The world is a widely varied place and it’s naive to imagine that a design that resonates well with one group of people will be equally effective with another group on the other side of the globe.
Today we’ll show you how to wield Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions to better tailor your designs to different cultures through a basic understanding of the values that they tend to pursue.
Tour pages are one of the most important components for websites advertising apps and/or services. The tour page is often where interested users will either make the firm decision to sign up or move on to something else.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of pressure as a designer to get this right! Fear not however, many talented designers have gone before you and we can learn a lot by looking at their examples. We’ll dive into tour pages from giants like Mozilla, 37Signals and Mint.com and see what common tricks they all use to win conversions.
Great design inspiration is all around us. Sometimes the best examples are so common that we see them all the time without a second thought. The cars we drive, the advertisements in our mailbox, the cover art on that new album you just downloaded, all of these are teaching their own little design lessons and if we would but listen, we just might learn something.
Today’s subject is playing cards. At least one pack can be found in almost every home in America, which means they’re a perfect example of ubiquitous design that we take for granted. We’ll take a fresh look at why they’re so perfectly designed and learn a little history along the way.
Infographics have been around for ages but in recent years they’ve really come into the spotlight as an almost irresistible way to communicate complex scenarios and information. We can’t help it, when we see a link for an infographic, we almost have to check it out!
If you’re at all interested in infographic design, read along as we take a look at some of our favorite examples and discuss some important do’s and don’ts for creating compelling and effective graphics.
Photography is one of your most powerful resources as a designer. Here we’ll take a look at some clever and unique ways to create photo-centric designs using multiple images.
Does learning the requisite software make you a designer? Just because you know CSS and HTML, can you really call yourself a web designer?
Today we’re going to explore the idea that, while you may be a Photoshop wizard, you might lack in fundamental design training that could drastically help you in your every day career.
Today we have a small collection of completely random but very useful design tricks that you should keep in the back of your mind the next time you need a new idea.
We’ll be showing you how to slice up some text in Illustrator to give it an edgy feel and how to build a metal slider and a curled sticker in Photoshop.
Do you have a friend, family member or colleague who is considering design as a profession and looks to you for guidance? Your instruction could mean the difference between a meaningful career and a non-starter.
Today we’ll offer up some basic advice that everyone should consider before attempting to teach someone to be a graphic designer.
Today we’re going to introduce you to a popular model used in marketing to understand consumer behavior. We’ll then discuss how you as a designer can use this model to structure your designs to encourage action from users.
By becoming more equipped to analyze your visitors, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about how to design more persuasive websites.
Responsive web design is one of the hottest topics among designers and developers right now. If you’re not quite sure what it’s all about, we’ll walk you through what it is, how it works and how CSS media queries are something you need to start incorporating into your own designs.
To top it all off, we’ll finish with twenty seriously impressive of responsive designs that use media queries to present experiences specifically catered to different visitors.
Always eager to jump into a debate, today I tackle the concept that artsy eye candy is currently too prevalent in design. Design inspiration galleries and communities are constantly critiqued for displaying art when their focus should be on design.
Can we cut through the biases and assumptions of the common rhetoric and discover the proper place for artistic talent in relation to functional design? Let’s find out.
This week has been all about branding and package design. We’ve gone over some tips for creating effective packaging and taken an in-depth view of the branding histories of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to see what we could learn about the power of a good brand.
Today we’ll finish off the week with a roundup of awesome packaging concepts from Behance and Packaging of the World.