Browse hundreds of articles, tips, and inspiring design collections. Find helpful design advice, or the perfect resource for your next project.
Style Tiles provide a fresh and productive way to approach the design process. They allow you to specifically hone in and focus on a project’s personality and mood without worrying about specific layout decisions.
Today we’re going to show you exactly what Style Tiles are, why you should use them and how to incorporate them into your design process. Follow along and you just might change the way you design forever.
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.
The last time we wrote about Google Web Fonts, it was a fairly new program with a handful of fonts. Today there are nearly 500 font families ready and waiting to be served up to your website completely free of charge. Google has certainly made its mark on web typography and stands as an excellent alternative to premium subscription services.
The downside of this growth is that it’s becomingly increasingly difficult to sift through the library to find the best selections.
We’ve got your back though and are serving up another great collection of Google Web Font combinations ripe for the stealing. Just copy and paste our code, then tweak the style to fit your needs and you’ll be good to go!
One of my favorite sites for design inspiration is Note & Point, which is a fantastic curator of great looking presentation decks (Keynote + PowerPoint = Note & Point). Not only is this site chock full of awesome design examples, most of their presentations are actually design and development related so you learn some great stuff along the way!
Today we’re going to look at five of my favorite Note & Point decks, which will teach us a ton of great stuff about presentation design.
Preprocessors like Sass are helping us flex our development muscles in nearly every area of our CSS. Variables, mixins, inheritance and many more great features make coding easier and more concise than ever.
So what about leveraging Sass for responsive design, or more specifically, for media queries? Are there any features of Sass that pair particularly well with media queries? Is there anything you should avoid? Join me as I experiment and discover the answers.
Today we’re going to see if we can take a single image inserted via HTML and make it look like a messy stack of images using only CSS. The key: pseudo elements.
Along the way we’ll see how embarking on a project like this can quickly lead to some messy code and how we can combat that with some awesome DRY coding practices.
So you think you’re a pro at spotting typefaces eh? You’re a real type lover with at least one clever t-shirt dedicated to the cause of teaching the world to kern. You’ve seen the Helvetica documentary eight times and you love to walk around a crowded city with a superior smirk on your face, pointing out all the instances of Helvetica that you see.
The big problem with this, aside from the fact that you seem a little full of yourself, is that Helvetica can actually be pretty tricky to identify if you haven’t done your homework. I’m willing to bet that you’ve even pointed at Arial (gasp!) a time or two and boldly proclaimed it to be Helvetica! Save yourself the embarrassment and learn some great tricks for spotting the most ubiquitous font on the planet.
What’s the difference between an element and a tag? When should I use strong and when should I use bold? What the heck is the DOM? When you’re new to web design, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is always the jargon. So many technical terms are thrown around flippantly and rarely explained outright that it’s easy to get lost.
This series will serve as a basic introduction to some terms that every new web designer should be sure to add to his or her vocabulary. This won’t be an exhaustive vocabulary list but rather a primer on a few terms that I found difficult to wrap my head around when I was a beginner. We’ll start with HTML today and move on to CSS in the near future.
We’ve been using floats for layout pretty much since we left tables behind. It’s a quirky solution that can often cause troubles, but if you know what you’re doing, it works.
One interesting alternative to floats that people are turning to more and more lately is to set the display value of an element to inline-block. What does this do exactly? How is it like a float? How is it different? Let’s dive in and see what we can discover.
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.
Once upon a time we relied purely on Photoshop to create fancy image effects. These days though we’re turning more and more to pure CSS to add eye candy to our images. Applying custom image treatments using code makes for an infinitely flexible workflow that’s easy to tweak at any time.
Today I’ll walk you through creating some extremely simple and fun CSS image tricks. From polaroids to vignettes, you won’t believe what we can pull off.
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.