Articles - Page 226

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

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.

Graphics / 6 Apr 2011

Print Design Tips for Web Designers

I started my career in print almost a decade ago and gradually moved over to the web. This whole new medium brought several creative and technical hurdles that I had to learn to deal with and even embrace.

Today’s article is for a new generation of designers making the opposite jump. You’ve been designing for the digital world for some time and are ready to learn print design. We’ll help ease the transition with some dead simple and practical advice.

Freebies / 6 Apr 2011

Weekly Freebies: 350+ Human Vector Silhouettes

This week’s set of freebies contains 15 of our favorite sets of free human vector silhouettes. Because they’re vector, you can of course use them on something as small as a web graphic or as large as a billboard.

No matter what your project is, if you need a human silhouette, the 350 below should get you off to an awesome start!