Browse hundreds of articles, tips, and inspiring design collections. Find helpful design advice, or the perfect resource for your next project.
Today we’re going to venture far outside of the designer’s typical learning bubble. We’ll leave Photoshop behind and pick up the tools of a marketing executive studying consumer behavior.
This article will teach you two distinct approaches to impacting your target audience. Knowing these terms and theories will not only help you become a more effective designer, they’ll also make you look super smart at work!
Freebies are awesome, and design blogs are full of them, but sometimes you need a professional tool to handle professional tasks. There are a wealth of extremely powerful and high quality photoshop tools that can dramatically improve your workflow and are worth every penny you have to spend to get them.
Today we’ll look at a number of the best tools available for making color adjustments, adjusting focus, enlarging images, transforming layers in 3D, reducing noise, creating textures, applying complex masks, and even taking that PSD into full-blown HTML.
The web is full of free texture resources. Unfortunately, we’ve all used them before and hate all the inherent restrictions that come as a result of using borrowed art. For your next project, why not just use textures that you make yourself from scratch? You skip the restrictions and the end product is much more unique because you’re not using the same resources used by everyone else.
Today we’re going to get you started by teaching you how to use a couple of basic Photoshop filters to create five completely different textures. Each texture should only take you anywhere from one to three minutes to bust out and can therefore be quickly applied without eating up your crucial design time. Let’s get started!
It’s been over a year since we took a look at Smashing Magazine’s very first publication, and the web industry has come a long way in twelve months. Today, we’re going to offering our thoughts on The Smashing Book #2, hailed as “sharing valuable practical insight into design, usability and coding”.
With a great range of contributors and big steps forward in shipping and physical design, let’s see how Smashing Magazine’s latest release stacks up!
It’s the dream isn’t it? A completely free website! No paying greedy designers, no web hosting free, no purchasing of a domain; just a pure and simple free presence on the web.
The world of free websites has come a long way in recent years, there are some truly viable options that just might suit your needs. However, there’s always a catch! Below you’ll find out which services have restrictions that you can live with and which you might want to avoid.
Restaurant websites are quite frequently disasters of both design and usability. Even good designers can go very wrong on this particularly tricky task.
Before you attempt your next restaurant website design, check out this article. We’ll go over some super practical tips for success in addition to a few pitfalls to avoid.
The Wireframe Toolkit for Keynote allows just about anyone with a basic grasp of how to use presentation software to rapidly build user interface mockups for iOS and the web. If you don’t have Keynote, don’t worry, there’s a Powerpoint version included as well!
Today we’re going to give you super quick run through of how to use the Wireframe Toolkit for Keynote to build a basic web app layout. If you can copy and paste, you can do this!
Etsy is a community that fascinates me. Thinking it was limited to scrapbooks and crafts I paid little attention to the site for years, but recently I discovered that there’s a lot more to this group than meets the eye. It turns out there are several very talented designers on Etsy making a decent amount of cash selling stock designs.
Today we’re going to take a closer look at some of the successful sellers of graphic design templates on Etsy to see if we can glean any trends and tips from them.
So you’ve finally graduated and you’re ready to hit the bricks and start looking for your first real 9-5 design job. You searched some job postings and lined up a few interviews, what now? How can you impress potential employers fresh out of school?
In this article we’ll go over some of the dos and don’ts of preparing for design job interviews. You’ll learn what employers are looking for in a portfolio, resume and candidate so you can be better suited to land that dream job.
Abstract watercolors are useful when you need a background that really draws interest from the viewer. No two are exactly alike and all of them are fascinating to behold.
Today we’ve rounded up a great collection of abstract watercolor textures and texture packs for you to use in your designs. Collectively you’ll be able to grab over 60 awesome textures from this post!
I have a dirty little secret, I hate slicing Photoshop files. By that I don’t mean that I hate turning PSD comps into websites, I mean that I hate Photoshop’s slicing tools. The whole process makes my PSD look busy, cluttered and overly complicated so I usually skip it altogether and instead opt to manually crop and save out images individually as needed.
In order to fight this tendency and attempt to see the true usefulness of Photoshop’s slicing tools, I embarked on a mission to learn all the intricacies of how slicing works. Below is a collection of tips and tricks that resulted from this journey. Hopefully, you’ll learn a thing or two you never knew!
On a technical level, the term “bokeh” refers to the aesthetic quality of the blur in a photograph. Photos and even lenses are often judged by this factor and points of light in the distance are one of the most commonly seen tests and experiments in this area.
The images that result from these experimentations are quite beautiful and have really captured the attention of designers in recent years. Today we’ve rounded up thirty of our favorite free bokeh textures for you to use in your designs. Enjoy!