Goals are important to have in life. They are especially important for website design, because without any goals, you have nothing to shoot for in the end and nothing to measure your success by. Goals help designers focus on the important things and not lose sight of what you want in the end; goals are what help designers deliver outstanding sites every time.
Information architecture can be a daunting subject for designers who’ve never tried it before. Also, creating successful infographics and visualizations takes skill and practice, along with some advance planning. But anyone with graphic design skills can learn to create infographics that are effective and get data across in a user-friendly manner.
Below are a collection of resources to get you going down the information architecture and data visualization path. Whether you just want to become more familiar with infographics and data visualizations for occasional use or are thinking of making it a career, the resources below will surely come in handy. There are also some beautiful examples and more roundups to see even more fantastic graphics.
While many articles try to dissect the process of designing a logo itself, I will attempt to share tips from my experiences with branding-focused logo design for the real world.
With the surge of “stock” logos, the quality of branding for new companies is literally going downhill. Many new designers fail to see that a logo, unlike any other design element, is literally the face of a company, and hence attached to a much larger beast. You can’t peel it off from a book and slap it onto things like a sticker.
Many of today’s design styles derive from Swiss-style graphic design, now more commonly known today as “modern design.”
The style is recognized for its unique and rather groundbreaking attention to typography. Needless to say, Switzerland’s design culture has taken the world by storm.
Of course, the style has grown beyond the graphic design industry and made its way into web design.
When we web designers search for inspiration, though, we tend to stick to this one culture.
Though a great source of inspiration, let’s look at some graphic design styles from other parts of the world. Perhaps we could incorporate at least subtle elements from those other cultures into our current style.
There is an old saying that rings true, no matter what forum or context it’s applied in. ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.’ We were thinking of this the other day, and how with some minor tweakage the statement could become a powerful statement of affirmation for designers, or at least it could lead us towards this freeing affirmation.
In this article, we’ll showcase website layouts and navigation structures that really break the mold. The designers of these websites have seen dozens of clone websites out there but have sought their own way. The unusual website layouts and navigation that results can either be very successful and innovative or disorienting for visitors. You decide. When you browse the showcase, think not so much about functionality as about why you design and develop the way you do.
Imagine working on a thousand-piece puzzle without having a picture on the box to guide you. What happens when you get to the very end, only you can’t seem to find the last piece to finish off the puzzle?
I’m sure there are many out there who can relate to this story. Every once in a while, we all get stuck on something, and can’t figure out what the missing piece is. Sometimes, we don’t even realize we’re missing a piece to begin with. It’s only when someone else stops by and looks at the puzzle, pointing out that it’s not finished yet, or instantly finds where the last piece fits that we can move on to the next puzzle.
There’s an absolute ton of material out there on the internet, and in the so-called Blogsphere, specifically geared towards helping designers hone their craft. There are tricks and tips, tutorials and lists. There are in depth articles, an ark load of inspiration (an ark, of course, being a very large boat) and innumerable freebie resources for you to use.
It’s like a veritable designer’s Utopia, a wide open land echoing with the promise of growing knowledge and better design.
Promotions play a vital role in marketing your product. High quality design gives a noticeable impact to your product awareness among the target audience. In this tutorial, we will design a promotional T-shirt for a website that is exclusively created for PHP enthusiasts.
This is a special tutorial sponsored by Astute Graphics that incorporates the use of their high-quality Phantasm CS (Studio or Publisher) Illustrator plugins. Our aim is to show a common programmer who is very enthusiastic about PHP. If so, they shall join the website with no delay. Let’s see how we achieve our goal in designing that strategic, promotional T-shirt!
Have you ever looked at a web site and immediately been impressed with it’s design? Then you take a closer look and discover what really makes it amazing. It’s the subtle details. Some designers are great at including this in their designs. These types of designers are border line perfectionists and aren’t afraid to make full use of the zoom tool and 1px brush size in Photoshop. In this article, we will look at several ways subtle details are being used in web designs to take them from great…to amazing.
