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By Cameron Chapman
There have been tons of posts about minimalist and simple web design. It’s something every designer should consider and study, as minimalist and simple design principles are important in a lot of website designs. But there’s been [...]
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By Cameron Chapman Single-page websites are becoming more popular among web designers, both for their own projects and for client sites. There are a lot of cases out there in which a single-page site makes a lot of sense: if [...]
Photoshop allows designers to create amazing things with their creativity. Lighting effects can be done in Photoshop a number of different ways, and the results can be quite impressive. In this post we’ll feature 25 tutorials from various designers that teach how to create amazing lighting effects. If you see something you want to learn, click through and follow the steps of the designer.
How to Enhance Your Subjects with Striking Lighting Effects in Photoshop
News and magazine-style sites tend to follow some specific trends. In this post we’ll take a detailed look at the design trends of news sites with plenty of examples, and the end of the post includes a showcase of sites.
If you’re working on designing a magazine-style site or blog theme, taking these trends into consideration may help.
White (or Light) Backgrounds
Like most content-heavy sites, news and magazine-style sites tend to have white or light-colored backgrounds, which is generally better for readability. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but especially among the major news sites, white backgrounds rule.
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By Andy Walpole The 20th century was witness to phenomenal social and economic changes in the status of women. Suffrage has been widely adopted around the world, anti-discrimination legislation is commonplace, contraception is widely available and abortion is legal. These [...]
Adding texture to a design can create drastic changes and powerful results. Photoshop provides a number of different possibilities for working with textures, which allows designers to use their creativity. In this post we’ll features 25 tutorials that will help you to learn more about working with textures in Photoshop and how to create impressive results.
How to Use Texture and Lighting to Create Rounded Artwork
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By Callum Chapman The 2009 Formula 1 season had an audience of over 520 million viewers, most of whom stayed up to date with the latest news on the official Formula 1 website, as well as their favorite teams websites, [...]
A few weeks ago we published a post, Learn Photoshop, that included links to well over 100 resources for mastering the basics of Photoshop and the use of the various tools. In response to reader request, we’re publishing this post to help designers who want to get started with Adobe Illustrator, or maybe just sharpen their existing skills.
Illustrator is a powerful program, but it can be overwhelming or confusing at times, simply because of everything that is possible. If you’re new to Illustrator, taking the time to understand the basics and how to use the specific tools will go a long way towards setting you up for success. In this post we’ve categorized more than 100 resources that will teach you everything you need to learn.
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Long gone the days when you simply handed over a white piece of paper with your name and contact info on it to potential clients. Nowadays, who do you think clients will call first, the guy with his name [...]
We frequently publish posts on this blog that feature tutorials for learning how to do various things with Photoshop, but we have rarely focused on just the basics. This post is intended for designers or aspiring designers who either want to get started with Photoshop or have limited experience and are looking to improve.
While there are plenty of great learning resources available online, it’s often difficult for beginners to know where to get started because everything seems to be scattered. With this post you’ll find links to plenty of resources to teach you all the basics and fundamentals of Photoshop.
Most of the resources and tutorials listed in this post will focus on teaching one particular aspect of Photoshop, such as how to use a specific tool. Everything is broken down into sections so you can find exactly what you are looking for.
The resources in this section will serve as an introduction for those who are new to Photoshop. They will help you to learn your way around the interface and with some of the basics of Photoshop.
Getting Started with Photoshop
Although there are a lot of quality tutorials available for designing logos, case studies from real-world projects can prove to be even more valuable as a learning resource. Case studies are excellent for showing more of the entire process, the steps that are involved, and putting it into the context of a specific client.
In this post we’ll point you towards 17 logo design case studies that will give you an in-depth look at the process of logo or identity design.
Logo Design Process and Walkthrough for Vivid Ways
Minimalism a popular style of design because it keeps things simple and user-friendly. In this post we’ll look at more than 20 websites, blogs and books dedicated to minimalism. Not all of them are related to web design – minimalism can also be applied to other aspects of business and life.
If you want to find great and inspiring examples of minimalist design, these sites will be excellent sources.
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By Callum Chapman In this ultimate collection, we bring you a massive selection of great Web design tutorials from all over the design community. All of the tutorials use Photoshop for the main application. By the end, you should have [...]
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By Louis Lazaris If you’ve been formally educated in marketing, more than likely you’ve learned about a marketing model called AIDA. AIDA is an acronym that represents the different steps involved in selling a product or service. Very often, the [...]
Non profit organizations tend to have limited budgets and limited involvement from members for planning, designing and maintaining websites. This often results in a site that doesn’t really achieve everything that it could for the organization and the people involved. In recent years there has been an increasing number of organizations that are doing great things with their websites and truly making them valuable and effective.
In this article we’ll look at the keys to an effective non-profit organization website, while showcasing some examples from specific sites.
Many of the visitors that will be arriving at the website will not be familiar with the organization. Upon arriving, they should be able to quickly get an idea of why the organization exists and a basic picture of what they do.
The full mission statement or purpose statement is sometimes part of an About Us page, but first time visitors to the home page should have an idea of why the organization exists without even visiting another page. The About Us page can of course provide more details, but visitors should not need to navigate through the site in order to understand the basic purpose of the organization.
