Search Results For: glow

UX Design / 30 Mar 2016

Designing for the Web: Are There Colors You Should Avoid?

The web is a rainbow of color options. Color is a great tool for grabbing the attention of users, providing visual interest and impact and creating contrast for readability. Color is also at the center of many design trends, including flat and material styles.

But can you go wrong with color? Are there hues or combinations that you should shy away from? In a word … yes! Today we’re looking at colors or color combinations that you should avoid when designing websites and apps. (And on the chance that you’ve already made one of these mistakes, we offer alternative suggestions as well.)

Graphics / 7 Sep 2015

Design Banner Ads That Don’t Suck: 15 Design Tips

There’s been a lot of recent chatter about banner ads. Are they fading? Are users actually clicking them? Are they dead? Are there better options available?

While it is true that banner ad clicks are in decline, that’s not the end of the popular online advertising format. While you can’t measure it, just seeing an ad helps create a user preference for that item, product or service. (Remember, ads have appeared on TV and in printed materials for decades without clicks to prove their success rates.) Today, we’ll look at 15 ways you can create banner ads that simply don’t suck. Take a look at the examples as well. They are 2015 winner of The Webby Awards for ad and website design. You can click through the images to learn more about each one.

UX Design / 24 Dec 2014

Designing Hover Styles and the Future of the Technique

Despite arguments that hover styles are dead, these small boxes that pop-up over images, text or other elements on websites are still found all over the web. Designers like them for an added bit of style and information; users like them for functionality. (They are only “dead” because hover styles don’t work without a mouse-over).

The UI function is still there for now. And if you opt to use it, you’ll want to create well-designed hover styles that engage users. You’ll also want to think about how to alter these areas of your website for responsive sites.

CSS / 22 Feb 2013

5 Simple and Practical CSS List Styles You Can Copy and Paste

Who doesn’t love a good list? We use them constantly in our markup for a variety of different situations. Today we’re going to take a look at a few simple and practical examples that you can steal and use in your own work.

We start off with a fun animated vertical list, then style up a list with thumbnails and text, another with just images and finally an ordered list where the numbers are styled differently than the rest of the type. There’s a ton of great things to learn here so let’s jump in!

Software / 31 Dec 2012

Invoiceable: The End of My Search for the Perfect Invoicing App

I love getting paid, but I hate invoicing. It can be tedious, time consuming and even frustrating if you don’t have a good system in place. Long have I searched in vain for the perfect invoicing app that has the features I need without costing me a fortune.

Good news: I finally found it. Invoiceable is everything I’ve ever wanted in an invoicing app. It’s easy to use, the invoices are highly customizable and the service is free. Sounds too good to be true right? Read on to learn more.

CSS / 13 Jun 2012

CSS Hat: A Magic Button That Turns Photoshop Styles Into CSS

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.

Software / 28 Dec 2011

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Using Scatter Brushes in Photoshop

In web design we often focus on using Photoshop to create pixel perfect designs that are meticulously shaped and layered until they’re absolutely pristine. Repeated patterns, tiny strokes, complex gradients and reflections are trademarks of this design style.

But what if you’re going for something more organic? How can we use Photoshop to create complex and random particle arrangements that don’t look cheesy and contrived? The answer of course is to utilize scatter brushes. This awesome tool seems fairly simple on the surface but there’s a ton functionality and limitless possibilities to explore so even if you’re a Photoshop pro, read on to see some great ideas for how to use scatter brushes in your work.

Typography / 2 Jun 2011

50 Examples of Beautiful Typographic Art

Everyone loves a good typography roundup. Type is the muse of so many extremely talented designers and the web is simply overflowing with beautiful examples just waiting to inspire you to create your own masterpiece.

Today we’ve got a collection of fifty of the most attractive typographic art pieces we could find from artists all over the world. Take a look!

CSS / 5 May 2011

5 Cool CSS Hover Effects You Can Copy and Paste

Need a cool hover effect for something on your site? Look no further! We’ve created several custom examples that you can view live for inspiration.

If you like the effect, steal it! We’ve got the CSS ready and waiting for you to copy.

CSS / 8 Apr 2011

6 Useful CSS Button Recipes You Can Copy & Paste

CSS3 is completely changing the game for creating buttons on the web. Techniques that were once only possible with images are now easily executable with just a few lines of code. For this post we custom built six attractively styled CSS buttons for you to copy and paste right into your projects, zero attribution required.

As with anything good in CSS3, the buttons below work great in Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but various versions of IE will fall short.

Graphics / 17 Feb 2011

How to Make Slicing Suck Less: Tips and Tricks for Slicing a PSD

I have a dirty little secret, I hate slicing Photoshop files. By that I don’t mean that I hate turning PSD comps into websites, I mean that I hate Photoshop’s slicing tools. The whole process makes my PSD look busy, cluttered and overly complicated so I usually skip it altogether and instead opt to manually crop and save out images individually as needed.

In order to fight this tendency and attempt to see the true usefulness of Photoshop’s slicing tools, I embarked on a mission to learn all the intricacies of how slicing works. Below is a collection of tips and tricks that resulted from this journey. Hopefully, you’ll learn a thing or two you never knew!

Business Card Templates / 11 Feb 2011

50 Incredibly Clever Business Card Designs

Business cards are a constant point of creativity for designers. This little personalized piece of marketing holds an impressive amount of potential for capturing the attention of potential customers and many businesses are willing to spend plenty of money to make sure their cards make a lasting statement.

Today we’ve collected over fifty business card designs and concepts that not only have aesthetic appeal, but really go that extra mile to increase impact. Some pop up into 3D shapes, others glow in the dark or even serve a lasting useful purpose. All of them are sure to inspire you in your own endeavors to create amazing business cards.