Search Results For: event

Inspiration / 19 May 2014

5 Tips for Creating a Fun Summer Color Palette

The official start of summer is just around the corner. Longer days, warmer temperatures and splashing in the lake or pool are just a few of the things that come with the change in season. When it comes to design, a change in seasons can create the urge to update your color palette as well.

With warmer days, warmer colors, brighter hues and even the use of more color are popular. And while you may not want to change the color scheme of an existing project — although you can – this season can be a great inspiration for designing a project with a summer-inspired color palette. Here are five tips for creating a great color palette with a few swatches to try based on each concept. Happy summer!

CSS / 8 Nov 2013

Build a Freaking Awesome Pure CSS Accordion

Who has two thumbs and loves to push the bounds of CSS? This guy. Let’s jump into a project that does just that. It’s pretty experimental and won’t pass the semantic police, but it’ll teach you a heck of a lot about advanced CSS tactics and will be tons of fun.

What we’re going to build is a pure CSS horizontal accordion slider. You’ll be able to insert as many slides as you want, each with unique content and each accessible via a click event, all without a lick of JavaScript. Impossible you say? Never!

Business / 19 Jun 2013

Understanding Agile Design and Why It’s Important

It’s no secret that the agile development process has been hurtling through the development world for several years now, swatting aside the older, clunkier waterfall development method. To be fair, whether it was agile or something else, waterfall really had it coming, as its risk-averse, top down approach just can’t keep pace with the demands of today’s marketplace.

While similar changes are occurring in the design world, the agile design process should necessarily look and feel a little different than agile development; they are, after all, different disciplines. Let’s take a deeper look first at what agile development is, and then at a few great ways to adapt the process to the design world.

JavaScript / 10 May 2013

40 Awesome jQuery Plugins You Need to Check Out

The jQuery developer community has to be one of the most generous and hardworking group of people on the web. They’re constantly churning out amazingly useful and completely free tools that they share with anyone and everyone who wants to use them.

The quantity and quality of free jQuery plugins simply never ceases to amaze me. I’ve been keeping a list of some great ones that I’ve found lately and I thought I’d share it with you. Here are 40 awesome and free jQuery plugins that just about every web developer should check out.

Business / 3 May 2013

Should You Be Designing With QR Codes?

QR codes are all the rage… aren’t they? Their presence certainly seems to have increased in recent years, indicating an impressive adoption rate among marketers. But does that mean that you should be using them? If a client asks you whether or not using QR codes is a good idea, what will you say?

Join us as we take an honest and critical look at both sides of the QR debate so you can decide for yourself whether or not you should be designing with QR codes.

Business / 29 Apr 2013

Simple Tips for Designing a Newsletter Template That Stands Out

Almost every business has an email newsletter these days. From retailers promoting sales, to organizations showcasing information and events, the email newsletter is one of the most popular marketing tools out there. And for it to really be effective, it must look good.

An almost unlimited number of free email templates can make it easy to just download something and send out an email, but you should really take the time to create a custom template for communications that represents your business and who you are. Your newsletter represents your work just as much as a website or printed product. Although getting started can be intimidating, it’s fairly easy to create a newsletter template, choose software for distribution and send your first group email. It is important to keep in mind that most people get a lot of email every day, so you must work to make your newsletter stand out.

Mobile / 12 Apr 2013

Focal Point: Intelligent Cropping of Responsive Images

The practice of implementing responsive images is still in its infancy. We’ve seen a lot of ideas and suggestions for how it should be done and we’re bound to see a lot more.

Today we’re going to look at a fascinating little framework that allows you to not only automatically resize your images when the viewport changes, but also crop the images with a specific important focal point in mind. Amazingly enough, it does all this with pure CSS. Read on to see how it works.

Business / 27 Mar 2013

How to Creatively Market Yourself as a Designer



Sometimes it seems like every time you jump online, you read about a talented new designer who’s making it big with their latest project. There are a lot of wonderful designers out there, and the constant showcasing of others’ skills makes it feel all the more like you’re lost in the crowd. It’s not enough anymore to have a solid portfolio and work experience; if you really want to stand out in today’s market, going the extra mile in marketing yourself can make all the difference in landing the perfect job, or getting some great freelance projects going.

When you’re considering all the ways that you could market yourself, the most important thing to take into account is how much of a time commitment you can realistically make. Don’t overstretch yourself with a daily blog entry or illustration unless you think you’ll be able to do a great job on it. There are many different levels of requirement for projects that can make a difference in your career; choose what works for you.

CSS / 21 Jan 2013

Build a Fun True or False Quiz With CSS

I’m constantly surprised by what you can achieve using only HTML, CSS and a little ingenuity. I love to think outside the box and attempt creative experiments just to see if I can pull it off.

Today’s random challenge is to create a fun little true/false quiz. Questions will be presented to the user and answers will be revealed only on click. To make the magic happen, we’ll turn to some pretty crazy methods and use features like active, focus and even tabindex! You’re bound to learn some quirky stuff so hit the jump and follow along.

CSS / 16 Jan 2013

Code a Spinning Circular Menu With CSS

Don’t be a square, break outside your boring box and try on a circle for size. Today we’re going to build a circular navigation menu that spins to different points as the user hovers over an anchor.

Along the way we’ll have to overcome several obstacles like how to structure our HTML to be conducive to a remote hover and how to position all of the elements just right so that everything works. It’s a fun challenge and there’s a lot to learn, let’s get started!

CSS / 10 Jan 2013

Perform a Split Reveal With CSS

CSS can pull of a lot of really great image tricks: size manipulation, desaturation, even blur. One limitation that we run into though is that you can’t really slice an image into multiple parts. For instance, if you wanted to cut a photo in half and animate the separation, you couldn’t really do it with pure CSS. Could you?

Today we’re going to code up a work around that allows us to achieve this very trick without an ounce of JavaScript or extra files. Let’s see how it works.

CSS / 3 Jan 2013

Photoshop to CSS Conversion: 3 Methods Compared

Converting Photoshop mockups to live web code is an extremely common practice among web designers. We’ve all done it a million times by hand, so it’s pretty exciting when we start seeing solutions pop up that will help us automate this process.

The latest version of Creative Cloud Photoshop CS6 has a built-in feature for converting Photoshop styles to CSS, and if you need another solution, there are two solid extensions that you can check out. Today we’ll compare the results of all three methods: Photoshop, CSS3Ps and CSSHat to see which is best.