Filed under Art, Design, Inspiration, News, weekly, weekly favs by Chris Spooner
The Art & Design Inspiration Fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from John Duvengar, Junichi Tsuneoka, Travis Price, Karoly Kiralyfalvi and Anna Johnstone. Eternal Melody Records by John Duvengar Google [...]
Continue Reading "Art & Design Inspiration Fix for May 18th 2012"Filed under Articles, Design, Inspiration, roundup, showcase, Trends, Typography, Web Design by Chris Spooner
With websites being built from digital code it’s difficult to imagine them being crafted by hand, but this post showcases a bunch of websites that feature custom hand lettering in traditional mediums. In place of fonts these websites boast hand crafted typography to add a real artistic touch to the design. G’nosh Austin Eastciders The [...]
Continue Reading "Showcase of Artistic Hand Lettering in Web Design"Filed under adobe illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Design, design tutorial, Graphic design, Illustrator, illustrator tutorial, photoshop, photoshop tutorial, poster, Tutorial, Tutorials by Chris Spooner
My absolute favourite style of motorcycle is the custom “bobber”. I love the stripped down appearance and the raw vintage styling. It’s my plan to chop up a bike of my own one day, but for now I have to settle with designing custom motorcycle posters instead. Follow this step by step Photoshop and Illustrator [...]
Continue Reading "Create a Dark Vintage Style Motorcycle Poster Design"Filed under Articles, Coding, CSS, css3, Design, generators, interface, links, Resources, roundup, Tips, Tools, Web Design by Chris Spooner
With the latest advances in CSS3 many of the effects that were once only achievable in Photoshop can now be replicated in CSS code, but it’s sometimes difficult to visualise the appearance of these effects when staring at a few lines of syntax. This is where CSS generators come in handy, this roundup of tools [...]
Continue Reading "Handy Roundup of CSS3 Generators and Tools"Filed under adobe illustrator, Articles, custom, Design, Graphic design, Inspiration, lettering, logo design, logos, showcase, Typography, Vector by Chris Spooner
One way to create an absolutely unique logo design is to craft the lettering by hand, as opposed to selecting an existing font. This allows the designer to create the perfect logo with their own custom ligatures, tails and loops. This post showcases 20 inspiring examples of custom lettering logos, each featuring the designer’s initial [...]
Continue Reading "Inspiring Examples of Custom Lettering Logo Designs"Filed under Art, Design, Inspiration, News, weekly, weekly favs by Chris Spooner
The Art & Design Inspiration Fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from Rubens Cantuni, Félix Ajenjo, Dariusz Markiw, Matthew Reilly and Ruel Jun Andaya. Nike T-Shirt by Rubens Cantuni Authority [...]
Continue Reading "Art & Design Inspiration Fix for May 4th 2012"Filed under access all areas, book, Design, Giveaway, members, Premium, Web Design by Chris Spooner
Awwwards, the online showcase of the world’s best website designs, recently released an awesome book full of design inspiration, titled The Best 365 Websites Around the World 2011. As the title suggests, it’s filled with the best CSS website designs fr…
Continue Reading "Awwwards Web Design Book Giveaway for Members"Filed under accessibility, Coding, CSS, Design, dribbble, HTML, Portfolio, standards, techniques, Tips, Tutorial, Tutorials, Web Design by Chris Spooner
Continue this step by step tutorial to create a simple single page portfolio website design that will self-update using shots from your Dribbble profile. In this second and final part of the series we’ll go through the process of building the Photoshop concept into a working HTML/CSS web page then add the jQuery plugins to [...]
Continue Reading "Build a Basic Dribbble Fed Portfolio Website (Part 2/2)"Filed under Art, Design, Inspiration, News, weekly, weekly favs by Chris Spooner
The Art & Design Inspiration Fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from Andy Gilmore, Mads Berg, Gerrel Saunders, Mats Ottdal and Roberto Ortiz. 08-20-2009 by Andy Gilmore Franks Originale by [...]
Continue Reading "Art & Design Inspiration Fix for April 20th 2012"Filed under Design, mobile, responsive design by Bruce Lawson
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There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices? Acclaimed usability pundit Jakob Nielsen thinks that you should make separate mobile websites. I disagree.
Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert, recently published his latest mobile usability guidelines. He summarizes, “Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.”
Continue Reading "Why We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites"Filed under Coding, css3, Design by Tom Giannattasio
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This year’s experiment: a 3D pop-up book á la Dr. Seuss. If you haven’t seen it yet, hop on over and take a look. The website was a test to see how far SVG and CSS 3D transforms could be pushed. I learned a lot in the process and wanted to share some of the techniques that I found helpful when working in 3D space.
