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Always eager to jump into a debate, today I tackle the concept that artsy eye candy is currently too prevalent in design. Design inspiration galleries and communities are constantly critiqued for displaying art when their focus should be on design.
Can we cut through the biases and assumptions of the common rhetoric and discover the proper place for artistic talent in relation to functional design? Let’s find out.
Recently, I decided that I needed a refresher in all of the various CSS shorthand properties. The best way to learn something is to teach it so here’s my attempt at exactly that.
Today we’ll learn how to use CSS shorthand for backgrounds, margins & padding, borders, fonts, list-styles and transitions.
The web is completely over-saturated with apps that help you connect with a social network, make grocery lists, manage large projects, decide who will make tea and every other crazy task you can imagine.
With all of this competition, how can you possibly convince visitors that your app is a the proverbial needle among the hay? Today we’ll look at some real examples to see if we can learn which strategies to mimic and which to avoid.
Web developers are constantly churning out free tools that are incredibly useful in reducing the amount of small, annoying tasks that you have to deal with when building a website or mockup.
Today we’ll look at three fresh tools that you breeze through layout, placeholder images and text styles on your next site.
Graphics designers often must choose between a wide palette of color schemes. Blue is by far one of the strongest, boldest colors to choose from. It has been prominently sponsored in websites, blogs, corporate entities, logos, and so many other digital arts throughout the 21st century.
CSS3 is completely changing the game for creating buttons on the web. Techniques that were once only possible with images are now easily executable with just a few lines of code. For this post we custom built six attractively styled CSS buttons for you to copy and paste right into your projects, zero attribution required.
As with anything good in CSS3, the buttons below work great in Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but various versions of IE will fall short.
Several years ago a friend of mine asked me to teach him how masks work in Photoshop. This is my incredibly late response.
We’ll go over the basics of what masks are, what they’re used for and how wielding them properly will take your Photoshop skills to an entirely new level.
I started my career in print almost a decade ago and gradually moved over to the web. This whole new medium brought several creative and technical hurdles that I had to learn to deal with and even embrace.
Today’s article is for a new generation of designers making the opposite jump. You’ve been designing for the digital world for some time and are ready to learn print design. We’ll help ease the transition with some dead simple and practical advice.
There are far too many social networks to keep up with these days. This article will give a quick rundown of which networks offer significant benefits for blog owners looking to integrate social media.
Sign up forms come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are a single field, others are a multi-step process that stretch over several screens.
Today we’ll take a look at 20 attractive and functional forms to see if we can find any useful ideas that you can apply the next time you’re building a sign up form.
Do you ever wonder how Photoshop masters create such realistic compositions? Seemingly simple tasks such as throwing some text onto a brick wall can easily lead to lackluster results if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So what sets you apart from the pros? Why are their final results so believable while yours reek of Photoshop? The simple answer is that they know more tricks than you! Let’s fix that.
Realism in UI design is a hot topic right now. Every design blog worth anything is openly telling Apple that they are way off in their suggestion that iPad apps should mimic reality.
Join us as we add some life to the debate by tackling some of these notions head on. We’ll go over when realism is effective and when it is destructive and how you can wield it in your own designs without ruining your interface.