Create a Stylized Election Poster Using Illustrator
It’s election season! Time for graphic designers to start helping clients design posters for their upcoming campaigns. It’s a great time to be a designer as each and every city has candidates making their run for spots. Using Live Trace and Live Paint in Illustrator makes stylized posters an easy task. This tutorial walks you through how to quickly make stylized posters that are vector based. This lets you use and re-use designs in various sizes – billboards to coffee [...]
Guidelines to Follow when Building for the App Store (iOS & Android)
There are a lot of factors to consider before building and submitting a mobile application. Developers have plenty of resources on the web for consulting official documentation. But there are some traits you should consider about the overall process. Whether you are building for Apple or Android-powered devices will make all the difference. Some developers have the confidence to build for both platforms which is staggering. I’ll try to mesh ideas together so they apply in both development environments equally. [...]
Where should I really be sharing?
Social networking is constantly evolving. In many cases, what was cool two years ago is now next to worthless. For example ‘the Digg effect‘ used to be massive and could really make a big difference to the visitors to a website. That was then, this is now. The Digg effect is now nearly nonexistent, paling in significance to the other social networks. Digg, like Stumbleupon and Reddit, is just a bookmarking system with some added kudos. Where as things like [...]
On Tastes, Trends and Personal Styles
The most important thing a designer needs to have is a good taste. A good taste at identifying great work. It doesn’t matter if your work doesn’t match up with your taste yet. It will slowly but steadily catch up. Ultimately your taste ends up defining your style. In fact your taste will be few steps ahead of your talent in the initial years of your career. Your taste can tell the difference in quality between what you want to [...]
50 Detailed Icon Design Tutorials for Photoshop
We are visual creatures. As much as we like to think we appreciate the inner quality of things, the reality is that we start off judging every book by its cover. It comes as no surprise then that icons have a huge impact on how we experience the digital world. So as a web designer, the ability to create quality icons is critical to your ability to breathe life into people’s online experience. In this post, Jameel Khan guides you [...]
CSS3-Only Tutorials and Techniques for Your Next Design
Today we are showcasing some of best tutorials and techniques that will help you create beautiful and functional designs by using only CSS, focusing primarily on the properties of CSS3. All with absolutely NO JAVASCRIPT. For the most part, the techniques we have highlighted below, can be used for everyday use, others probably not. Please do check browser compatibility when implementing any of these techniques. You might also like… CSS3 Compatibility Tools, Resources and References for Internet Explorer → CSS [...]
Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.122)
This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy 
If you would like to receive our daily updates and keep up to date with the latest and greatest articles and resources from the design community, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebookor by subscribing to our RSS feed. Our Weekly Design News has been sponsored by MediaLoot. Check them out for some seriously useful resources [...]
Focus On: Mobile App Design Trends for 2012
Mobile applications are on the rise as more consumers switch over to smartphones. Between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating system there are plenty of wonderful apps to browse through. The past year has built up a catalog of exceptional design patterns which will continue over into 2012. In this article I’d like to spend a bit of time examining some of the more popular trends. Graphics designers are jumping on board quickly and appear willing to share their knowledge. [...]
Tips for Wireframing a Usable Mobile App Interface
A lot of time and energy is required to build mobile iOS/Android apps. Aside from the coding and UI design you need to plan functionality ahead of time. This way you can start programming immediately and implement key features without a hassle. The best way to start off a mobile application is through wireframing. This is a design process where you lay out each of the app’s views in detail. This could be just a rough sketch, but many designers [...]
How to Build a Stylish CSS3 Search Box
A search box is probably one of the most common UI elements around, and I think there is no need to explain its purpose anymore. Whether it’s about a website or a web application, to increase user experience for it, you may want to add a stylish search box. Today, you will learn how to create a nice CSS3 search box using pseudo-elements. Before we begin you can download the Source Files or view the Demo The HTML As you [...]
40 Fresh Highly Creative Illustrator Tutorials
In this post, we’ll be sharing with you a collection of useful tutorials that will help you to to use Adobe Illustrator in a variety of new ways. Whether you are a pro or a budding novice, you are bound to find something that will help you. Below we present a collection of some of the latest, most useful and highly creative tutorials for Adobe Illustrator. Realistic, Vector Bubbles In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create colorful, realistic bubbles. [...]
Getting Started Building iPhone Apps in Xcode 4.2
The newest version of Xcode comes packaged with a few noticeable interface changes. For beginners and intermediate users it can be difficult figuring out even the most basic functionality. And although Apple’s online documentation is well-written, it’s certainly not friendly for the average user. So in this guide I’d like to put together some basic steps for building any iOS app. I’ll be focusing exclusively on iPhone & iPod Touch devices since iPad opens up a whole new chapter of [...]
Freebie: Colorful 3D UI Kit
We have a fantastic freebie for all of you web designers out there, you’ll love this:) Designed by Land-of-Web, the Colorful 3D UI Kit comes in .psd format and is full of beautifully designed modern web elements covering almost all aspects of web design, including: • Drop-Downs, Silders & Progress Bars • Switches, Tabs, Icons, Tool-Tips and many useful Navigation Elements • Search and Select Boxes • Media Control Buttons and Mini Player UI Kit Preview Download the UI Kit [...]
Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.116)
This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy If you would like to receive our daily updates and kepp up to date with the latest and greatest articles and resources from the design community, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebookor by subscribing to our RSS feed. git – the simple guide – no deep shit! Things We Wish Clients Would Say IE6 declared [...]
40 Effectively Designed Non-Profit and Charity Web Sites
A charity or cause may not need the sleek sales pages of a business on the web, but a poorly designed one could still mean the difference between helping people or failing to do so. Therefore, a non profit website design should be appealing enough to invite the organization’s targeted donors and volunteers. The basics of web design are enough to make a difference – An easy to navigate and user friendly website with careful use of fonts, colors and [...]
10 Rules to Follow for Popups and Modal Windows
Skillfully used popups or unclicked modal windows are among the best ways to attract newsletter subscribers, to sell affiliate products, and to generally get your message noticed. The problem with them is that they are at times far too obtrusive and users do hate it when you bombard them with popups. This is why you do need to find the balance between using popups for marketing purposes and keeping your visitors happy. Here are 10 basic rules to follow to [...]
Our 50 Favorite Web Developers Resources and Tools from 2011
As a developer, anything that can save you just a little bit of time is well worth its weight in gold. If you agree with that statement, you will love this. What we have for you is our selection of the best, the most useful and the most innovative tools and resources from 2011. That includes frameworks, boilerplates, apps, Javascript resources, CSS3 animations tools…and on…and on. So, no matter what, you are guaranteed to discover something completely new and really, [...]
Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.115)
This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy If you would like to receive our daily updates and kepp up to date with the latest and greatest articles and resources from the design community, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebookor by subscribing to our RSS feed. Is Flash dead? The History of HTML5 Font Management Tips for Web Designers How to use Firebug [...]
20 Amazing Implementations of HTML5 Canvas
In this article, we explore some of the most awe-inspiring implementations of HTML5′s canvas element so far. From all of the new HTML5 tags, canvas is likely to be the most powerful. In a nutshell, the canvas element is a drawable region defined in HTML code with height and width attributes. With it, web developers are able to create visually inspiring implementations previously restricted to only Flash. You could create some yourself or you could take advantage of some of [...]