Five Minute Upgrade – Making Your Design Pop 1. Brighten Colors If you have a design that you just feel isn’t anything special – stop – crank up the color intensity – then reevaluate. Saturation plays a big role as far as mood goes. 2. Monochromatic themes are great, there are some great black and white designs and sometimes using only a single color makes designing easier. 3. Here’s the deal, align your text and things will look better, not to mention it will increase your scannability. 4. This was discussed wonderfully over at PsdTuts a while back but there are a few key things to keep in mind. Don’t be afraid to use shadows sparingly, helps fight the flat and boring look.1px lines are great at clearly defining edges.Using faint gradients over text and backgrounds gives a subtle 3D look. 5. Overlap your images in ways that are out of the ordinary. 6. Give your user room to appreciate what you’ve done, it will help them focus on each element and not feel overwhelmed. 7. 8. Don’t have them, use them. The Wrap Up Google+
25+ Free Resources for Graphic Designers | Logo Design Marketplace Thursday 20 January 2011 | Keith J. Hamilton 5 Comments Attention to detail and depth of creativity – These two qualities are indicative of a great graphic designer. So without further ado, here they are… Tutorials: Fonts: Generators: Striped Web Background – Download and create striped background for websites Background Dotter – Create a dotted background for your website Background Maker – Variety of background in all kinds of patterns for your site Tartan Maker – Web 2.0 web design Tartan Kit with Ajax generator Web: The internet is a treasure trove of information for many disciplines, graphic design included.
Freebies | Web Design Ledger 599 shares 8 Must Have Free Fonts for your Designs Need some fresh fonts for your new projects? We got your back. We are always searching for good resources for our readers, and fonts are our top priority. Our job is to browse the web and find what you need. Read More 441 shares 9 Free Icon Sets to Diversify your Library Every designer needs to be ready to go wherever their projects take them. 960 shares 10 Best New Free Fonts We’ve been on the prowl for some new free fonts to share with you. 301 shares Spring Up your Designs with Some Free Flower Textures Textures are a good way to add personality, depth and interest to a design. 501 shares 30 Free Vintage Logo Templates Looking for some high quality vintage logos or insignias? 433 shares Exclusive Free Download: Vintage Infographic Elements Infographics are great for displaying information in a way that is easier to digest. 1149 shares 9 Free & Useful Fonts for your Designs 464 shares 8 Free & Useful Minimal Icon Sets 773 shares
The Elements of Retro Web Design The vintage and retro style is becoming more and more popular in today’s digital artwork. The use of retro and vintage themes in design is probably one of the most pervasive trends since the industry went almost completely digital. In today’s post, we’ll look at examples of work sourced from the wonderful Dribbble, which helps us focus on snippets of a piece, rather than the entire design or illustration. From here, it’s possible to identify what techniques have been used and to describe how they impact the overall design. You will become familiar with these design trends and be able to replicate them. To help you, short tutorials are scattered throughout the article. 1. Simple shapes are commonly used in vintage design. p This lovely illustration makes use of elliptical shapes to produce a sun and is finished off nicely with a typographic effect. Circlebox Creative’s branding is based on a circle and inspired by vintage ink stamps and badges. Mini-Tutorials And we’re done! 2. Color Resources
The BIGGEST ever list of design resources! - ProofHQ Following the huge success of last year’s “World’s Biggest Ever List of Graphic Design Blogs”, we’ve decided that we should turn it into an annual event – after all, more people than ever before are blogging and the talent pool continues to grow. This year, we’ve added in some additional categories including typography and image sourcing sites to help you along your way. The list is at least 40% larger than last year and is the one stop shop for all that you could need in terms of inspiration, reference material or tools for you to use. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen…. drum-roll please! Graphic Design 1stwebdesigner Blog by Dainis Graveris in Latvia covering all things design and freelance. 2expertsdesign A blog filled with tips – whether it’s graphic design, logo design, web design, advertising, branding or typography. 456 Berea Street Blog from Roger Johansson containing articles and tutorials on web standards, accessibility and usability. 72dpi Graphic design inspiration.
