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+
Designers Toolbox 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Beautiful/Decay Cult of the Creative Arts Gabriel Moreno does beautiful work with such basic materials: a pen and a brush. His illustrations begin in black and white, upon which Moreno builds, adding layers of color and images of other places and people tattooed into their skin. Flowers, birds, and faces organically expand from his subjects, as if a rush of creativity, or a dream, is escaping them. 10 Useful Web Apps for Designers DesignWoop welcomes this guest post by Tomas Laurinavicius. Since the iPhone and iPad entered the market you can hear lots of news about apps for these devices. Tons of apps available today and you can find everything you want. But today I would like to share 10 handy web-based apps for designers. To use these apps you don’t need to buy an iPhone or iPad, you can use them without any additional software or device, you just need a web browser. Invoice Bubble Invoice Bubble is free invoice software that lets you create an invoice and send to your client in seconds. Gridulator Tell Gridulator your layout width and the number of columns you want, and it’ll spit back all the possible grids that have nice, round integers. Browize Useful tool for resizing current browser window size to set or custom resolutions. Screenr Screenr is a web-based tool that lets you create screencasts without installing any software. Launchlist Kuler Favigen Easily generate favicon for your website. Fillerati Loads.in