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Textures In Modern Web Design - Smashing Magazine

Textures In Modern Web Design - Smashing Magazine
Advertisement If you look around at well-designed websites in CSS galleries or any other source of design inspiration, you’ll see that texture is extremely common in modern Web design. One of the reasons it’s so popular is because of its versatility. Textures can be used in countless different ways and in a wide variety of design styles. Textures in Web design can be very subtle, so that the visitor hardly notices, or they can be a focal point of the design. When examining exemplary Web designs that employ textures, you’ll notice that textures are used in background images, headers, footers, sidebars, content areas and even fonts. One of the reasons texture is so useful to designers and so popular is because adding it to a design can be quick and easy with a program like Photoshop. Gallery: Texture in Modern Web Design Now, we’ll take a look at 50 websites in which texture has been applied to the design to improve it in some way. Textured Backgrounds Textured Headers Sidebar Texture 1. 2.

Thomas Rondony - 30+ Best Texture Tutorials for Photoshop Making art or various designs will often require different textures. It can be that you need it for that extra grungy look or maybe you are trying to recreate a piece of denim for a logo. It can be very useful to be able to make your own textures in Photoshop. This way you get the exact effect you want, its customizable, no need to pay anyone for the use of it etc. I’ve collected some of the best texture tutorials I know of and hope these will inspire! Enjoy! 1. Denim, a rugged cotton twill textile has been around for a long time. 2. The texture of Grass can be used for many different designs, and also here the variations are many. 3. The crumbled paper texture is a texture that always is popular. 4. Military style textures are mainly popular for those who make artwork that features military machinery or personnel. 5. These cool and versatile scales can be made in any color combination you want. 6. This is a texture trying to recreate the look of the good old Mac Powerbook (g4). 7. 8.

Retro and Vintage In Modern Web Design Advertisement Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale. When applying “old-style” elements to their works, designers produce creative and appealing designs that make their websites stand out and look really different. Retro and vintage designs exhibit graphic solutions that are strongly influenced by the time period that they are supposed to represent. Such elements create a nostalgic atmosphere, awaken feelings and memories and attempt to communicate information effectively using emotions. The Secrets Of Vintage and Retro Designs What elements do designers use to create a genuine vintage or retro atmosphere? illustrations from old posters, movies, newspapers, CDs, vinyls, ads; old-style typography (e.g. Custom Design6 Prahba29

65 Beautiful Fonts You Can Download For Free Freebie 65 Beautiful Fonts You Can Download For Free by Alex on Aug 9, 2012 • 9:43 am 17 Comments There are so many free fonts all around the web these days and sometimes it makes me think is their any really point purchasing fonts. If you like fonts, you’ll love our favorite premium font, check it out here on Envato Market. Neuton Font Family Download Font → Intro free font Download Font → Bemio Download Font → Exo Font Family Download Font → Rex Free Font Download Font → Metropolis 1920 Download Font → Free Typeface NeoDeco Download Font → Hagin Free Font Download Font → Mosaic Leaf Download Font → Cubano Download Font → Cubic Sans Download Font → Banana Brick Download Font → Sofia Download Font → Sansita One Download Font → Villa Didot Download Font → Accent Download Font → Lavanderia Download Font → Blanch Download Font → Lorena Download Font → Age Download Font → Arvo Download Font → Banda Download Font → Bigmouth Download Font → Cappuccino Download Font → Code Download Font → Copse Download Font → Cube Download Font → Dan Days Deibi Dekar

Thomas Rondony - Photoshop: How To Make An Awesome Grungy Paper Texture From Scratch  If our freebies have benefited you personally or have helped you earn a profit please consider donating via paypal. Donate Now Many of you might remember my Free High-Res Grungy Paper Textures I gave away a while back. Step 1: Scan Get a natural-brown-colored piece of paper (or brown paper bag), give it a good crinkle, then flatten it back out and scan it in. If you don’t have a scanner click here to download the image I’m using from Flickr if you’d still like to follow along. Step 2: Add Texture First, we’re going to add a little texture to the paper itself. Select “Canvas” from the drop down menu, set the scale to around 100, and the depth between 2 and 4, then Click OK. You should now see something like below: (full size close-up) Now we have a canvas-like texture, but it only goes in one direction. Now that your image is on it’s side, we’re going to apply the texture again, this will give us the grain going in both directions. Step 3: New Layer Now it’s time to start grunging it up. Done!

