Most typefaces have more than just 52 letters – 26 uppercase and 26 lowercase. They also contain an assortment of alternate characters that can help add flair and interest to your typography.
These special characters have been around since the beginning of type. Renowned typographer Johannes Gutenberg even used them in printing early copies of the Bible.
Sharing is an integral part of the web experience and designers are always looking for new and interesting ways to highlight or show off the sharing portion of their pages.
Today, we’re going to build a simple sharing menu that integrates an icon font as well as some animations. The final product is inspired by Disqus, but has a unique twist of its own. Let’s jump in and see how it works.
I was recently put in an interesting position where I had to choose between my professional principles and a paycheck. As a designer, you’re probably no stranger to this situation.
What’s the right course of action? When is compromise a laudable action and when is standing firm and refusing a request the better way to go? I’ll share my thoughts through a real and personal story.
The Layers Panel in Photoshop is one of the single most important aspects of the software’s UI. Odds are, you’ve spent a good chunk of your life staring at and interacting with the Layers Panel, but how well do you really know it?
Today we’re going to take a deep dive into what the Layers Panel has to offer and how to make the most of it in your workflow. We’ll learn about everything from keyboard shortcuts to obscure customization features. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, you’re bound to learn a few new tricks!
Here at Design Shack we offer a simple but useful service called a web design critique. It’s basically a consulting service that you can take advantage of for a mad cheap price in exchange for letting us post it on the site as an educational tool.
I’ve personally written up a whopping eighty five of these things thus far (#85 will be posted later this week). That’s a whole lot of design advice! Read on to see what I’ve learned about web design in the process, both from the good examples and the bad.
Texture is a key element of design. Learning how to wield and apply textures effectively will really open up your level of skill and proficiency in Photoshop.
Today we’re going to learn about a super quick and easy way to take a photographic texture and turn it into a mask that affects the transparency of a layer. No matter how proficient you are with Photoshop, you should be able to pick up this technique and begin using it on your projects today.
Every now and then I come across a site that has one or two really inspiring bits of design and UI that are good enough for me to write about them. On even rarer cases, I find a whole site that’s just so overflowing with uniquely awesome design ideas that I have to share it with you. This article is about one such site.
Sevenly.org is a site dedicated to helping charities through the sale of limited edition custom t-shirts. Beyond the fact that I love the organization and what they stand for, I’m blown away by what they’ve done with the site and think it serves as a learning tool for web designers. Let’s take a look!
Taking a design from Photoshop to the web in a click is not even a remotely new idea. For as long as there have been “web designers” there has been the dream of such a workflow. Today we’re going to look at yet another tool that makes this promise: CSS Hat.
CSS Hat is different than other apps that you’ve seen though. It’s not a full blown WYSIWYG aimed at allowing you to build an entire site without writing code, rather it’s a way to bust out a few quick CSS3 styles on a single element using the process that you’ve used for the past decade or more, right in Photoshop. Spoiler alert: it’s good. Really good. Read on to see why.
In the past, we took a look at fifty of the best and worst university websites from around the United States, a post which launched an interesting discussion about how web design projects can be destroyed by committees and politics, even if talented designers are leading up the team.
Today we’re following that up with a similar discussion on official state websites. Which U.S. states have the absolute best looking websites and which have sites that look like they haven’t been updated since Clinton was in the Oval Office? Read on to see how your state ranked.
Odds are, :hover was the very first pseudo class selector that you ever learned. Heck, it might be the only one you ever learned. We all love this lovely little feature and use it constantly as a way to create enriched user experiences.
My question today could change the way you think about hover forever: “Does the ubiquity of touchscreens render hover events obsolete?” Put another way, did the iPhone kill :hover? Read on to see how iOS handles a CSS hover event, what that means for you as a developer, and how you should or shouldn’t be using hover events in your designs.
I’ve been seeing a lot of tutorials lately that utilize :target in CSS to perform some fancy feat so I thought I’d take the time to really dig in and discuss how and why this syntax works. Instead of blindly following someone else’s code, you should be able to wield this tool with the knowledge of what’s happening how it affects browser support.
Read on to learn all about the basic functionality associated with the :target pseudo class and how you can stretch that ability to perform all kinds of crazy stuff with pure CSS. Along the way we’ll build some great navigation and slideshow examples for you to learn from.
Today we’re going to embark on the challenge of creating an animated banner of photos that automatically scrolls horizontally through an infinite loop. The best part: we’re going to do it without a single line of JavaScript.
To make this banner truly useful, our goal will be to use individual photos dropped into our HTML, not simply one long CSS background that repeats. This is pretty tricky but we’ll walk you through exactly how it works. Let’s get started!