Articles - Page 217

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

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.

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.

Freebies / 10 Jun 2011

Weekly Freebies: 25 Beautiful Stone Textures

Happy Friday everyone! Before you blast out of the office and declare your freedom for the next couple of days, take a gander at these awesome stone textures to add to your arsenal of design resources.

All of the textures below are completely free and licensed under creative commons. They have also been approved for commercial use so you can use them in pretty much any project you want! How sweet is that? Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Business / 9 Jun 2011

Outsourcing Your Own Brand: Pros and Cons

Should designers outsource their own website or personal brand? It may sound crazy but the practice is more common that you might think.

Today we’re going to attempt to look at both sides of this issue and explore the good and the bad of letting another designer define your digital identity.

CSS / 8 Jun 2011

3 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples: Coded

Recently on Design Shack we featured an article titled “10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples“, which broke down some common layouts into simple silhouette wireframes so you could easily apply them in your work.

Today I’ve chosen three of these layouts and converted them to live, responsive web pages with some HTML and CSS. They’re all super simple and easy enough for many beginners to take on, plus we’ll be using an awesome framework to do the heavy lifting.

CSS / 3 Jun 2011

Mastering CSS Reflections in Webkit

The box-reflect property is just one of many awesome new CSS3 effects that Webkit brings to the table. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest to use. There’s a lot of syntax that can be confusing and today we’re going to sift through it and explain it in detail so you can get the hang of it.

It’s important to note that, at this point, box-reflect is only supported by Webkit browsers. It’s a superfluous visual effect so you can use it as long as you accept that it’s not going to render in anything but Chrome and Safari.