Articles - Page 184

Browse hundreds of articles, tips, and inspiring design collections. Find helpful design advice, or the perfect resource for your next project.

Business / 3 Dec 2013

Was My Design Plagiarized (Or Is That Just Flattery)?

Is nothing original anymore? It’s a concept we designers talk about all the time. All original ideas “have been used already”. But is that true? (I, for one, am not sure I actually believe it.) And if it is true are we all plagiarizing other designs on a daily basis?

All of these are ideas that are thrown around loosely, but have quite serious implications. So how do you know if your design idea was plagiarized? Or is a similar concept just the most sincere form of flattery? Let’s dig a little deeper today…

CSS / 28 Nov 2013

Building a Custom CSS3 Pagination User Interface

Website pagination is a crucial aspect to any layout with repeating content. Blogs are often a consideration, but also portfolio listings or related news/feed links or any other types of archive. Organizing a blog post into many pages helps to cut down on reading time – especially with particularly in-depth articles.

In this tutorial I want to demonstrate a collection of CSS techniques for designing pagination. Once you combine these designs with content systems like WordPress you can see how the interfaces really work in action. To get an idea of the final product take a look at my live sample demo below.

Competitions / 26 Nov 2013

Grab a Free Dot Grid Book and Save 10% at Creoly

It doesn’t matter how fancy the iPad, or how realistic the e-ink, there’s something about a good quality pen and a thick, fresh pad of paper that’s impossible to replicate. Whether it’s for sketching, taking notes, or planning your to-do list, often paper is best.

We’re pleased to tell you about a fantastic partnership we have with Creoly for Design Shack readers, giving you the chance to win one of five exclusive notebooks, and save 10% on any order you place (with free international shipping!). Read on to find out more.

Business / 25 Nov 2013

10 Tips to Gain More Confidence as a Designer

Sometimes when a project fails, it can be hard to get back on your feet again. We all take the occasional confidence knock from time-to-time. But to see continued success in this tricky industry, it’s important to be able to regroup and recover gracefully.

Here, we’ll look at ten things you can do to gain confidence as a designer. These tips can work for experienced designers after a troubled project, or new designers looking to break into the market. It’s advice worth taking to heart.

Graphics / 22 Nov 2013

Learn by Example: 6 Lessons for Designing Restaurant & Food Websites

Today’s topic is a delicious one: restaurant and food websites. Small businesses pay the bills for freelance designers and local restaurants can serve as a major source of revenue. If you’re embarking on your first restaurant site design though, there are a few things that you should know.

In this article, we’ll learn by example as we take a look at lots of mouthwatering food and restaurant websites. By examining what these designers got right, you’ll help ensure your own success in this area.

CSS / 20 Nov 2013

Creating a Custom HTML5 Audio Element UI

HTML5 has made many things simpler in web development, one of which is using embedded audio. Today, we’re going to work through the process of completely customising the HTML5 audio player element, which can adapt to older browsers with fallbacks. It’s a simple method that’s easy to build upon and tweak.

The open source project MediaElement.js is wildly popular, and has even been built into the core of WordPress since version 3.6. It allows you to embed any HTML5 audio or video using a native player interface which can dynamically adapt into a Flash/Silverlight player when needed. I was really impressed to see all the features and it seems to be one of the more advanced solutions for handling legacy browsers. We’ll be using that as a starting point!

CSS / 15 Nov 2013

Build a Super Easy CSS Slider With Thumbnails

Today’s project is another exploration of the types of practical applications that you can achieve with a little ingenuity and some fairly basic CSS. You’ll be blown away by how much you can achieve with just a few lines of code.

The final result with be a great way to display a strip of small image thumbnails that the user can hover to see larger images. Let’s dive in and see how it works.

Design Dilemma / 13 Nov 2013

Design Dilemma: When You Just Can’t Do Anything Right

Have you ever worked at a place where no matter what you do, whatever you design, or whatever you suggest, you’re wrong, but they don’t fire you? There’s a good reason why, and here are some funny (but odd) reasons, along with advice no one would think of to ease the tension.

An interesting email was sent to me from a young designer who is ready to quit design because her boss keeps putting down her design abilities, and it’s making her very depressed. It’s a very common problem in the design industry, so, join us as we delve into another Design Dilemma, helping to answer your questions, queries and concerns about the murky world of design…

CSS / 11 Nov 2013

How to Create Unique Block-Style Radio Inputs With jQuery

Input buttons are used in web forms where a user needs to select one option from a larger collection. This often happens with unique values like newsletter subscriptions, profile settings, and submission categories. I have always liked the old-school Digg-style input buttons where you click a link to choose your story category.

In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can build a similar interface using CSS3 and jQuery. All of the input radio buttons are still present within the form itself, but they are hidden on the page. Instead we update the selected choice using JavaScript and even have the possibility to display this value in HTML (or return it to a backend script). Check out my sample demo to get an idea for what we are building.

CSS / 8 Nov 2013

Build a Freaking Awesome Pure CSS Accordion

Who has two thumbs and loves to push the bounds of CSS? This guy. Let’s jump into a project that does just that. It’s pretty experimental and won’t pass the semantic police, but it’ll teach you a heck of a lot about advanced CSS tactics and will be tons of fun.

What we’re going to build is a pure CSS horizontal accordion slider. You’ll be able to insert as many slides as you want, each with unique content and each accessible via a click event, all without a lick of JavaScript. Impossible you say? Never!

Business / 7 Nov 2013

Food-Based Web Design Tips to Make Visitors Hungry

It’s the same routine every date night: “where are we heading for dinner?” To the web we go, looking for restaurants around us that whet our appetites. And the places we always seem to hit after this dinner search are the locations with websites that just make us hungry.

Certain techniques, from color to photos to imagery, are common among the best food-based websites. These sites employ a specific strategy designed to make you hungry. Today we’ll look at how photography, colors, shapes, vivid copy and simple design are used to make mouths of website visitors water.

Design Dilemma / 5 Nov 2013

Design Dilemma: Dainty Designers — Grow a Pair!

There are some designers who just can’t say “no!” to a client. While it’s painful to hear their stories, do they affect the industry for others? Do you need to develop some iron clad nerve to protect yourself?

This is the story of a designer who keeps being called into endless meetings by a client who picks her brain for a new line of product packaging, but still hasn’t committed to her as the designer on the project, nor has the client paid her for her time. I gave her some advice, so perhaps she’ll follow it? Join us as we delve into another Design Dilemma, helping to answer your questions, queries and concerns about the murky world of design…