Browse hundreds of articles, tips, and inspiring design collections. Find helpful design advice, or the perfect resource for your next project.
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.
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.
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.
There are a huge number of different tools for email campaigns available; Emma, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp to name a few. Today I’ll be looking at a longstanding piece of email marketing software with a whole range of tools, Omnistar Mailer. It differs from other software in that it is hosted locally on your server.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just thought I’d take a moment to mention a new designer forum which launched recently. Design Forums has had a really successful first month, with over 180 members and some 1500 posts. I’m not generally a huge forum fan, preferring to frequent design sites and blogs which have better ‘crafted’ content and articles. That said, I’ve read a few very well thought out posts with some excellent discussion over the past month.
It’s a UK based site, which means that it may not be perfectly suited to US readers (though to be perfectly honest, most of the content is very general).
Take a look and do let me know your thoughts. Are there any other design forums which you frequent regularly?
Our partner site, 13 Styles has just released a new CSS menu called “Simple Hover“. It is, as the name suggests, a simple affair, with a link description appearing when hovered over.
The menu is completely free to download, use and customize, contains no images (it’s all CSS) and should work in any browser or operating system you use.
Please let me know if you find any problems or would like to contribute a menu in the future.