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.
Long before web UI mockups came along, print designers would hone their ideas using a tried and true method called thumbnail sketching. This practice seems to be somewhat of a lost art so we’re going to shed some light on it!
Today we’ll briefly discuss what thumbnail sketches are, some tips for creating them and how to effectively implement them into your already busy workflow.
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.
Today we’re going to have all kinds of fun. First we’ll build an animated menu using some shiny new CSS3 while learning how to implement pseudo selectors in a practical way on a real project. Then we’ll follow that up with how to build the same thing without pseudo selectors for better browser support. Finally, we’ll end with a look at how to scrap all that fancy CSS in favor of some good old fashioned jQuery.
Join us as we examine not one but three ways to tackle a CSS sliding navigation menu!
Here at Design Shack we like to feature a full range of tutorials, from expert PHP projects to very simple CSS tips. Today’s tutorial is targeted at those still in the beginner stages of CSS.
One of the most frequent questions I get from CSS beginners is, “How do I create a button?” It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. There are quite a few ways to go about it and unfortunately there are also quite a few ways to go wrong. When I first started out in CSS, figuring out all the button syntax was one of the most persistent troubles I faced, it seemed like I was always doing it wrong. Today we’re going to walk through a very simple and flexible process that you can apply to any button you create. More important than the end result is the in-depth explanation at each point outlining why we do it that 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.
Today we’re going to have some good clean fun by recreating the animated Mario Bros. question mark box with pure CSS3.
Along the way you’ll learn how to use several cool CSS3 technologies such as rounded corners, box and text shadows, and keyframe animations that work in both Safari and Firefox. Let’s jump in!
Mastering different forms of selection creation is one of the fundamental aspects of becoming a Photoshop professional. If you don’t know half a dozen techniques or more to create a usable selection, your toolbox of skills is unnecessarily limited.
Today we’re going to take a quick look at eight popular methods for creating selections in Photoshop and where each is the most applicable.
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.
Today we’re going to discuss a little bit about how and why Flash came to be regarded in a negative light and how we can avoid running down the same path with the modern technologies replacing it.
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.
Google Maps is one of the best utilities to ever hit the web. It has become the standard way for people to get directions online, view satellite and terrain imagery and perform any other map-related task.
There are a number of reasons that you would want to embed a Google Map into your web page, whether it be for functional purposes, such as guiding users to your physical location, or aesthetic purposes, such as using map for a background graphic. Today we’re going to look at two ways you can go about this task: the quick and easy way and the powerful, flexible API route.