Every project is created by design. It is thought out, analyzed and finally, designed and executed.
But is every design project also a work of art? How similar (or different) are the processes and results? You may find that every designer or artist has a different definition. Here I will share my characteristics of each. (Feel free to agree with or even challenge me.)
Let’s face it, responsive design is hard work. Web design was difficult enough when we were only considering desktop platforms, but the challenge of seemingly infinitely varying screen and viewport sizes has really added to the complexity of website layout.
Whether you’re completely new to responsive design or consider yourself an expert in the area, the tool that we’re going to look at today will blow you away. It’s called Gridset and it’s amazing.
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.
Fast food restaurants are notoriously bad with web design, but the emerging market of “fast casual” eateries thus far is proving to be much better in this area.
Today we’re going to look around the web at the websites for some of the most popular fast casual restaurants to see who is doing the best work and what we can learn from them. Warning: this post will make you hungry!
When Google Web Fonts was first released, we wrote up a quick walkthrough. Since then, the service has been completely overhauled and it’s high time for a thorough walkthrough from scratch.
Join us as we start at the very beginning and discuss what the Google Web Fonts service is and how to get it up and running on your site today.
Give us a few minutes of your time and we’ll open you up to the awesome world of awesome free web fonts.
220.5 pixels per inch: 2,800 wide and 1,800 tall for a total of over five million pixels. That’s the screen that I work on now, full time. This gives rise to tons of questions: does Apple have any business making such a screen? Will it help or hinder the industry? Can you really do design work on that thing if you’re designing for non-retina screens?
Today I’m going to tell you all about my experience with the machine that threatens to change the way you do your job. I’ll hold nothing back as I rave about what I love and rant about what drives me nuts. Read along and see if you agree with my conclusions.
Scrolling effects are all the rage these days. As the user moves down the page, content does more than move up the screen, it comes alive and becomes more interesting. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to pull these effects off with pure CSS. If you don’t know JavaScript, you’re out of luck.
That’s where Stroll.js comes in. It’s a super easy to implement library that makes applying mind-boggling scroll effects a breeze. All you have to do is paste in a couple of brief lines of JavaScript, the rest is all handled with HTML and CSS. Keep reading and I’ll show you how it works.
Today’s project is a fun one. We’re going to build a standard CSS image slider with a twist: the visible image area will be divided into four distinct sections, each with a hidden message that is revealed when the user hovers over it.
The ultimate effect is pretty awesome and I think you’re going to like it a lot. Along the way we’ll play with some animations, transitions, positioning contexts and a lot more. Let’s dive in and get started!
If you follow Chris Coyier on Twitter, then you have no doubt seen quite a few mentions go by in recent months of a not so secret project called CodePen. Chris promised us that this new tool would join the ranks of jsFiddle and Tinkerbin, serving as a sort of online playground to experiment with and share CSS, HTML and JavaScript demos.
Like a kid in December anxiously awaiting Christmas day, I’ve been dying to see what Chris and his team would come up with. Fortunately, Christmas has arrived. CodePen is a live project and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
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.
Recently, Twitter unveiled its brand new logo. It’s certainly not the first time this has happened, but the company seems insistent that this is going to be the last change we see for a while.
Join us as we take a look at the new logo, discuss why it’s better or worse and analyze the interesting geometry that was used to create the icon. Is there some hidden magic in using circles to create your logo? Read on to find out.
Today we’re going to embark on the adventure of building yet another awesome and fun CSS demo. This time we’ll create a big, seamless wall of photos. When the user hovers over an image, a transparent black overlay will fade it out as a text label fades in and the image zooms.
The result is pretty slick and I’ve also thrown in a bonus second version for those that make it all the way through the tutorial. Read on to get started!