Articles - Page 206

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

Graphics / 21 Jun 2011

5 Logo Design Lessons From Fast Food Joints

Few logos have the power to immediately draw forth feelings from us more than those of fast food restaurants that we’ve seen and eaten at for decades. Just the sight of those golden arches can bring a smile to the face of children and adults alike.

What makes these logos effective and how can you put these ideas into practice in your own work? Today we’re going to see what we can learn by exploring the logos of several famous American fast food restaurants.

Business / 20 Jun 2011

A Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Through Social News

The modern web 2.0 landscape features dozens of amazing social networking projects. The most popular include brands such as Facebook or Twitter. Underneath these however lies an even larger industry centered around user participation and information sharing systems.

Critique / 18 Jun 2011

Web Design Critique #55: Gadget-O

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.

Today’s site is Gadget-O, a site all about fun gadgets!

Inspiration / 17 Jun 2011

50 Creative and Clever Examples of Outdoor Advertising

Outdoor advertising is an incredibly rich and diverse medium that allows a very unique spectrum of creativity for designers to play with. Sometimes you have to catch someone’s attention in a split second, other times you can do something fun and interactive.

Today we’ve scoured Ads of the World and come up with fifty particularly creative billboards, bus stops, subway ceilings and more. If you need a fresh blast of creativity to boost your next project, take a look!

Freebies / 17 Jun 2011

Weekly Freebies: 20 Outstanding Swirly Brush Sets for Photoshop

Another Friday, another set of awesome quickie freebies for you to download and add to your design arsenal.

The curls, swirls and twirls of these brushes will surely unfurl some creativity in your next design project. Whether you’re looking for grungy, floral or just pretty and abstract, we’ve found some brushes that will be just perfect.

Graphics / 16 Jun 2011

Awesome and Unusual Places to Steal Color Palettes From

A good color palette can make or break a design. It sets the tone, conveys emotion and can even drastically affect usability. With all this pressure, choosing a color palette is tricky business.

Today we’re going to think outside the box and explore some fresh and interesting ways to select the colors for your project by pointing out some great sources of inspiration. Let’s get started.

Software / 15 Jun 2011

Adobe Illustrator 101: 10 Things You Should Know About Ai

Adobe Illustrator is one of my absolute favorite applications. For vector work, Illustrator simply can’t be beat and you should really set your reservations aside and give it a shot. Even if you’re commonly creating raster graphics for the web, there are a number of things that Illustrator simply does better than Photoshop so getting to know both apps and their strengths/weaknesses is a must.

Today’s article is for the extreme Illustrator newbies. You have the Adobe Creative Suite installed on your computer and have seen Illustrator sitting there quietly begging to be played with but you’ve never jumped in. We’ll go over ten basic things you should know before starting.

Competitions / 15 Jun 2011

Win an iPad 2 & One Year of Hosting (Worth £730)!

I’m excited to let you know that – in partnership with Heart Internet – we’re kicking off a fantastic competition to win an iPad 2, and one year of free reseller hosting with domain and goMobi!

It takes just five minutes to enter, and we’re asking you to fill out a short survey. We’ll be publishing the statistics from this in a few weeks time, to give you some awesome insight into the web design industry. Read on to find out more…

Graphics / 14 Jun 2011

Designing News: How Top News Sites Handle Tons of Content

If I had my way, along with just about every other web designer, web pages would always contain a fairly limited amount of content in order to keep the focus clear and the line of communication easy to follow.

Unfortunately, real world situations call for web pages with immense amounts of content. To learn to tackle the issues that arise in this arena, we’re going to look at a particular section of websites that are perhaps more overcrowded than any other: news websites. How do the designers at CNN, MSNBC, Fox and others handle the layout of so much information? Find out after the jump.

Navigation / 13 Jun 2011

Custom Web Design Techniques for Unusual Navigation

Page navigation is arguably the most important aspect to any properly constructed website. How easily your visitors can travel from page-to-page will affect the overall emotion and user interface of your website.

Great web designers always keep a surprise around every corner, and navigation menus can feature this big time. From fullpage to corner links I’ve shared a few great examples of unusual website navigation. Hopefully these ideas can incite a barrage of creativity within yourself and any future projects.

Critique / 11 Jun 2011

Web Design Critique #54: BDQWorks

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.

Today’s site is BDQWorks a Drupal/WordPress theme design and development company.

Business / 10 Jun 2011

What to Do With Your Portfolio’s Contact Form: 3 Popular Solutions

You’ve got your portfolio site almost finished and it’s time to tackle that task you’ve been putting off: the contact form. Some designers love forms, but many of us find them boring and annoying and would rather spend our day creating anything else.

One of the most difficult parts of this task is simply deciding what fields and questions to place in your contact form. What information should you be gathering from potential clients? Today we’ll answer that question by looking at three different common solutions.