Articles

Typography / 5 Mar 2018

Serif, Sans, Script & Slab: 4 Font Types Explained

Always wanted to know the difference between serif, sans, script, and slab fonts? Look no further. Take your typography game to the next level, and quit guessing if certain typefaces or font pairs work together. Back your logic with a little design theory!

Having a better knowledge of fonts and typography can make explaining your choices to clients easier (always a bonus), and will give you more confidence when selecting font pairs. Here’s a primer (or refresher) on four common font types and how to use them in your design projects.

Reviews / 2 Mar 2018

5 Reasons to Be Counting Your Words

Almost everyone is a writer in some way. Whether you’re crafting copy for a website, working on a paper for a class, or a content marketing professional trying to develop the perfect tweet, Word Counter is a tool that can make your life easier.

A good word counter helps you stay on target with your writing without wasting time trying to guess how much you’ve written by eyeballing it on the screen (or even worse, counting words manually.)

If your writing tools don’t have built in word counters (or you want something a bit more powerful), we’ve got a helpful suggestion for you.

Inspiration / 1 Mar 2018

35+ Best Lightroom Presets of 2018

If you’re looking to supercharge your design workflow this year, updating your Lightroom presets with a new, powerful collection is a good idea! Lightroom presets let you instantly fix, improve, and enhance your photos with a single click. And we’ve found the perfect set of presets just for you.

Having the right set of Lightroom presets can be a huge time-saver for designers. Everything from retouching portrait photos, to adding stunning visual effects, enhancing interior photos, optimizing HDR photos, adding retro effects, and much more is possible with the Lightroom presets we’ve included in this list.

Business / 28 Feb 2018

6 Finance Apps for Your Freelance Business

A great set of financial apps and tools can make it easier to manage your freelance business. From tracking receipts and invoices for clients, to making sure you’re ready for tax season and have all your expenses accounted for. There are plenty of great apps to help you manage your freelance business.

Characteristics of great finance apps are that they are secure, cloud-based, include automation tools to help you work more efficiently, are affordable, come with financial accounting and reporting that you can understand and customer support when you need it. All of the apps on this list fit the bill.

Inspiration / 27 Feb 2018

100+ Beautiful Script, Brush & Calligraphy Fonts

Brush, script, and calligraphy fonts can add a touch of elegance to your design. They’re stylish, flowing, and full of character! We’ve picked some of the best examples of these typefaces to add to your collection.

Whether you’re looking for a precise and decorative script font or a bold brush typeface that needs to grab the reader’s attention, we’ll have something for you here. Each of these fonts is beautifully crafted to add character to your next design project, perfect for logos, lettering, clothing design, posters, flyers, quotes, and so much more.

CSS / 26 Feb 2018

13 Best Ways to Learn CSS Grid

CSS Grid an increasingly popular method for creating complex responsive web design layouts that render more consistently across browsers. Now is the time to familiarize yourself with CSS Grid, so we’ve collected 13 of the best ways to get started learning today.

Rather than old-school methods such as tables or the box model, CSS Grid allows you to create more asymmetrical layouts and more standardized code that is cross-browser compatible. Most major website browsers already support CSS Grid and it is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, which would formalize it as a standard practice. It’s widely believed that CSS Grid will be the future of website layouts.

Inspiration / 26 Feb 2018

80+ Modern Stationery Templates

This collection of the best modern stationery templates gives you a way to showcase your brand or identity in a realistic setting. Show off your company image, and deliver branding mockups in an authentic and professional way.

We’ve gathered a variety of stationery templates that contain a number of useful branding items — envelope designs, business cards, invoices, letterheads and many others. These beautiful templates are comprised of fully editable files, and are all available for just few dollars. Your brand will never have looked as good!

Reviews / 26 Feb 2018

Wix Code Review: Building Web Apps With Ease

One of the common problems most front-end web designers face is building the back-end of website projects. Usually, designers have to team up with web developers to work on projects such as web apps and eCommerce platforms.

What if there was a way to easily design both the front-end and back-ends of websites such as checkout systems, membership databases, web apps, and more, in a user-friendly and approachable way? Well, that’s exactly what Wix Code does. Let’s take a closer look.

Inspiration / 23 Feb 2018

30+ Best Food & Drink Menu Templates

Using a pre-made menu template can be a great starting point for your restaurant or cafe. This is our collection of the best food and drink menu templates out there, to give you some delicious inspiration!

If you’re a restaurant owner or a designer working for the food industry, it can be helpful to start with a template (rather than beginning from scratch). These menu templates are easy to customise, and can be a life saver in situations where you have to meet a tight deadline. Most of these cover a full three-course menu, along with separate wine and coffee templates. All starting from just a couple of dollars!

Graphics / 23 Feb 2018

How to Design a Professional PowerPoint Presentation

Our series of tips on presentation design outlined some generic rules and ideas that you can live by to create better, more professional presentations. Today we want to follow that up by taking you through the actual process of designing a presentation from start to finish.

We’ll break down every step of the design process, from choosing colors and images to using whitespace properly. After reading through this you should be all set to design your own beautiful presentation slides that will put your coworkers to shame.

Using a pre-built PowerPoint template can be a good starting point for many people (we collected some of the best PowerPoint templates for you!). But if you’re wanting to design your own from start-to-finish, you’re in the right place!

Inspiration / 22 Feb 2018

30+ Best Scene and Mockup Generators of 2018

It isn’t always easy to find the right mockup for your header or feature image. Using a mockup generator can help you tweak and customise a mockup to match you needs perfectly.

Mostly because high-quality stock photos and images are hard to find, and can come with hefty price tags. Even when you do find a great image, you later discover that someone else is using that exact same image on a different website. Which brings you back to square one. However, there’s a simpler solution to this problem: Scene generators!

Scene and mockup generators are bundles of elements and objects, which you can use to create your own unique header images, product mockup scenes, and custom graphics however you like. The best part is that you’ll be able to use these scene generators to create all the images you need for various projects.

We handpicked an amazing set of scene and mockup generators from Envato Elements. You can download all of these files from only $19 per month by simply subscribing to Envato Elements!

Mobile / 21 Feb 2018

5 Fun Augmented Reality Apps for Design Inspiration

Augmented reality is a growing trend in application design and development. Apple has invested in the technology with recent updates (ARKit), and plans to include even more AR features. So how do you start planning to design for augmented reality?

It starts with playing with apps already on the market to see how they work. What do you like (or dislike)? Here are five AR apps to help jumpstart your design inspiration and hopefully get you thinking about this next generation technology. (And how to make it look great and function well.)