There are a number of different ways to help convey a message of mission or purpose on a home page. In some cases there will be a brief one or two sentence statement that is located in a prominent position. Photos and images can also help to communicate purpose.
One-page portfolios are certainly a popular trend among web and graphic designers. Many designers have created one-page portfolios that use a lot of creativity, but there are also some elements or characteristics that are very common among them.
In this post we’ll look at ten trends of one-page portfolios with examples of each. At the end of the post we’ll include a showcase for your own design inspiration, plus some resources to help you if you’re interested in creating your own one-page portfolio.
One-page portfolios tend to keep the work of the designer as the focus of the page. More traditional portfolio sites may include screen shots of some work on the homepage, but generally the work in the portfolio will be displayed on a separate page.
Because one-page portfolios include all of the elements of a portfolio site (the work, biographical information, services information, contact, etc.), the contents of the page are often arranged to emphasize the work from the portfolio.
James Lai Creative
James Lai Creative uses a prominent location on the page to display items from the portfolio. Click on a thumbnail and you’ll see a larger image above.
WordPress 3.0 is more than just the next in a long line of WordPress releases. It will see the merging of WordPress with WordPress MU (multi-user), which lets you run as many blogs as you like with a single install, a move that’s been widely welcomed by the blogging community. Besides this major advancement, however, little has been announced about any further updates to WordPress 2.9. Messageboards are currently awash with demanding bloggers, listing the new features they most want to see and the plugins they want shifted into core. Below you’ll find the 9 new features that are most in demand.
By Thursday Bram There’s no formula for a perfect portfolio. There’s no format that’s guaranteed to land you clients, as long as you follow it. However, there are certain questions that a prospective client has in mind when he’s looking for a web designer. If your portfolio can supply the answers a client wants, you can [...]
If you frequently browse through sites like deviantART and the Behance Network you’ve no doubt come across a number of designs that use typography and floral effects. In this post we’ll showcase some excellent works of this kind from various designers. If you would like more inspiration from typography and text effects please see our gallery site TypeInspire.
By Cameron Chapman Proper use of image compression can make a huge difference in the appearance and size of your website image files. But compression is an often-misunderstood topic, partly because there’s a real lack of understanding on what the different types of compression are good for. If you don’t understand which type of compression to [...]
An often overlooked member of the Adobe Creative Suite is Adobe Fireworks. This application software can be used to create vectors, design application interfaces, digital artwork, and create rapid prototypes of websites. Adobe Fireworks can also generate PDF’s, export CSS based layouts, and a variety of other features. However, Adobe Fireworks resources are not [...]
By Louis Lazaris The web form has been one of the most discussed elements in web design for more than ten years now. We can’t help it. Call-to-action functionality often leads users to a form; purchases are made using forms; users register or subscribe using forms — the uses for forms are endless. While it is fairly [...]
By Cameron Chapman Information architecture can be a daunting subject for designers who’ve never tried it before. Also, creating successful infographics and visualizations takes skill and practice, along with some advance planning. But anyone with graphic design skills can learn to create infographics that are effective and get data across in a user-friendly manner. Below are a [...]
Wacom tablets are preferred tools for many graphic designers because they can be much easier than working with a mouse for some types of design. Learning to work effectively with a tablet can be a little tricky, but fortunately there are a number of tutorials that can help. In this post we’ll feature a selection of tutorials that will help with learning how to design specific things, and some that will help you understand the Wacom tablet and to get the most out of it.
Draw a Windy Sunset Illustration
By Robert Hartland In this article, we’ll showcase website layouts and navigation structures that really break the mold. The designers of these websites have seen dozens of clone websites out there but have sought their own way. The unusual website layouts and navigation that results can either be very successful and innovative or disorienting for visitors. [...]
A current trend is web design inspired by nature. I’m sure you’ve seen sites with illustrated backgrounds or headers of a sky or horizon, or maybe a large background picture of something from nature. In this post we’ll feature 65 resources that can help you with your own nature-inspired design. The post includes Photoshop tutorials, Photoshop brushes, textures, and vectors.
How to Create an Illustrative Web Design in Photoshop
As a final post for 2009, let’s take a look back at the best tutorials for creating website layouts in Photoshop. There were a number of great tutorials of this kind throughout the year, many more than in years past, making it a great year for anyone who wants to improve their design skills. Here is a look at 25 of the best.
Create a Company/Business Web Layout Using Photoshop
By Louis Lazaris Not many of us will have the opportunity to attend or participate in a live web-related event, conference, or presentation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from the information exchanged at such events. Many of the sites associated with those events provide supplementary information, summaries, presentation slides, plus audio and video footage [...]
Since the year is winding down, we thought it would be helpful to go back and pick out the best Illustrator tutorials that were published in 2009. The year was full of great tutorials, and 50 of the best are featured here. For more Illustrator tutorials please see:
Smoothly Shift Winter Colors While Creating an Icy, Vector Landscape
Since the year is winding down, we thought it would be helpful to go back and pick out the best Illustrator tutorials that were published in 2009. The year was full of great tutorials, and 50 of the best are featured here. For more Illustrator tutorials please see:
Smoothly Shift Winter Colors While Creating an Icy, Vector Landscape
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