Articles - Page 239

Graphics / 13 Jan 2011

Designing a Church Homepage Without the Clutter

Church home pages tend to suffer from many of the same problems that we recently saw with band websites. There’s so much content that gets thrown onto these pages and it all competes for attention to such a degree that most or all of it loses any intended visual significance.

Today we’ll learn how to battle that by designing a dramatically simple and attractive church homepage that still has plenty of room for various messages, announcements and more.

JavaScript / 12 Jan 2011

Easily Create a Full Screen Photography Slideshow Website Without Flash

Photography websites nearly always run on Flash. Adobe’s increasingly notorious technology simply does an excellent job of displaying imagery in a dynamic way that’s perfect for photography showcases. However, there are a few downsides.

First, it’s not always easy to find a quality, free slideshow template to start from, and if you’re not a Flash developer, this could lead to significant costs. Secondly, the world is in quite the love/hate relationship with Flash at the moment, with many developers switching to JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5 where possible.

So today we’re going to build a beautiful, Javascript-powered photography site with a full-screen slideshow. Literally all of the heavy lifting will be done by an awesome free jQuery resource so our job will be mostly customization. Let’s get started!

JavaScript / 11 Jan 2011

Weekly Freebies: 10 Brilliant jQuery Plugins

This week’s collection of awesome free resources includes some of our favorite jQuery plugins. Utilizing these in your site designs can save you loads of time in development and will help ensure that both your code and design is top-notch.

There are a few random plugins for tooltips and Twitter widgets but most of the resources you’ll find below help with image presentation. Whether you want a 3D carousel or a fullscreen slideshow, there’s something here for you!

Critique / 8 Jan 2011

Web Design Critique #33: Trade & Lateral Development

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 Trade & Lateral Development, an email marketing firm.

Business / 7 Jan 2011

How Much Money Do Designers Make?

Design isn’t about money, it’s about something higher. It’s about loving what you do, making the world more attractive and satisfying your never-ending need for intellectual stimulation. Good designers don’t see design as a job, but a lifestyle. We think about design constantly while looking at the things around us, our hobbies are design-centric, we read and write about design; on and on.

Who needs money when you have a passion like this? Me, that’s who. Don’t get me wrong, lots of that mumbo jumbo above describes me pretty accurately. But let’s face it folks, we all have mortgages, bills, student loans and other factors that ensure our need for green stays intact. Today we’re going to have some fun and see how much money we should be making!

Graphics / 5 Jan 2011

Illustrator Typography: Using the Appearance Palette

Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic app for creating complex vector typographical arrangements. The application is so big and complicated though that it can take years to figure out how to recreate some of the cool effects that you’ve seen elsewhere without coming up with complicated workarounds.

Today we’ll remove some of the mystery of working with strokes and fills by diving into the appearance palette to see not only how it works, but how to manipulate the items within to create some really cool effects.

Graphics / 4 Jan 2011

Designing Web Interfaces Scaled for Touchscreens

Gone are the days of convoluted javascript notation and countless plugins includes in your header. Layout design has taken a large step forward as we’re seeing designers creating some extravagant concepts. Touch screen devices currently hold the highest interest from a designer’s and developer’s point of view.

More people are using touchscreen enabled devices now than ever before. This includes tablet PCs and the entire list of mobile phone operating systems. These devices are all mobile and allow for access from most any remote location.

Graphics / 3 Jan 2011

Weekly Freebies: 10 Great Grunge Paper Textures

You can simply never have too many grungy paper backgrounds at your disposal. Unfortunately, many roundups shoot for quantity over quality in this area so it can be difficult to track down real, usable resources. We sifted through tons of paper textures to bring you ten of the best we could find.

All textures are sourced from Flickr Creative Commons and Lost and Taken. They’re all very large and ready to use. About half require simple attribution in the form of a link while the rest are usable with no restrictions. Enjoy!

HTML / 28 Dec 2010

Deeper Study Into the WWW’s Document Object Model

The Document Object Model is a fundamental part of the World Wide Web. DOM for short, this is a set of API standards which define how a browser should construct a web document and how developers are able to manipulate objects.

We’ll be looking a bit further into how the DOM really works. The model has been around for years and currently resides at DOM level 3 (DOM3 documentation here). There is a DOM4 currently in editor’s draft with some brand new specs coming soon. For now we can focus on a brief understanding of how the object model came into being.

Business / 23 Dec 2010

Design Discussion: Brand Advertising vs. Promotional Marketing

Design is not merely the act of creating attractive things for people to look at, that’s art. Instead, every project you work on as a designer has its own set of goals for what it should accomplish. The visuals you create are meant to help lead people in a specific direction.

Below we’ll take a look at two common goals that are pursued in advertising design. First we’ll go over the similarities and differences between brand advertising and promotional marketing, then discuss how these implications apply to your design work, regardless of what field you’re in.

Graphics / 20 Dec 2010

The Totally Made Up Design Awards for Design Blogs

Once upon a time, designers discovered blogging. This changed everything for many long-time designers like me who now pretend to be writers for a living. The rapid explosion of the design blog industry has brought about an unending flow of articles that essentially use 1,200 words to tell you how you should do your job. The question we’ll answer today is, which blogs actually take their own advice?

To highlight those blogs that feature the best design, we’ll be handing out very prestigious awards in several categories that I made up on the spot. All awards are based solely on visual appeal and give no consideration whatsoever to the actual quality of the blog content. Winners can claim their trophies at any trophy store for a small fee. Let’s get started!

Software / 16 Dec 2010

10 Fresh Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces (And What We Can Learn From Them)

Interface design is a valuable skill to possess. Every decision you make, be it something as major as a color scheme or as minor as a stroke width, can potentially have a huge impact on whether or not people decide to use the application, website, etc. We designers know this better than anyone because we tend to be interface snobs, meaning we flat out refuse to use an app with poor design, even if the functionality is stellar.

The next time you’re faced with the task of designing an interface, why not learn from those who have already succeeded? Below we’ll take a look at the interfaces of ten beautiful and fairly new Mac applications and discuss what went right.