Search Results For: effect

Graphics / 3 Feb 2011

An Introduction to Working With Spot Colors

Color has always been a popular topic on the web. We used to throw around terms like “web safe colors” a lot more than we do now simply because the computer displays back then weren’t as great as they are now. In place of these discussions, design blogs revert mostly to discussions of color theory and of course, free tools to help you build color palettes.

However, color was a hot topic long before the web was around. Once upon a time, my discussions about color revolved around printing presses and processes for applying ink. I’d wager there are plenty of readers out there who are either interested in learning about print or still work in print today so in this article I’ll teach you all about the magic of ink.

Graphics / 20 Jan 2011

Best and Worst Design: 50 University Websites From 50 States

If you hail from the U.S., which state are you from and how would you rate the level of design from the schools there? Today we’re going to jump into this topic by examining 50 website home pages, one from a university in each of the fifty states.

We’ve divided the schools up into the best and worst and didn’t pull any punches when it comes to calling out bad design practices. Let’s see how your state fared!

Graphics / 19 Jan 2011

Photoshop Reflections 101

Today we’re going to learn all about how to make convincing reflections in Photoshop. Text reflections, 3D reflections, product shot reflections, all kinds of crazy reflections. We’ll discuss everything from custom transforms to blending modes and beyond. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, you’ll probably learn a thing or two.

You might be thinking that reflections were all the rage a few years ago, but are currently losing a bit of steam, and you’d be right. However, you can still see plenty of them in practice on Apple.com and other sites. You should definitely beware of over-using them and adding to bad web 2.0 trends, but also know that once in a while they can add class to a boring item.

Business / 14 Jan 2011

Design Meets Psychology: Putting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Work

In the past, we discussed at length Why Designers Can’t Ignore Marketing. For the most part, commenters agreed with idea that designers should familiarize themselves with basic marketing principles.

Today, we’re going to put this idea into practice and discuss Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a model born in humanistic psychology and adopted by many marketing professionals as a way to understand consumer behavior. We’ll go over what the model is, how popular companies like Coco-Cola put it into practice and why any of this is relevant to you as a designer.

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.

JavaScript / 5 Nov 2010

Effortless Full Screen Background Images With jQuery

Today we’re going to build a simple and fun webpage for the sole purpose of showing off Fullscreenr, a great little jQuery plugin that makes it easy to add a background image to your site that automatically adjusts to the window size.

We’ll also throw in some @font-face and rgba action to keep things modern and educational on the rest of the build. Let’s get started!

Graphics / 4 Nov 2010

10 Design Lessons From HTML Email Templates That Actually Sell

In the past we and several other blogs have outlined some useful technical information for how to code and structure your HTML emails from a developer point of view. But much less discussion has been given to how to actually undertake the design component of email newsletters.

Today we’ll take a look at some of the top-selling email templates from Themeforest and see if we can decipher what their designers did right so you can mimic these basic principles in your own designs.

Graphics / 27 Oct 2010

Photoshop Blending Modes: Beginner’s Tips and Tricks

Photoshop’s blending modes are a source of constant confusion for many designers. There aren’t really any sort of built-in examples for you to see and the blending mode names are no where near intuitive suggestions of what the effect actually does to the appearance of your document.

Today we’ll help remove a little of the mystery by discussing how a few key blending modes work in addition to some hints for how to use them effectively.

HTML / 22 Oct 2010

How to Build a Website With Flux 3: A Coder’s WYSIWYG

Flux is a WYSIWYG website editor for Macs. Now, before you curse under your breath about how much you hate WYSIWYGs, you should know that Flux is different and is both powerful and flexible enough to be used by professional web developers.

Today I’ll introduce you to Flux by creating a super simple web page from scratch (no annoyingly rigid templates). Along the way we’ll see what a typical workflow looks like and why it just might be the best visual web editor I’ve ever used.

Layouts / 15 Oct 2010

Create a Stunning Wooden Website Template in Photoshop

Today we’re going to build an awesome website template in Photoshop utilizing a number of advanced techniques.

I’ll take you through the entire process in ten easy steps and provide you with a link to download the finished template. Let’s begin!

Graphics / 14 Oct 2010

5 Super Easy Illustrator Typography Tricks

Beautiful typography goes much further than finding the right font.

Today’s post will help you break out of the nasty habit of simply typing out a headline and calling it a day by showing you how to craft standard text in Illustrator into something more interesting and unique.

Below you’ll find a fairly random collection of tricks that I’ve picked up in the last few years. Each method is highly open to interpretation and you should definitely try to tweak and customize them to your own preferences.

Graphics / 7 Oct 2010

Designing With Strong Simple Focal Points

In design, we tend to think of simplicity in terms of recent trends towards minimalism. A simple design by this definition is one with lots of literal whitespace and very little on the page outside of what is absolutely necessary.

However, instead of blindly following this trend, it’s important to understand the ideas behind it so that we don’t find ourselves trapped in a minimalist box with obvious grid-based layouts, white backgrounds and newspaper-style typography (not that this is bad, it’s just not good to be stuck in this idea). When you consider the principles of design that are at work in minimalism, you can successfully break out of the box and create clean designs that aren’t bound by an obvious and strict visual style.