Headlines are one of the most important elements on your page and are often the starting point that sets the tone for the entire design. So why not make them great?
Today we’ll take a look at seven different design techniques that you can implement in a minute or less that will boost your headline from plain to awesome.
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.
Multi-step CSS animations are easy with keyframes, but what if we want to use plain old transitions to achieve a similar effect? Further, how do we take a single hover event and translate that into multiple animations on different elements?
The answer lies in using buried hovers, a simple and effective trick you should definitely try out.
Are you tired of creating building websites using the same old grid-based layouts for every project? Have you been itching to break away from the norm and attempt something a little more organic?
Today we’ll take a look at a few sites that have done just that to see what we can learn about alternative layout methods and how they can be successfully implemented.
Here at Design Shack we can’t get enough of good color schemes. We recently discussed some Awesome and Unusual Places to Steal Color Palettes From and today we’ll follow up that discussion with some tips on how to build your own awesome color sets in Adobe Illustrator.
We’ll go over the extreme basics of working with color in Illustrator and jump into how to use the excellent built-in Color Guide to get you on the path to lightning-fast generation and manipulation of custom color schemes.
Placing a large greeting message at the top of your site is a great way to create a welcoming environment and provides the perfect opportunity to clearly state your purpose for being.
Today we’ve rounded up over fifty such messages for inspiration on both the message and visual appearance fronts. The greetings has been divided up into clear categories so you can analyze the different popular techniques being used by designers today.
Sign up forms come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are a single field, others are a multi-step process that stretch over several screens.
Today we’ll take a look at 20 attractive and functional forms to see if we can find any useful ideas that you can apply the next time you’re building a sign up form.
Today we’re going to jump into an age old rivalry between the two biggest soft drink companies on the planet and their flagship products: Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
The main theme will be brand evolution. We’ll take a look at how both brands have changed over the years and which seems to have the better strategy.
Color has always been a popular topic on the web. We used to throw around terms like “web safe colors” a lot more than we do now simply because the computer displays back then weren’t as great as they are now. In place of these discussions, design blogs revert mostly to discussions of color theory and of course, free tools to help you build color palettes.
However, color was a hot topic long before the web was around. Once upon a time, my discussions about color revolved around printing presses and processes for applying ink. I’d wager there are plenty of readers out there who are either interested in learning about print or still work in print today so in this article I’ll teach you all about the magic of ink.
Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic app for creating complex vector typographical arrangements. The application is so big and complicated though that it can take years to figure out how to recreate some of the cool effects that you’ve seen elsewhere without coming up with complicated workarounds.
Today we’ll remove some of the mystery of working with strokes and fills by diving into the appearance palette to see not only how it works, but how to manipulate the items within to create some really cool effects.
Photoshop’s blending modes are a source of constant confusion for many designers. There aren’t really any sort of built-in examples for you to see and the blending mode names are no where near intuitive suggestions of what the effect actually does to the appearance of your document.
Today we’ll help remove a little of the mystery by discussing how a few key blending modes work in addition to some hints for how to use them effectively.
Flux is a WYSIWYG website editor for Macs. Now, before you curse under your breath about how much you hate WYSIWYGs, you should know that Flux is different and is both powerful and flexible enough to be used by professional web developers.
Today I’ll introduce you to Flux by creating a super simple web page from scratch (no annoyingly rigid templates). Along the way we’ll see what a typical workflow looks like and why it just might be the best visual web editor I’ve ever used.