Before we jump in, please note that explaining everything about the website without boring you to death would be damn near impossible. For your sake and mine, I’ll provide just brief takeaways. As you skim through the code snippets, be aware that jQuery is being used and that a lot of code has been removed for simplicity (including browser prefixes).
Continue Reading "Beercamp: An Experiment With CSS 3D"Filed under Design, dribbble, guide, How to, interface, photoshop, photoshop tutorial, Portfolio, Tips, Tutorial, Tutorials, Web Design, website by Chris Spooner
Follow this step by step tutorial to create a simple single page portfolio website design that will self-update using shots from your Dribbble profile. In this first of the two part series we’ll go through the process of designing the website concept in Photoshop, before coding up the HTML and CSS next week. The portfolio [...]
Continue Reading "Build a Basic Dribbble Fed Portfolio Website (Part 1/2)"Filed under Articles, Design, doodle, Graphic design, hand draw, illustration, links, Logo, logo design, sketch by Chris Spooner
Logos don’t always have to feature perfectly designed abstract icons or devices, sometimes a basic hand drawn sketch or doodle can express the casual or fun values a brand is aiming for. This post rounds up a huge collection of over 50 cool logos all based on a hand drawn style. Piccolo by Matt Vergotis [...]
Continue Reading "Showcase of Cool Hand Drawn, Doodle & Sketch Logos"Filed under Animation, Articles, Coding, CSS, css3, Design, keyframes, links, Resources, Web Design by Chris Spooner
We started seeing experimentation and articles about CSS3 @keyframes animation in 2011, but back then support was limited to webkit browsers. As of mid 2011 Firefox 5 gained support, and we can expect the next incarnation of Internet Explorer (10) to also show support, so now is the perfect time to get to grips with [...]
Continue Reading "Useful Links for Learning CSS @Keyframes Animation"Filed under app, Button, Design, dev, effects, font, Graphic, Graphic design, Illustrator, map, mobile, photoshop, Resource, Resources, Template, Text, Tutorial, Typography, Vector, web by Tara Horner
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 [...]
Filed under Art, Design, Inspiration, News, weekly, weekly favs by Chris Spooner
The Art & Design Inspiration Fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from Like Minded Studio, Jordan Metcalf, Linza, Ricky Ruff and Florian Nicolle. Way of the David by Like Minded [...]
Continue Reading "Art & Design Inspiration Fix for April 6th 2012"Filed under Design, Typography by Laura Franz
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The practice of using a large letter to mark the start of a text has been around for almost two thousand years. Illustrated caps increased usability by marking important passages and guiding readers through the text. Unlike their historic counterparts, drop caps on the Web don’t add value in terms of usability or readability—and they are hard for Web developers to control, often rendering differently across browsers.
Yet, front-end designers and clients often want to use drop caps as decorative elements. How should we implement them? Just as scribes, artisans, and early printers had a variety of methods for creating initial capitals, we Web designers have multiple methods to choose from. We can use an image of a letter, create a class to enlarge and place a letter, or use a first-child:first-letter to enlarge and place the first letter of the first paragraph. But which method should we use? Which method remains consistent across browsers? Which is most accessible?
Continue Reading "Drop Caps: Historical Use And Current Best Practices With CSS"Filed under adobe illustrator, cartoon character, character, Design, design tutorial, Graphic design, illustration, illustration tips, Illustrator, illustrator tutorial, screenprint, texture, Tutorial, Tutorials, Vector, vector graphics by Chris Spooner
I’m sure we all remember painting with sponge (or potato!) stamps as a child, but back then we didn’t really appreciate the cool distressed effect the printing technique created. Today designers and illustrators strive to add that retro/vintage style to their work with textures, so in this tutorial we’ll cover the process of creating a [...]
Continue Reading "How To Create a Vector Sponge Art Effect in Illustrator"Filed under Art, Design, Inspiration, News, weekly, weekly favs by Chris Spooner
The Art & Design Inspiration Fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from Federico de Luca, Josh Dykgraaf, David Delin, Marcelo Schultz and Matthew Benkert. London Anime by Federico de Luca [...]
Continue Reading "Art & Design Inspiration Fix for March 30th 2012"Filed under book, Competition, Design, email, HTML, icon, Icons, iphone, Logo, Template, theme, Vector, web, Wordpress by Speckyboy Editors
For this weeks giveaway we have 10 Premium Shock Bundles, courtesy of the guys behind Theme Nation. All you have to do for a chance of winning one of these books is leave a comment below telling us why you would like to win this bundle. The Shock Bundle The bundle (usual cost $129) includes a whopping 107 Premium WordPress Themes, 30,000 Iconshock icons, 28,577 additional icons (14,000 icons for Android, 14,000 iPhone icons, 427 credit card icons and 150 [...]