Articles - Page 234

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

Articles / 17 Apr 2009

Defend Your Design

We all know that acute rush of adrenaline experienced before submitting a design for review or approval all too well. You click down on that “Send” button, take a deep breath and look at the design one more time before releasing your mouse. It’s gone.

You’ve sent your design out into a cruel, critical world. Will it succeed or will it fail? Perhaps that depends less on the design itself and more on whether or not you’ve set it up to succeed. As designers, we need to be advocates for the craft by explaining what we do and educating clients on our method.

Articles / 18 Mar 2009

Creating a Shaking Login Form

Tired of the plain old boring login forms? How about we add some jazz! If you have ever typed in your password wrongly on your Mac, you would have seen that the login screen will vibrate and kinda shriek to indicate that the password you entered is wrong. I always found that rather cool! It’s surprising how little this trick is being used in web applications today. So, I thought I will write up a tutorial on how to get this going.

Business / 11 Mar 2009

Good Design, Now What?

Here at Design Shack, we’ve built up a solid archive of the best designs the web has to offer. When browsing through the 3,000+ sites featured, it’s hard to fully grasp the amount of time and effort put into the design and development of each one.

That’s why it breaks my heart when I see a brilliant site screenshot taken the day it was launched, but when clicking to visit the live version, I find a shell of what it used to be.

CSS / 26 Feb 2009

Correctly Displaying Your Logo With CSS

Every site has a logo, and whether it’s a page filling feature or a small design element, it often forms the primary title feature of your page. This article will show you how to implement a logo using correct semantic markup and simple HTML code, with all the presentation done via CSS.

It’ll ensure that those browsing your site without images will see a decent alternative, and provide search engines with a correct representation of your page title.

PHP / 9 Feb 2009

Smart File Type Detection Using PHP

In most web applications today, there is a need to allow users to upload images, audio and video files. Sometimes, we also need to restrict certain types of files from being uploaded – an executable file being an obvious example.

Security aside, one might also want to prevent users from misusing the upload facility, e.g. uploading copyrighted music files illegally and using the service to promote piracy! In this article, we’ll look into a few ways in which we can achieve this.

Articles / 19 Jan 2009

Barack Obama Letterpress Poster

I’m excited to announce that Kishore – a regular contributor to Design Shack – has today released a Barack Obama letterpress poster to celebrate his inauguration. Inspired by Cameron Moll’s beautiful letterpress design, these 14” by 20” posters are a product of hours of (fun) labour, letterpressed using one of the very few platen letterpress machines still left in Chennai, India.

The poster itself consists of characters from MrsEaves, Bickam Script Pro, Adobe Garamond and the Trajan font families. Instead of using a random set of characters in the artwork, Kishore decided to embed something meaningful; important figures, dates, milestones, words and phrases associated with President Obama.

Articles / 12 Jan 2009

Best of 2008 – JavaScript

In the last part of our summary series, it is time to see some of the JavaScript Goodies of 2008. Some of the following are resources, some are useful tutorials, some opinions and others just plain fun interesting stuff.

There is always a lesson or two to take away from these, and it could help you enter the New Year with a variety of new skills in your portfolio.

Articles / 22 Dec 2008

Best of 2008 – Typography

Typography is beginning to come to the fore as one of the most crucial elements of web design as people start to understand its importance. There’s no doubt that if you perfect the size, style and position of type on your page, the rest of the design will flow much easier.

In part one of our 2008 roundup, we saw some of the most useful graphic design tutorials of the year. This second section will walk you through a selection of the best typography related resources and articles of 2008 – tutorials, downloads, fonts, and everything you need to perfect the use of type in your design.

Articles / 16 Dec 2008

Best of 2008 – Graphic Design Tutorials

As we arrive at the last month of yet another year, it’s time we revise and reflect on all the goodies this year had to offer. At the same time  it’s great to practice the tips and lessons learnt for the years to come!  We have brought together a series of what we feel are some of the best tutorials of 2008 from around the web.

We’re starting off with the most useful graphic design tutorials of the past year. In no particular order, read on to see 33 that have stood out in particular.

Graphics / 8 Dec 2008

Creating Fading Site Dividers

You might have seen these fading dividers/separators on various sites, which seem to fade both horizontally and vertically. Here is an example of what I mean:

They provide a great way to split content up, doing so in a subtle and non-intrusive manner. I would like to share a simple way to create these fading dividers using Photoshop.

JavaScript / 2 Dec 2008

Pirobox jQuery Lightbox

Lightbox scripts have become a very popular way of displaying images online in recent months. There are a huge number of them available, using a variety of different frameworks and languages.

I’m pleased to announce that today, in partnership with Pirolab, there’s a new jQuery lightbox script available. It has been designed and created by Diego Valobra. If you’d like to read more about the features and download the lightbox script, click through to read on.