Search Results For: graphic design

Graphics / 16 Mar 2012

5 Gorgeous Note & Point Presentations You Have to See

One of my favorite sites for design inspiration is Note & Point, which is a fantastic curator of great looking presentation decks (Keynote + PowerPoint = Note & Point). Not only is this site chock full of awesome design examples, most of their presentations are actually design and development related so you learn some great stuff along the way!

Today we’re going to look at five of my favorite Note & Point decks, which will teach us a ton of great stuff about presentation design.

CSS / 24 Feb 2012

Do We Still Slice PSDs?

The other day a friend of mine said something that caught my attention, “I’m trying to learn how to slice a PSD.” It’s a simple enough statement. As soon as he said it, I knew exactly what he was talking about, and yet, there was something in there that didn’t quite set right.

Upon seeing my hesitation my friend responded with a question, “Do we still slice PSDs?” Great question! For beginners, jargon isn’t merely jargon, it implies a process and suggests a method of action. For this reason, it’s often helpful for more advanced developers to define their terms in a way that is meaningful to others. Today we’ll dive into the theory behind the process of converting a PSD to to a web page and end with a discussion on the ups and downs of designing in the browser.

CSS / 18 Jan 2012

Beating Borders: The Bane of Responsive Layout

Responsive design often requires setting your widths using percentages. This is easy enough to accomplish, that is until you start throwing borders into the mix. If your columns and total width are set using percentages, a static border size wreaks havoc on your layout.

Today we’re going to look at a couple of different ways to beat this problem. You’ll learn how to create a completely fluid layout that doesn’t mind extra borders or padding one bit.

Graphics / 12 Jan 2012

When the Photo Doesn’t Fit the Space: Tips and Tricks for Making It Work

You’ve been there a thousand times, staring at a big empty canvas that simply doesn’t seem to work with the photo that the client has provided. Perhaps you have a vertical space and a horizontal photo (or vice versa), or maybe the image is simply too small to resize without unacceptable quality loss. What now?

Today we’ll go over some tricks of the trade and teach you how to cope with images that don’t fit where you need them to. The next time you run into a problem, you’ll be ready!

CSS / 11 Jan 2012

Build a Fun Trivia Game With the CSS Active Selector

We’ve done a ton of fun stuff recently with the :hover selector. From button hover effects for beginners to more advanced hover tutorials and even onto using hovers with multiple backgrounds. Today we’re moving on and learning about a related but equally awesome selector that often gets overlooked.

With :active, we can control the state of an object while it’s being clicked. Typically, this takes the simple form of changing a link’s color while the mouse is pressed down, but we’re going to do something much more interesting. Follow along as we build a super cool, pure CSS presidential trivia game.

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.

Layouts / 1 Dec 2011

The Evolution of Apple.com

The Apple design team is widely regarded as one of the most talented group of designers in the industry today. The trends that they set are followed by not only every other major tech company, but by web designers in every conceivable product and service niche.

Follow along as we embark on an exciting journey through time and witness the evolution of Apple’s design style. You’ll get several amazing glimpses at Apple.com dating all the way back to 1997 as we witness the rise and fall of several important design trends.

Software / 21 Nov 2011

5 Simple Steps to Stunning Portraits in Photoshop

Today’s article points out a harsh but true reality: just because you know how to use Photoshop for design work doesn’t mean you know how to edit photos. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered.

Follow along as we show you five simple and lightning fast steps you can take to transform your plain, boring portraits to stunning images that look straight out of a professional photographer’s portfolio. Along the way you’ll learn several important tips such as how to properly sharpen an image and how to draw the viewer’s attention to where you want it to go.

HTML / 10 Oct 2011

What Is HTML? the Anatomy of an HTML5 Document

This is the second article in our series on the absolute fundamentals of web development. Our first article explained in detail what HTML is on a conceptual level. We looked at what a markup language is, what tags are and how HTML compares to other important pieces of the web development puzzle such as CSS.

Join us today as we move on and take a look at each basic piece of an HTML document. I’ll explain all that stuff at the top of an HTML file that confuses you and outline the basic structure that you’ll follow for creating your own HTML files.

Inspiration / 8 Sep 2011

30 Useful and Hilarious Lorem Ipsum Generators

Lorem ipsum represents a long-held tradition for designers, typographers and the like. Some people hate it and argue for its demise, but others ignore the hate as they create awesome tools to help create filler text for everyone from bacon lovers to Charlie Sheen fans.

Today we’re going to briefly discuss why lorem ipsum and its brethren still have legitimate uses and then we’ll have some fun as we check out thirty great dummy content generators that you’ll definitely want to bookmark.

Software / 7 Sep 2011

8 Ways to Get the Selection You Want in Photoshop

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.

Typography / 31 Aug 2011

8 Simple and Useful Tips for Kerning Type

Kerning is fun! All right, unless you’re a serious type nerd like me, that’s definitely not going to be a true statement. However, it is an absolutely essential part of your typographical education and implementation.

If you’ve been ignoring kerning or simply aren’t sure how to do it properly, take a look at these eight quick tips and get started on the road to becoming a kerning master.