More Web Design Trends For 2009 Advertisement Last week we presented 10 Web Design Trends For 20091, our review of the most promising developments and techniques in web design that may become big in 2009. In the first part we covered embossing letters (“letterpress”), rich user interfaces, PNG transparency, big typography, carousels and media blocks. This post is the second part of our review. You may want to take a look at the following related posts: Web Design Trends For 2009 Let’s first take a closer look at some of the trends we identified, discovered and observed over the last months. 1. As we pointed out a couple of months ago in the showcase 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box8, we are observing a strong trend towards more individual and creative layouts. In these out-of-the-box-designs, the overall creative approach is often more important and more memorable than the attention to details. 2. 3. A design with multiple columns (3+ columns) is not necessarily a complex design. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

25 Free Pixel-Perfect Fonts for 8-Bit Designs We all know that retro and vintage designs are hot right now. Not to mention the fact that geeks, gamers, nerds, and dorks are taking over the world. From the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Bros. feeling nostalgic for their old school video games, to the currently popular video game Minecraft, to the animated film “Wreck it Ralph,” 8-bit design is all the rage. Do you want to perfectly pixel-fy your next design? These 8-bit fonts are just what you need for any retro arcade-themed T-shirt, poster, website, and of course, game. Free Pixel-Perfect Fonts for 8-Bit Designs Munro (Download) SansTaiNa (Download) Pixel Noir (Download) Press Start 2P (Download) Fipps (Download) Pxlvetica (Download) 04b 30 (Download) Free Pixel (Download) Computer Pixel-7 (Download) Thin Pixel-7 (Download) BitOut (Download) Pixel LCD-7 (Download) Minecraftia (Download) Silkscreen (Download) Bubble Pixel-7 (Download) V5 Xtender (Download) Digiffiti (Download) Retro Computer (Download) Vermin Vibes 1989 (Download) Wide Pixel-7 (Download) 8Bit Wonder

Thomas Rondony - 100 Beautiful Free Textures - Smashing Magazine Use of texture in Web design is extremely common. Part of the reason textures are so useful to designers is the relative ease of the integrating one into a design if a high-quality textured image already exists, not to mention the endless possibilities . Fortunately, plenty of photographers and designers are willing to share their work with the rest of us so that we can use them in a number of different ways. In this post, we’ll look at 100 different textures in a wide variety of different categories. For more on textures see: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. (al) Leave a Comment Yay! Web Design Trends For 2009 Advertisement We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go mainstream and become a classic approach. As a result, new design approaches come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them, new trends emerge. Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. This article covers only 10 of the over 25 trends we’ve identified over the last months. Update: the second part of our review1 is now published as well. Web Design Trends For 2009 Let’s first take a closer look at the main trends we identified, discovered and observed over the last months. Embossing Letterpress Rich user interfaces PNG transparency Big typography Font replacement (sIFR, etc.) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

2BIT: Subtle tees. Symptoms Of An Epidemic: Web Design Trends Why You Should Get Excited About Emotional Branding Globalization, low-cost technologies and saturated markets are making products and services interchangeable and barely distinguishable. As a result, today’s brands must go beyond face value and tap into consumers’ deepest subconscious emotions to win the marketplace. In recent decades, the economic base has shifted from production to consumption, from needs to wants, from objective to subjective. We’re moving away from the functional and technical characteristics of the industrial era, into a time when consumers are making buying decisions based on how they feel about a company and its offer. Read more... A Guide To Validating Product Ideas With Quick And Simple Experiments You probably know by now that you should speak with customers and test your idea before building a product. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. Read more... Read more...

Designing Websites With Inkscape | Tucson Labs Inkscape is a great program to have in your toolbox as a web designer. It’s similar to Adobe Illustrator, but the user interface and tools are slightly different. It’s also an open source program released under the GPL, and is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. This program can be used on on its own without the use of photo editing software like Photoshop or Gimp to create professional websites. This tutorial will walk you through some basic techniques for creating websites with Inkscape using this very basic blog design as a guide. Document Set Up Open up a new document in Inkscape and edit the document size by navigating to File » Document Properties or just press Ctrl + Shift + D. A width of 960 pixels is popular for the web because most people in the US have a computer with a resolution of 1280 by 800 or greater. The Layout The next thing we need to think about is the site’s layout. Creating An Export Layer Guides Design The Drop Shadow The body The logo Main Content

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