Articles - Page 208

Articles / 23 Mar 2012

Big Design in Small Spaces

It’s easy to get caught up in the big picture sometimes – what your whole site looks like or the message it conveys. Just as important though, are the small spaces. The look of your banner, sidebars and even the dreaded-in-some-circles above the scroll presentation can bring people into or turn people away from your site.

Effective design in restricted, and even constricted spaces can be the key to adding just the right flair to your site. Simple design tools such as cropping, color, text display and contrast can make all the difference when planning the design for the boxed-in spaces of your next project.

HTML / 22 Mar 2012

Ready or Not, Here Comes HD Web Design

Apple is pushing the tech industry forward by increasing the pixel density on iPhone and iPad screens. This is great from a user’s perspective, but as a web designer or developer it literally threatens to completely change the way you build websites.

Are you ready for HD web design? Do you know how your sites will look on a new generation of high resolution screens? What steps can you take to prepare yourself and what skills will you need to stay relevant in the years to come? Read on to find out.

Inspiration / 21 Mar 2012

105 Remarkable Retro Logos

It’s time for another massive logo collection. This time around we’ve sifted through thousands of great logos to find over one hundred that were designed in a retro or vintage style.

If you’re looking for some good old fashioned logo design inspiration, this post will surely get your creative brain firing on all cylinders. From robots to muscle cars, these logos are flat out cool.

Google Fonts / 20 Mar 2012

10 More Great Google Font Combinations You Can Copy

The last time we wrote about Google Web Fonts, it was a fairly new program with a handful of fonts. Today there are nearly 500 font families ready and waiting to be served up to your website completely free of charge. Google has certainly made its mark on web typography and stands as an excellent alternative to premium subscription services.

The downside of this growth is that it’s becomingly increasingly difficult to sift through the library to find the best selections.

We’ve got your back though and are serving up another great collection of Google Web Font combinations ripe for the stealing. Just copy and paste our code, then tweak the style to fit your needs and you’ll be good to go!

Articles / 19 Mar 2012

Photo Effects and Manipulations: Do These Tricks Work?

Are you looking to add a little something extra to a photo on your website? Did you purchase new photo editing software and feel the need to use some of the bells a whistles? Don’t get too pulled in by all the photo manipulation gimmicks out there. Typically the best images are those that are composed and shot well, not a bad image with tricks added to it.

There are, though, some manipulations that can benefit your project when used in moderation. But there are many more so-called photo tricks to avoid if you want to produce professional-looking work.

Graphics / 16 Mar 2012

5 Gorgeous Note & Point Presentations You Have to See

One of my favorite sites for design inspiration is Note & Point, which is a fantastic curator of great looking presentation decks (Keynote + PowerPoint = Note & Point). Not only is this site chock full of awesome design examples, most of their presentations are actually design and development related so you learn some great stuff along the way!

Today we’re going to look at five of my favorite Note & Point decks, which will teach us a ton of great stuff about presentation design.

CSS / 15 Mar 2012

Sass and Media Queries: What You Can and Can’t Do

Preprocessors like Sass are helping us flex our development muscles in nearly every area of our CSS. Variables, mixins, inheritance and many more great features make coding easier and more concise than ever.

So what about leveraging Sass for responsive design, or more specifically, for media queries? Are there any features of Sass that pair particularly well with media queries? Is there anything you should avoid? Join me as I experiment and discover the answers.

CSS / 14 Mar 2012

Code a Responsive Navigation Menu

Navigation menus used to be a fairly simple thing. Code up an unordered list, float it left and you’re good to go. With responsive design being all the rage these days though you’re faced with some new challenges when creating a menu design.

Follow along as we start from scratch and code a simple but effective responsive navigation menu that you can easily modify and reuse in your own projects.

CSS / 12 Mar 2012

Use Pseudo Elements to Create an Image Stack Illusion

Today we’re going to see if we can take a single image inserted via HTML and make it look like a messy stack of images using only CSS. The key: pseudo elements.

Along the way we’ll see how embarking on a project like this can quickly lead to some messy code and how we can combat that with some awesome DRY coding practices.

Freebies / 9 Mar 2012

Weekly Freebies: 25 Fantastic Free Form and Field PSDs

Every week we search all over the web and bring you a handpicked selection of the finest design freebies around. We do all the research and you reap the benefits!

This week’s collection of freebies contains 25 incredibly useful form and field PSDs. We’ve got everything from login and payment forms to gorgeous search fields. If you’re looking to add some UI goodness to your next project, don’t miss these downloads!

Typography / 8 Mar 2012

That’s Arial Hot Shot: 5 Tricks for Spotting Helvetica in the Wild

So you think you’re a pro at spotting typefaces eh? You’re a real type lover with at least one clever t-shirt dedicated to the cause of teaching the world to kern. You’ve seen the Helvetica documentary eight times and you love to walk around a crowded city with a superior smirk on your face, pointing out all the instances of Helvetica that you see.

The big problem with this, aside from the fact that you seem a little full of yourself, is that Helvetica can actually be pretty tricky to identify if you haven’t done your homework. I’m willing to bet that you’ve even pointed at Arial (gasp!) a time or two and boldly proclaimed it to be Helvetica! Save yourself the embarrassment and learn some great tricks for spotting the most ubiquitous font on the planet.

CSS / 7 Mar 2012

Web Design Vocabulary Refresh Part 2: CSS Structure

What’s the difference between a property and a selector? How is a declaration different than a declaration block and what’s a CSS rule? How do I tell the difference between a pseudo class and a pseudo element?

This series will serve as a basic introduction to some terms that every new web designer should be sure to add to his or her vocabulary. It won’t be an exhaustive vocabulary list but rather a primer on a few terms that I found difficult to wrap my head around when I was a beginner. We started with HTML earlier this week and today we’ll move on to some structural components of CSS.