide

Every brand, from the smallest website or startup, to corporate giants such as Nike or McDonald’s, need a set of branding guidelines and rules to maintain their identity. This document, which can range from a couple of pages, to several hundred, is the thread that holds together what the public sees from a company.

A brand bible establishes the voice and personality of a company, as well as who the public will see, and it governs every aspect of communication from the company. The brand bible is the basis for all interactions on behalf of a company – personal communications, social media, advertising and design. While a brand bible focuses on many things, we are really going to look at how it affects design.

JavaScript / 10 May 2013

40 Awesome jQuery Plugins You Need to Check Out

The jQuery developer community has to be one of the most generous and hardworking group of people on the web. They’re constantly churning out amazingly useful and completely free tools that they share with anyone and everyone who wants to use them.

The quantity and quality of free jQuery plugins simply never ceases to amaze me. I’ve been keeping a list of some great ones that I’ve found lately and I thought I’d share it with you. Here are 40 awesome and free jQuery plugins that just about every web developer should check out.

Business / 3 May 2013

Should You Be Designing With QR Codes?

QR codes are all the rage… aren’t they? Their presence certainly seems to have increased in recent years, indicating an impressive adoption rate among marketers. But does that mean that you should be using them? If a client asks you whether or not using QR codes is a good idea, what will you say?

Join us as we take an honest and critical look at both sides of the QR debate so you can decide for yourself whether or not you should be designing with QR codes.

Mobile / 12 Apr 2013

Focal Point: Intelligent Cropping of Responsive Images

The practice of implementing responsive images is still in its infancy. We’ve seen a lot of ideas and suggestions for how it should be done and we’re bound to see a lot more.

Today we’re going to look at a fascinating little framework that allows you to not only automatically resize your images when the viewport changes, but also crop the images with a specific important focal point in mind. Amazingly enough, it does all this with pure CSS. Read on to see how it works.

Business Card Templates / 10 Apr 2013

Design a Business Card That Won’t Get Thrown Away

It’s an almost unavoidable part of doing business – the business card. While more people are beginning to ditch traditional paper cards for digital counterparts, the business card is still an integral part of doing business.

Cards are almost as commonplace as the handshake, and it’s something you’ll always want to have ready to hand when you meet a potential new client.

So what makes your card stand out from the pack? How can you design a card that won’t get thrown away minutes after the meeting? And how can your card best illustrate the style of your work?

Let’s delve into some suggestions and tips today.

Typography / 19 Mar 2013

Mixing Typefaces: Tips and Techniques

Mixing typefaces can be on of the most rewarding, and trickiest parts of the design process. Creating the perfect pairing of typography can result in a beautiful and perfectly readable outline for almost any project.

But how can you get started? What should you consider when mixing typefaces? While the answers aren’t black and white, there are a few things you can do. Think about contrast, x-heights, shapes and slants and overall mood when combining typefaces for any project. In this article, we’ll be delving into each of these in a little more detail!

CSS / 6 Mar 2013

How to Center Anything With CSS

Recently, we took a dive into the very core concepts behind CSS layout and explored the differences between absolute and relative positioning. We’re going to follow that up with another CSS layout talk, this time based around a fundamental question that almost every new developer asks: how do you center something?

There are a bunch of different types of web elements and layout situations, each calling for a unique solution for centering (both vertically and horizontally). Today we’ll go over a bunch of these scenarios so you can wrap your mind around how they work and come away with the confidence to center anything!

CSS / 22 Feb 2013

5 Simple and Practical CSS List Styles You Can Copy and Paste

Who doesn’t love a good list? We use them constantly in our markup for a variety of different situations. Today we’re going to take a look at a few simple and practical examples that you can steal and use in your own work.

We start off with a fun animated vertical list, then style up a list with thumbnails and text, another with just images and finally an ordered list where the numbers are styled differently than the rest of the type. There’s a ton of great things to learn here so let’s jump in!

Layouts / 8 Feb 2013

How to Use Centered Alignments: Tips and Examples

Today we’re going to go back to basics with a “design 101” discussion on alignments. Centered alignments are an easy place to go wrong and if you don’t know how to wield them properly, the result is a very poorly structured page.

Join us as we take a look at why centered alignments tend to be weak, where you should avoid them and how you should be using them.

Graphics / 23 Jan 2013

Check Out the New American Airlines Logo

American Airlines has had the same logo for forty-five years. That’s definitely a pretty impressive stretch! They’ve decided to hang up their Helvetica though and look to not only a new typeface, but a new eagle and even a new livery design.

Read on to see the logic behind the new design and whether or not I think it’s another chapter in a long line of recent brand redesigns gone bad.

CSS / 16 Jan 2013

Code a Spinning Circular Menu With CSS

Don’t be a square, break outside your boring box and try on a circle for size. Today we’re going to build a circular navigation menu that spins to different points as the user hovers over an anchor.

Along the way we’ll have to overcome several obstacles like how to structure our HTML to be conducive to a remote hover and how to position all of the elements just right so that everything works. It’s a fun challenge and there’s a lot to learn, let’s get started!

CSS / 27 Dec 2012

Four Custom Icon Font Generators Compared

Icon fonts are all the rage right now. They make it so dang easy to embed vector graphics into a page that designers everywhere are turning to them as the primary way to handle icons.

The problem of course is, we need more control over which icons we embed. Sometimes we pull from a variety of sources, including our own work, and we need a good way to put it all together. Enter icon font generators. Follow along as we compare a few of our favorites.