Articles - Page 225

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

Inspiration / 8 Jul 2011

10 Unbeatable Premium Memberships and Courses for Professional Design Training

As a professional designer, it’s absolutely crucial for you to stay up to date with your skill set. With web design moving along at a rate so fast that even the best quickly fall behind, it’s helpful to have a solid lifeline to quality educational resources.

Today we’re going to look at ten awesome premium design memberships and sources for training courses that will help you learn a plethora of new skills and help you stay current on the topics that you’re already versed in.

CSS / 7 Jul 2011

Helpful Tips & Tools for Web Design Experiments

Today’s article encourages you to get into the habit of devoting time to little experiments. Testing ideas and solving problems in a low-pressure and possibly even fun environment can massively boost your education and lead to awesome innovation.

We’ll start with some benefits and tips for experimenting with web development projects and finish up with a brief look at a few of the tools that I personally use to compose my own experiments. Let’s get started!

CSS / 6 Jul 2011

Rolling Your Own Grid Layouts on the Fly Without a Framework

Do you hate CSS grid frameworks but love the rapid layout benefits that they provide? Do you struggle with the math and code necessary to create your own flexible multi-column layouts on the fly?

Today we’re going to walk you through creating your own basic, reusable system for creating multiple columns that you can implement anywhere any time with only a few lines of code. No bloated code or non-sematic class names required!

CSS / 5 Jul 2011

3 Must-Learn CSS Techniques for Perfect Web Typography

This article presents an extremely useful set of tips and best practices for those who are still fairly new to working with typography on the web.

We’ll go over the most popular methods for embedding web fonts, sizing fonts and setting a solid line-height.

Business / 4 Jul 2011

Webmaster Quick Tips: Optimizing Your Website for Search Results

The process to set up and launch a full scale website requires a lot of hard work and dedication. It’s not an easy task to build up new templates and reform them every so often. However, as webmasters it is our responsibility to market and promote each of our launches and give each website a proper branding experience.

Today we’ll go over some extremely helpful search optimization techniques which have been passed down from web designers across the globe.

Critique / 2 Jul 2011

Web Design Critique #57: Okay Geek

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.

Today’s site is Okay Geek, an awesome gadget and tech blog.

Freebies / 1 Jul 2011

Weekly Freebies: 3 Exclusive High-Res Wooden Textures

Rather than bring you a roundup of textures from other sources, this week we decided to do something a little different and build three custom wooden textures exclusively for our readers.

Keep reading to get a peek at these great free textures, which you can download and use in all of your projects completely attribution free!

Business / 1 Jul 2011

Google Hangouts: Thoughts on Concept vs. Functionality

Today’s discussion topic was sparked by the launch of the new Google+ experiment, specifically Google Hangouts, which represent a new twist on video conferencing.

There’s an important lesson here about how you can take a product with not-so-revolutionary functionality and present it in such a way that it is instantly more useful to potential users.

CSS / 30 Jun 2011

Build a Web Page With CSS3 Flexbox

Yesterday we discussed the future of CSS layout and a few of the new modules that CSS3 brings to the table in this arena. One of these that we briefly touched on was CSS3 Flexbox.

Today we’re going to dig deeper into this model and build a full-on web page with it. It will by no means be ready to implement on your projects but it will give you further insight into one possible way that we will be coding websites in years to come. Plus, this stuff is just flat out fun to play with!

CSS / 29 Jun 2011

Farewell Floats: The Future of CSS Layout

Floats are one of the most basic tools for structuring a web page using CSS. They’re both one of the very first things that we learn about and one of the last things that we truly master.

Today’s article looks at some of the reasons that floats are pretty lame and takes a look at a number of alternative layout systems, some of which are still under development but may one day represent the standard for CSS-based layout.

Graphics / 27 Jun 2011

Standard Trends in New-Age Minimalist Logo Designs

Graphic designers have evolved an amazing trade. With so much information readily available it’s possible for high school students and even younger artists to buckle down and study the digital arts. From this we’ve seen a massive collection of astounding logos and trends in recent years.

More commonly it has become popular to portray minimalist trends in logos by slimming down content. These include solid-color backgrounds, basic text effects, vector shapes, and low-res icons. Pixel designs have also become popular amongst the techie crowd.

Below I’ve examined some of the new-age trends emerging with logo design. Hopefully these ideas can inspire a new generation of designers to pick up the trade. Most of these effects can be recreated in Adobe Photoshop, or Illustrator if you’re more comfortable. Spend some time browsing logo galleries for more in-depth inspiration.