Articles - Page 222

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

Freebies / 9 Sep 2011

Weekly Freebies: 50 Fantastic Fall Textures

September is here, which means (for some parts of the world) jackets, falling leaves, football and maybe even some hot cocoa. It’s my absolute favorite time of year, but sadly I live in a dry, hot desert so I don’t really get to experience it properly!

Whether you’re in the midst of autumn or just wishing you were, take a look at these fantastic fall textures from some really gifted photographers. Each image is licensed for commercial use with attribution so feel free to grab them for your next project!

Inspiration / 8 Sep 2011

30 Useful and Hilarious Lorem Ipsum Generators

Lorem ipsum represents a long-held tradition for designers, typographers and the like. Some people hate it and argue for its demise, but others ignore the hate as they create awesome tools to help create filler text for everyone from bacon lovers to Charlie Sheen fans.

Today we’re going to briefly discuss why lorem ipsum and its brethren still have legitimate uses and then we’ll have some fun as we check out thirty great dummy content generators that you’ll definitely want to bookmark.

Software / 7 Sep 2011

8 Ways to Get the Selection You Want in Photoshop

Mastering different forms of selection creation is one of the fundamental aspects of becoming a Photoshop professional. If you don’t know half a dozen techniques or more to create a usable selection, your toolbox of skills is unnecessarily limited.

Today we’re going to take a quick look at eight popular methods for creating selections in Photoshop and where each is the most applicable.

Typography / 6 Sep 2011

Script Tips: 50 Examples of Script Headlines and Logos

Today we’re going to talk about script fonts. We’ll examine how they’re commonly used on the web, offer up some tips for incorporating them into your own designs and see fifty sites that use scripts in a big way.

We’ll also take a close look at one of the most commonly used scripts on the web today, can you guess what it is?

Graphics / 5 Sep 2011

An Easy Design Trick: Using a Photo’s Natural Lines

Today we’re going to explore a super easy design trick for combining text and photos in interesting ways. I’ll teach you four methods for using the directionality of a photograph to determine a corresponding design layout.

This one will be fun and is sure to challenge the way you think about images in your designs so sit back and come along for the ride!

JavaScript / 2 Sep 2011

Code a Web Magazine Style Dropdown Navigation Menu

Frontend web development has grown into a very popular niche. With the expansion of jQuery more web designers are beginning to create fantastic animations and page effects. The possibilities are limitless!

In this tutorial we’ll be creating a magazine-style drop down nav menu. This will be created with some fancy CSS3 techniques to work in standards-compliant browsers. Even if you are shaky with jQuery you should be able to keep up with this little bit of code, and possibly learn something new. Check out the live demo script in my example.

Freebies / 2 Sep 2011

Weekly Freebies: 30 Terrific Typographical Textures

This week’s collection of freebies is an awesome selection of photographic textures featuring typography. Some depict old grungy type, others are faded and handwritten, all will prove extremely useful the next time you need a good texture.

Let’s jump in and look at these amazing resources!

Typography / 31 Aug 2011

8 Simple and Useful Tips for Kerning Type

Kerning is fun! All right, unless you’re a serious type nerd like me, that’s definitely not going to be a true statement. However, it is an absolutely essential part of your typographical education and implementation.

If you’ve been ignoring kerning or simply aren’t sure how to do it properly, take a look at these eight quick tips and get started on the road to becoming a kerning master.

Mobile / 30 Aug 2011

More Than Scaling: How to Make the Leap From Mobile to Desktop

In the last decade, much discussion time has been given to how both interfaces and user experiences translate from desktops to smaller mobile devices. Recently however, the conversation has switched and we’re now seeing trends begin in the mobile environment and make the leap back to the desktop.

This leap is deceptively simple and merits significant inspection as to the fundamental differences between mobile and desktop platforms and how that can and should affect how interfaces and experiences are crafted.

Inspiration / 29 Aug 2011

Important Marketing Lessons From Outrageous Vintage Advertisements

I absolutely love looking at old ads from the early to mid 20th century. The themes covered and claims that are made are often so completely outrageous that you wonder how they ever made it to print. Looking at these, you can’t help but marvel how far advertising has come.

How much advancement have we really made in this area though? Aren’t the advertising ploys of past generations still the same tricks used by marketers today? Follow along as we take a look at some truly ridiculous ads and how they really aren’t so different from advertising we see today.