Browse hundreds of articles, tips, and inspiring design collections. Find helpful design advice, or the perfect resource for your next project.
Designing a baby-centric site isn’t an easy task, especially for people like myself who usually favor masculine themes, colors and textures in their designs. Today we’ll tackle this task head on by creating a fun and unique baby announcement site that’s far from typical.
Feel free to follow along and be sure to download the PSD so you can have a look around or even use it in your own site.
Website template designs are very popular among modern web developers. Working within a template design can save boatloads of time when under the deadline crunch. Not only this but most source code is created within HTML5/CSS standards and allows for simple customizations.
There are a few techniques which can be utilized to develop the best templates. Designers and developers alike frequently create templates and offer them for free download to the community. Color theory, grid design, layout structure, and content development all play key roles in the creation process. Check out some of the tips below and see how you could integrate these ideas into your work.
Slab serif fonts are quite stylish and attractive and are versatile enough to be used in many different contexts. They’re also currently very popular among web designers everywhere.
If you’ve been wondering where other designers are snagging these great slab serifs, look no further than the collection of twelve free fonts below.
Direct marketing is all about connecting with customers in a real way. To accomplish this effectively, you often have to come up with some crazy unique and inventive ideas. The next time you’re in a meeting where people are ideating about direct marketing ideas, use these as inspiration to wow the group!
All of the examples below are from Ads Of the World, an excellent online source for all kinds of real and conceptual advertising and marketing examples. This is a truly invaluable inspirational resource for anyone involved with printed marketing deisgn.
Freelancing is an interesting profession. The flow of work is referred to by many as “feast and famine,” meaning that you can generally expect periods of complete overload followed by extended periods of little to no work at all.
With much of the world still attempting to rally from a global economic crisis, many freelancers have taken a serious hit or have even been forced to give up their ventures altogether. Today we’ll go over a few ideas for opening up your horizons and finding sources of income outside of web design.
Earlier this year, we put out an article outlining 5 Reasons Band Websites Suck. Today we’re going to follow up that post by creating a band web page design that steers clear of the problems encountered by most sites in this category.
We’ll create the mockup in Photoshop and learn about a few features as well as some solid design theory along the way. Let’s get started!
Working in freelance web design is like nothing else in the world. You are able to set your own hours, spend all day working to create beautiful designs and can even practice some of your skills. From the outside this seems like the artist’s dream job, though there are a few downfalls.
The largest is, quite blatantly, lack of drive and interest in work. Over time you can become burnt out from so much design work and lose focus on projects. I’ve gone over a few productivity tips below which will help novice and professional alike.
After graduating from college, how you present yourself to the job market can have a huge impact on your future career. If you’re sending potential employers to a portfolio website, you want to make doubly sure that you’re putting your best foot forward.
Today we’ll be looking at a real portfolio site and trying to see how we can improve upon not so much the design but the strategy in place to leverage the resource. You can use these lessons to analyze your own portfolio site and gauge whether or not you need to make any changes.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I’m off stuffing my face with copious amounts of poultry and mashed potatoes but I planned ahead so that you don’t have to miss out on your daily dose of Design Shack!
If you’re like me, the holidays drastically cut in to your work time. You don’t get the luxury of having less to do, only less time to do it! If this sounds like you, check out the 20 amazing tools below to help maximize your time. Dedicating yourself to using just a few of these will boost your productivity levels to an all-time high.
Adobe recently launched a project called Rome that is meant to be a sort of all-in-one content publishing platform. You can use this innovative application to build websites, print projects, interactive PDFs and more.
Today I’ll give you a super basic beginner’s introduction to Rome so you can see what it is, how to use it and whether or not it’s right for you.
Web designers come at a dime a dozen. These days businesses are not hiring professional designers to create work anymore. Instead most of our progress has shifted overseas where outsourcing web design and coding is common place.
This shows how much industry name really means. The conversion into a well-known and respected designer takes time and a lot of hard work. There are some great networks out there for connecting with designers and once you understand how to utilize their power almost anything is possible!
Today we’re going to examine a real-world issue that frequently faces designers. Updating and old design can be a daunting task, whether it’s your own or someone else’s. Once you see a design presented in a certain way, it’s hard to break out of that mental box, even if you don’t like the original.
The article below will tackle a number of touch issues for designers. We’ll be dealing with outdated graphics, readability on a dark background, information overload, working with textures and more. Keep reading to see how we tackle these problems.