Articles - Page 202

News / 4 Feb 2009

Onwards and Upwards

Design Shack launched proudly in 2003 and has been gradually growing and expanding ever since. Over the past 6 years the site has gained a fantastic readership, I’ve had the chance to meet some great people, and certainly hope that you’ve been a little inspired by the articles and designs we’ve featured.

2009 marks the start of a refresh for Design Shack, and I’m incredibly excited about what the year has in store. The previous site design has been in place for a couple of years and, whilst I was thoroughly pleased with it at the time, I felt that a shift towards a more professional style was required.

Reviews / 27 Jan 2009

OnmiStar Mailer Review

There are a huge number of different tools for email campaigns available; Emma, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp to name a few. Today I’ll be looking at a longstanding piece of email marketing software with a whole range of tools, Omnistar Mailer. It differs from other software in that it is hosted locally on your server.

Articles / 19 Jan 2009

Barack Obama Letterpress Poster

I’m excited to announce that Kishore – a regular contributor to Design Shack – has today released a Barack Obama letterpress poster to celebrate his inauguration. Inspired by Cameron Moll’s beautiful letterpress design, these 14” by 20” posters are a product of hours of (fun) labour, letterpressed using one of the very few platen letterpress machines still left in Chennai, India.

The poster itself consists of characters from MrsEaves, Bickam Script Pro, Adobe Garamond and the Trajan font families. Instead of using a random set of characters in the artwork, Kishore decided to embed something meaningful; important figures, dates, milestones, words and phrases associated with President Obama.

Articles / 12 Jan 2009

Best of 2008 – JavaScript

In the last part of our summary series, it is time to see some of the JavaScript Goodies of 2008. Some of the following are resources, some are useful tutorials, some opinions and others just plain fun interesting stuff.

There is always a lesson or two to take away from these, and it could help you enter the New Year with a variety of new skills in your portfolio.

Articles / 22 Dec 2008

Best of 2008 – Typography

Typography is beginning to come to the fore as one of the most crucial elements of web design as people start to understand its importance. There’s no doubt that if you perfect the size, style and position of type on your page, the rest of the design will flow much easier.

In part one of our 2008 roundup, we saw some of the most useful graphic design tutorials of the year. This second section will walk you through a selection of the best typography related resources and articles of 2008 – tutorials, downloads, fonts, and everything you need to perfect the use of type in your design.

Articles / 16 Dec 2008

Best of 2008 – Graphic Design Tutorials

As we arrive at the last month of yet another year, it’s time we revise and reflect on all the goodies this year had to offer. At the same time  it’s great to practice the tips and lessons learnt for the years to come!  We have brought together a series of what we feel are some of the best tutorials of 2008 from around the web.

We’re starting off with the most useful graphic design tutorials of the past year. In no particular order, read on to see 33 that have stood out in particular.

Graphics / 8 Dec 2008

Creating Fading Site Dividers

You might have seen these fading dividers/separators on various sites, which seem to fade both horizontally and vertically. Here is an example of what I mean:

They provide a great way to split content up, doing so in a subtle and non-intrusive manner. I would like to share a simple way to create these fading dividers using Photoshop.

JavaScript / 2 Dec 2008

Pirobox jQuery Lightbox

Lightbox scripts have become a very popular way of displaying images online in recent months. There are a huge number of them available, using a variety of different frameworks and languages.

I’m pleased to announce that today, in partnership with Pirolab, there’s a new jQuery lightbox script available. It has been designed and created by Diego Valobra. If you’d like to read more about the features and download the lightbox script, click through to read on.

Articles / 14 Nov 2008

Design Forums

I just thought I’d take a moment to mention a new designer forum which launched recently. Design Forums has had a really successful first month, with over 180 members and some 1500 posts. I’m not generally a huge forum fan, preferring to frequent design sites and blogs which have better ‘crafted’ content and articles. That said, I’ve read a few very well thought out posts with some excellent discussion over the past month.

It’s a UK based site, which means that it may not be perfectly suited to US readers (though to be perfectly honest, most of the content is very general).

Take a look and do let me know your thoughts. Are there any other design forums which you frequent regularly?

Navigation / 11 Nov 2008

Simple Hover CSS Menu

Our partner site, 13 Styles has just released a new CSS menu called “Simple Hover“. It is, as the name suggests, a simple affair, with a link description appearing when hovered over.

The menu is completely free to download, use and customize, contains no images (it’s all CSS) and should work in any browser or operating system you use.

Please let me know if you find any problems or would like to contribute a menu in the future.

Visit

Inspiration / 3 Nov 2008

Announcing Design Top 10

A project we have been working on for a while launches today – Design Top 10. The site will be updated every month, featuring the best website designs, tutorials and resources published in that period. Hopefully it will grow into a great place to find inspiration and keep up to date with the best content produced online.

The design stems from a notebook style layout, as the site is a ‘scrapbook’ of discoveries and inspiration on a monthly basis. I feel that it fits the profile of the site well and I’m really happy with it.

Please take a look at the site and, if you find it appealing, write a post about it or drop me a comment – I’d love to hear what you think. I hope you find Design Top 10 a useful source of inspiration!

Visit Design Top 10 Subscribe

Navigation / 29 Oct 2008

Creating a jQuery Dashboard

The ‘Dashboard’ feature on a Mac looks great, and the menu allowing you to add/remove widgets is a well designed feature. A similar effect can add a whole new level of functionality to a website, providing a simple slide-down menu at the top of a page. This tutorial will walk you through the process from beginning to end.

Before getting started, you may like to check out the demo, or download full source code here.