September 2nd, 2010

Twitter Background Design – Great Tips and Gorgeous Examples

We all know that gaining Twitter followers is down to how often you tweet and what you tweet about – or if you’re a website owner and use Twitter, a way to communicate with your readers. However, there are additional ways to increase the chances of new stumblers to follow you, one of them being by having an interesting background.

This isn’t a quick route to Twitter success, but it most certainly does help. By designing your own interesting Twitter background you can express your personality through images. One example is if you’re a creative person (which you probably are as you’re on Psdtuts+!) you would likely be able to put your skills to use and produce something beautiful that other creatives will appreciate. If they like your profile page, the chances are they’ll like your tweets, therefore following you!

August 28th, 2010

How to Design a Web Banner That Stands Out

In today’s world, the need of advertising is growing directly in proportion with the growing economy. Advertising has become an inevitable element of businesses. Every company is adopting the concept of advertising  and is constantly striving to use new mediums of advertisement by which people can be attracted. Internet is one of those newest and the most inexpensive mediums of advertising being used nowadays. The Internet is inundated with different tools of advertisement to cater to the needs of any business. Among these tools, Web Banners are one interesting and quite a useful source of Internet advertisement which is being used by many big and small companies.

Web banner generally imparts a very tremendous effect on the people’s minds. It gives a constant recall to the web user as well as communicates the objective in a smart way. It also makes the viewer realize that the certain group or company is there in the market marking its presence in all ways possible. With an increase in Internet usage, web banner also act as an effective mean of brand identity for both its customers and its competitors.

August 22nd, 2010

A Practical Guide to Designing With Faces

One of the principal functions of professional design, if not the central function, is to draw the attention of the viewer. Everyone has a message that they want to get across, but getting people to actually stop and take that message in is no easy task.

Designers are therefore tasked with attempting to use every human’s natural attraction to aesthetic beauty in such a way that it becomes possible to capture the attention of an audience almost without them even realizing it.

August 19th, 2010

Designing Like a Writer

I don’t think it’s any secret that I enjoy writing. That’s part of the reason that I love running and working on this blog so much (and why I write for other design blogs, too). It gives me a chance to do something that I really enjoy. Moreover, it also provides me the opportunity to combine my love of writing with my passion for design. It’s probably also part of the reason that some of the articles here get a little long sometimes!

Regular readers will also know that my educational background is in English literature, and that I am frequently thinking about the connection between language and design. Well, dear readers, I’ve been doing it again. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the whole issue of the craft and the process and found myself wondering what it would be like to envision my writing process as a design process.

August 13th, 2010

Call-to-Action Brochure Designing

In today’s world, the success of a business greatly depends upon the effectiveness of its marketing communication. It is important for the organization to communicate to the potential customers and the best tool for one-to-one communication is the brochure.

Brochures really help the marketers in their pursuit and to achieve their goals well. This source of communication provides greater details about the products in an attracting manner. Basically, the brochure design makes the information more appealing. If you give out the information about your product or service without a properly and professionally designed brochure, it will bring nothing but half-hearted results.

July 21st, 2010

10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Be a Designer

Did you know that becoming a designer is relatively easy? You go to school (some people even skip that part), you interview for a job or start your own freelancing business, and then you start getting paid in exchange for making stuff look cool.

Becoming a great designer — like becoming great at anything — takes a lot of practice, hard work and dedication. Maybe you are a student wondering if a design major or minor is the right way to go. Or maybe you are already a designer but you’re wondering whether a career as a designer is really right for you.

July 17th, 2010

How to Enhance Your Website Using Breadcrumbs – Showcase

On large websites and websites with hierarchically arranged pages, breadcrumbs are a really great way for users to navigate around the web site. They are a type of secondary navigation scheme which indicates the exact location of a user on a website. They greatly improve the findability of a web site’s sections and pages.

Breadcrumbs, in the simplest form, are horizontally arranged text links separated by a greater than symbol (>). Using breadcrumbs on your website can be really beneficial. It provides a convenient way for users to navigate around the website and also allows users to establish their location on the website.

July 4th, 2010

Designing for the Moment

There has been some discussion in the past about timelessness in design. In an article all about the important elements of logo design, Jacob Cass includes timeless design as one of the 5 key elements of a good logo. In the article, Jacob presents a really interesting and telling timeline that contrasts the logos of Pepsi and Coca-Cola across a period that spans over a century. Interestingly, while the Pepsi side has 11 different variations, the Coca-Cola logo is shown to have remained the same.

June 25th, 2010

Design For Efficiency: Techniques & Templates

Yep, it’s me again. The pro-process designer who wants you to use smart objects and break those awful Photoshop habits. Are you noticing a theme yet? I love efficiency. And organizing. And most of all, organizing efficiently. So I’ve got yet another process-tweaking post for you, and this time it’s epicly long and comes with free PSD templates. FREE PSD TEMPLATES, people. And I didn’t just write that for the search traffic. They really exist.

June 10th, 2010

The Makeup of a Designer

Recently, and thanks to a Smashing Magazine tweet, I stumbled across an interesting article over on FINCH. The title of the article is “You Suck at Design (Here’s Why)“, and the piece itself explains an interesting phenomenon by which those who truly understand a particular subject area – like design – are actually those best equipped to judge the quality of their own work, and thus tend to undervalue themselves. On the other hand, those who know nothing about that same subject area tend to overvalue their own abilities, simply because they are unable to actually see the mistakes they’re making.

June 9th, 2010

Brilliant Tips and Guidelines for Professional Logo Design

Designing your own logo doesn’t have to be too hard as long as you have some guidelines to stick to, some decent software, a huge portion of creativity and a few hours to spare. In this article I’ll try provide you with the guideline part and give a couple of tips on how to get the rest.

Logo-design is an art form, there’s no doubt about that. There are own websites, forums and communities dedicated to the logo creation process.
This article is for those who aren’t necessarily experts of logo design but want to learn a bit about the basics of the process. Maybe you’re a new freelancer or want to design a logo as part of a bigger project. Either way this article is for you.