How to make a professional logo design, web logo design, internet branding The Golden Arches. The Swoosh. The Shell. You remember them all like you remember the lyrics to Ice-Ice Baby. It’s a company’s identity. Their logo. You’d think this would be simple and easy to make/design a logo, but it ain’t. FUN & SERIOUS or COOL & SOPHISTICATED… Depending on how you approach it, your logo design will create a mood. There’s a serious danger heading off into one extreme over another when designing logos. That being said: Research is key. First, you should ask your client a bazillion questions. Second, find out their taste. BRANDING vs. That logo you designed is great, but – so what?! In this case, Resume Bear wanted to not only have it on their website, letterhead, and business cards. It also tells us: The Logo Must Be Legible. SEPARATION of BEAR and RESUME… Resume Bear started out with a big, brown, passive bear holding a piece of paper in its mouth as if it just caught a trout. An easy question to ask yourself, as a designer, is What’s The Focus?
27 Must-Have Starter Kits For Web Designers Starter kits are great timesavers for web designers and they are particularly useful for those who often create mock-ups for project pitching on daily basis. If you are a designer-cum-programmer think of it as your code snippets So what’s in a starter kit? We think it varies – depending on what each designer routinely worked with. In today’s article, we attempt to show you some of the best design starter kit we’ve come to know. GUI, Form Elements and Web Components From form elements like checkboxes, input fields, textareas to web design components like buttons, arrows, icons, badges and more. Yahoo’s Design Stencil Kit Probably one of the most complete kit for designers. Web Form Elements With all these tabs, buttons, dropdowns in one single PSD file, it’s sure going to give you a kick start in interface design. Browser Form Elements PSD Browser Form Elements PSD for Mac Firefox 3 and another for Vista IE7. Flex Dark Skin Sleek dark skin interface elements. Turquoise PSD Vista elements.
David McCandless » Books Information Is Beautiful Published Feb 2010 by HarperCollins UK Visually stunning displays of information that blend the facts with their connections, their context and their relationships – making information meaningful, entertaining and beautiful. This is information like you have never seen it before – keeping text to a minimum and using unique visuals to offer a blueprint of modern life. Easy to flick through but intriguing and engaging enough to study for hours. » Check out the Information Is Beautiful ultra-site » Check out on Amazon.co.uk “It’s almost impossible to look at a page of this book without feeling better informed.” The Visual Miscellaneum Published Nov 2009 by HarperCollins US Note: this is the US, paperback edition of Information is Beautiful A unique, groundbreaking look at the modern information age, helping readers make sense of the countless statistics and random facts that constantly bombard us. “Dangerous” to have on your desk if you have other work to get done!
15 Excellent Free Fonts for Graphic Designer We selected for you 15 fresh free fonts, that will surely help you to improve your typography work. Amable Typeface – Download Here Coldi – Download Here Pico Super Bold – Download Here PincoyaBlack – Download Here Cow.Cow – Download Here Exus Pilot – Download Here Portal – Download Here File – Download Here Digitica – Download Here Layered – Download Here Nadia Serif – Download Here Sketchetica – Download Here Mamma Gamma – Download Here Ripe – Download Here Pac Font – Download Here 25 New Illustrator Tutorials That Will Make You A Master Of Vector Art Just because you can usually get a similar effect in Photoshop doesn’t mean the end result will be as good as using Illustrator (depending on the project). If you are like me (and I will bet most of you are) you will go ahead and use PS because you know it much better even though the final project will not be as good or as functional as it could be. Well it’s time to buck up and get this learning curve completely out of the way so you make the right choice next time. Below are some sweet Illustrator tuts that will leave you in vector heaven once your done. Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular photo editing programs that has ever been created. This tutorial teaches you how to make a portrait of William Shakespeare in Illustrator using text. Article Link Advertisement A very interesting tutorial, from Design Instruct, that takes you behind the scenes and shows you the illustration process from start to finish. Article Link Article Link Article Link Article Link Article Link Article Link