Articles - Page 211

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

Graphics / 20 Apr 2011

Designing a Web App Homepage: Examples, Tips and Peeves

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.

Freebies / 19 Apr 2011

Weekly Freebies: 20 Fantastic PSD Web Button Packs

Buttons add a ton of personality to your site, so much so that they can often define much of the impression of the aesthetic quality of the page. One way to start off in the direction of a solid design is to grab some high quality button graphics.

Below we’ve compiled 20 packs of free, layered PSD web buttons for your use. From downloads and uploads to navigation and social media, you’ll likely find just what you need here.

Graphics / 15 Apr 2011

Bringing Photoshop Comps to Life With Fireworks

Photoshop or Fireworks? It’s the question that has thrown all kinds of designers and developers into a heated debate. Today we’ll use both applications to create a simple web graphic.

This tutorial is aimed at all those designers who would never dream of giving up Photoshop and know almost nothing about Fireworks. I’ll show you how to take your Photoshop graphics and add in some interactive features via Fireworks.

CSS / 14 Apr 2011

3 New Tools for Creating Website Mockups on the Fly

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.

Business / 13 Apr 2011

4 Social Media Myths Every Small Business Owner Should Know

Your company can’t survive in this new digital age without social media. It’s a revolution that will change the way you do business for the better and triple your customer base in months.

Sound familiar? Today we’ll take a look at what greedy Internet marketing companies want you to believe about social media and how it compares with reality. Before you spend money on an expensive campaign, you’ll want to read this.

Freebies / 12 Apr 2011

Weekly Freebies: 30 Vintage Victorian Design Resources

Victorian is a term that loosely refers to the time of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901. For today’s purposes, it refers to an awesome collection of resources focused around floral patterns, ornate illustrations and even some items from that period, all of which will be perfect for your next grungy design project!

Inspiration / 12 Apr 2011

Trends of Blue in Icon Graphics and Web Design

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.

CSS / 8 Apr 2011

6 Useful CSS Button Recipes You Can Copy & Paste

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.

Graphics / 7 Apr 2011

A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Masking in Photoshop

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.