Articles - Page 127

Graphics / 11 Jul 2013

Understanding Color: Dominant vs. Recessive Colors

Ever wonder why your colors don’t look quite right in some situations? It could be a simple as the color choice. Certain colors tend to take on the characteristics of other hues, while others always look pure. In addition, the human eye perceives color in different ways based on whether it is in the foreground or background.

This phenomenon can be explained through dominant and recessive colors. Join us as we take a closer look at these two terms today, and delve into deeper understanding of how they can guide your design choices and decisions.

CSS / 21 Jun 2013

What the Heck Is CSS Specificity?

CSS specificity is a topic that many new front end coders avoid for as long as possible. It sounds complicated, there are all of these rules, you might even have to do some math! How lame is that?

Ultimately, you can only avoid it for so long. Specificity is an essential concept that you need to grasp to be an effective developer. Today I’ll walk you through the concepts of specificity in a simple and easy to understand manner. It’s easier than you think!

Business / 30 May 2013

Tips and Advice for a Design Portfolio Review

For every member of the design community – designers, photographers and illustrators – the portfolio is an essential tool when it comes to getting new clients or changing jobs.

The portfolio review can be one of the more stressful parts of your career. It can be tough to take criticism and hear things you may not want to about your work. A good portfolio review will make you better and it is just as important to understand how to receive a review as well as give a good one.

Inspiration / 22 May 2013

Pinterest for Designers: Using It to Your Advantage

Design inspiration is all around us. And every day there are new tools popping up to help us collect and share that inspiration. One of those great tools is Pinterest. The image collection platform is a fantastic source of design inspiration, from typography to print, web or packaging design.

Newer additions to the service, such as boards for business and hidden boards make the tool even more useful. Haven’t gotten on board with Pinterest yet? Not sure how to make it work for you? Read on.

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!