Browse hundreds of articles, tips, and inspiring design collections. Find helpful design advice, or the perfect resource for your next project.
Need an idea for your new site design?
Why not look to nature for your inspiration? Today we’ll look at 25 sites either loosely or strictly inspired by some facet of the natural world.
Along the way we’ll discuss four popular trends that most nature inspired sites fit into.
Boring paperwork is one of the necessary evils of being a freelance designer.
There’s simply no way around it, if you want to track and manage payments from clients, you’re going to have to setup an invoicing system. It’s not all bad news though; the fun part is that you actually get to design a custom invoice.
Today we’ll walk through designing an invoice from scratch. I’ll be as in-depth as possible and include everything you need to know from the absolute basics to advanced features and even a little design theory.
There is no shortage of companies that follow popular design trends to appeal to a mass market. Much more rare is the breed of company that actually sets design trends. Today we’ll examine the techniques of a company that occupies the top of the design food chain: Apple.
Below you’ll find 15 practical ways to follow Apple’s example in creating beautiful interfaces.
So you want to be a freelancer, now what?
Despite the glamorous reputation, freelance design is no walk in the park. It takes an incredible work ethic, significant entrepreneurial prowess, and a little bit of insanity to pull it off effectively. This article will discuss how to effectively make a living as a freelancer (designer or otherwise). Since we are in fact a design blog, I’ll scatter in some well-designed freelancer sites along the way for inspiration.
E-commerce sites are notoriously busy and overcrowded.
Today we’ll be examining a ton of online stores that break this trend by being both functional and attractive. Each of the examples below has a unique lesson to teach us about good e-commerce design. Let’s get started!
CSS3 has brought about a number of aesthetically impressive new features. Perhaps the most fun of these to play with is CSS animation, which allows you to perform many motion-based functions normally delegated to JavaScript. Join me on my epic quest to discover the coolest, most innovative, and more importantly, nerdiest use of CSS animation on the web. Begin!
A strong footer can leave your visitors with a lasting positive impression.
There are tons of creative ways to boost the cool factor of your footers by focusing on both form and function. Below you’ll find 10 simple ideas to inspire you towards footer greatness.
Today we’ll be looking at how to add keyboard navigation to a website using a few simple lines of JavaScript. First we’ll create a simple site theme in Photoshop and then transform it into a working website that uses keyboard functions to switch pages.
Once upon a time, designers would lug unwieldy physical portfolios from interview to interview to showcase their work. This tactic is steadily being replaced with sending out emails containing links to an online portfolio. A portfolio website is becoming an essential marketing tool for every designer and can be the single biggest impression upon which you will be judged and hopefully, hired.
This article contains several tips and examples to help you create an amazing single page portfolio.
Tumblr is an easy to use, fast-growing blogging platform with a strong emphasis on simple, no hassle content sharing. I would describe Tumblr as much more attractive and streamlined than Blogger and a lot simpler than WordPress (though not as powerful).
Like other blogging platforms, Tumblr makes it really easy to change themes on the fly without messing up previously posted content, and with over 275 themes to choose from, you get a lot of variety. However, sorting through hundreds of mediocre themes to find those few golden nuggets of design goodness can be quite the mundane task. That’s why we’ve done the work for you and created this collection of 30 beautifully designed Tumblr themes.
As a designer, color management should be an integral part of your workflow. A website’s color scheme helps shape its identity and therefore should not be carelessly thrown together. Here are 25 online, desktop and iPhone applications to help you live and breathe color management no matter where you are.
Once upon a time I was in a rock band. When I was building our website, I naturally wanted to put some music up so visitors could listen before purchasing our songs on iTunes. After a bit of research I found out that there are a million ways you could go about it, some better than others. Sadly, after two albums and lots of good times, my band The Van Buren Regulars no longer exists. Fortunately, what I learned about embedding music lives on and is easy enough to pass along.
Today we’re going to look at four easy ways to embed MP3 files into your website. All of these methods are free and take mere minutes to implement. Let’s check them out!