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Recently in Design Category

thomas_m_schmitz
Full disclosure: I am not a designer. I cannot select color palettes. My favorite textures involve brushed steel. Whenever I walk by, our design team seems either out for coffee or in a meeting. That said, even I can recognize colossal web design blunders. It's amazing how the perfectly wrong photo will rip the eyes out of your sockets and whimper them off from a web page's correct eye-tracking path. Design is subjective. You see the world like no one else. What seems like a perfectly comforting image to you and me might creep-out an animal rights activist or a …
jarrod_medrano
The Magic Number If you have ever had any interest in the art of graphic design, chances are you have heard of the golden ratio. Throughout history, artists, mathematicians and musicians alike have studied this peculiar number. Some say that it is the most aesthetically pleasing of all proportions, while others contend that this has merely been ingrained into our collective consciousness through centuries of overuse. It is said that Leonardo Da Vinci used the golden ratio to construct his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. It can be found in subjects as diverse as seashells, hurricanes, galaxies, and even the path …
When designing a website for a business, it’s easy to overlook the little things. A lot of time is spent on design, layout, and development. Other, less glamorous things like image file size and product images are often overlooked. Attention to the little details in a website can make all the difference in the world when it comes to catching a customer’s eye. In less than five minutes I’ll teach you how to spruce up your product images in Photoshop. Keep in mind you can do this with any jpg. I start with a nice high res photograph of a …
Web 2.0 was sighted at a local party last evening. Many who attended expressed that he was ‘Not as cool as we remembered.’ Recently I was poking around a few design blogs and noticed something interesting. It seems like the trends and styles that were so popular only a year ago are starting to fall out of favor. Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Wall have all but declared web 2.0’s glossy style dead. Last year, or maybe two years ago, I got a lot of inspiration from this page, as I’m sure many others did. If you’re wondering what I …
The internet today is filled with tutorials on how to design your web site 'web 2.0' style. I thought it would be fun to teach you some of the horrible design trends from the past. So I invite you to return to a simpler time, a time when people still listened to TLC's 'No Scrubs' (not me) and terrorism was something that only happened in Steven Seagal movies. Here's how to design your website like it's 1999. Use a lot of Stock Photography This is a website convention that never seems to go out of style. The idea seems to …
Recently I was looking for a way to make some cool rusted metal text in Photoshop, and after searching through a few tutorials on Google I decided that all of them were garbage. So I messed around for a while and created my own. …