Smashing Slab Serif Typography
Typography has been around for Centuries if not Millennia. It has played a major role in communication and a world without type can be extremely hard to comprehend. Ever since the first letter was punched, typography has advanced significantly. There are now a number of different styles and fonts to choose from, that almost anyone can use on their website or magazine/book. The type of style I will be looking at today is Slab Serif. I have recently noticed a increase in popularity in this style so I thought I would collect a few of my favorite fonts and typefaces and share them with you today.
The hidden power of border-radius
So hopefully after reading – Understanding CSS – Padding, Positioning and CSS3 – you understand the basics of CSS and have been experimenting with other properties. It is important to remember that some properties will allow you to achieve effects that aren’t necessarily stated. In this post we will explore the property border-radius and how it can be used to create circles, semi-cricles and quarter-circles. It also has the potential to produce some terrific designs using just CSS – no images.
The six fundamental ways of adding depth to your designs
The typical web design, you will notice, has advanced a considerable amount since the days of the animated and somewhat awfully designed geocities websites. With the improvements in the markup languages HTML and CSS and the incredible graphic software now available, website design has become an industry in itself. It is therefore important to stay up to date with the latest trends and to also to be imaginative and to spark new ones. It is because of this that many people have begun to experiment with depth, this article will take a long hard look at depth and explain various ways in which it can be achieved.
Latest posts
Flawless iPad user interface designs that you just have to see
Jun
One of the many reasons to why I want to buy an iPad is the beautiful design it features. Not only is the product itself designed beautifully but the apps that are built for it tend to have truly impressive user interfaces. Since there was a quick increase in the number of gorgeous app designs I decided to collect and showcase the ones I thought were the best. Hope you like them and I would like to thank LandingPad as the majority of the screenshots came from there and not to forget the developers and designers who worked on the apps.
Having fun with transparency
May
Web design continues to grow and advance with new features constantly being brought forward through browsers, programming and markup languages. Being creative doesn’t necessarily being the first to use these new features but instead being the first one to experiment. Take a look at the border-radius property, on first glance it just just rounds off corners, but when you begin to delve deeper and experiment you realise that the property can do much more than just round off corners. To be creative you don’t have to magically spark new ideas all the time, sometimes its about working with what you have and ‘thinking outside the box’. In this post I shall be sharing and explaining a number of creative uses of transparency in web design.
This post has an autoplaying video for the example hinted above, be warned, I know some of you can hate autoplaying flash videos (including me) but this one is okay, just some relaxing music while you read.
Celebrating the finale of LOST with outstanding fan art
May
Since I am a huge fan of LOST and the finale is about to air in roughly 12 hours I thought it would be fitting to celebrate the huge success the show has had. Now some people say there are lovers and haters of the show, I for one believe the haters only hate because they are missing out. The suspense and overall plot of LOST is incredible, the writers seemed to have perfected the ‘cliffhanger’ ending across the years leaving fans right on the edges of their seat. If you haven’t watched any episodes of LOST I strongly suggest you do, if you gave up on the show for various reasons I can only say give it another chance. So in this post, to celebrate, I have showcased some of my favourite LOST fan art I have seen over the past couple of years. I hope you enjoy this post and also the finale coming very soon.
Gorgeous free icon sets that you should be using
May
The amount of icon packs currently available for commercial use is vast, to say the least. Every now and then when you’re working on a design and want to find that perfect icon, you spend hours searching the web. Even if you stay focused and manage to find that icon, you’ve probably been sidetracked to such an extent that you don’t know where the icon goes or what you wanted it for in the first place (exaggeration…or not?). This happened to me a fair few times until I started collecting some icon sets I liked and used regularly. Those sets can be seen below, I hope you like them and if you do, don’t forget to pay your respects to the authors.
Create a pixel perfect subscription box using CSS3
May
Today I will show how to create the above subscription box using simple HTML markup and a few advanced CSS3 properties. I believe CSS3 is the future and the sooner you can jump on the CSS3 band wagon the better. All the stylish shadows and gradients used are rendered using CSS properties which can be experimented with to produce some fantastic results.
An inspiring collection of designer workspaces
May
There a number of reasons why you may want to be a designer, the flexibility, the freedom and the potential to become the best in your field. But there is one area that continues to push me towards a design career and that is the office or workspace. Designer’s tend to have such gorgeous desks and computers that I envy and continue to strive for. Below is a collection of beautiful workspaces courtesy of Deskography.
#27 Creative Logos of the Week!
Apr
The human body was the core of the inspiration since the cave man. It inspired him to draw the first ever hand made drawings, and it remained the same through out all the art periods and the history of creativity overall. The graphic shapes inspired by the human figures are full of grace, dynamics and sophistication and they offer a lot of expression approaches. So the art itself found it’s place in the graphic design niche as well, and the element of the body and movement offered a nice base for incredible logo solutions to. We meet them around all the time and some of them are really underrated knowing how hard it really is to achieve an high quality standard when replicating such a complex form. And as in every technique we talked about so far, the wide range from really simple all over to the super complex forms can be found and analyzed. Sometimes those logos offer the direct movement and strength messages but sometimes they are used to describe the subtle character aspects of the figures. Since we are involved in every aspect of human actions and behavior there is no boundaries when it comes to usage of this illustrative technique and designers love to reach out for the logo solutions inspired by the people.
Design and build a personal mini-site
Mar
Personal mini-sites (or vCard sites) are simple one page websites that have become extremely popular over the last couple of years. They serve as brief personal introductions to the owner, and launch pads to their profiles and content on popular web sites and applications.
Experimenting with data visualization
Mar
Data visualization as you might of guessed is the study the visual representation of data. Currently, the most popular form of data visualization that demonstrates creativity would have to be infrographics. The most simplest form would most likely be the table. Now when it comes to web design, designers tend to stick with what they know. Tables are used to produce pricing pages, pie charts to demonstrate percentage and proportion, bar charts to display discrete or discontinuous data and so on.
#26 Creative Logos of the Week
Mar
There is an popular beverage TV commercial at the moment that is based on that ‘People who said NO to…’ concept, so we can transfer that idea on this article and name it ‘People who said NO to only 2 dimensions!’. And those people are logo designers who decided to go over the edge and use all available vector tools to welcome us in the 3D world. Now there are many techniques of how to achieve this style, as you will see through the featured examples, but all of them have the same goal – to provide an unforgettable experience of almost being able to touch or feel these visual solutions. Elements being visualized can be subjects, beings, space around us or even something virtual and abstract that is inspired by something else. But as complex as it might seem, after some practice with the most common software tools the one can discover the spectrum of endless possibilities. The technology barrier between print and screen media is getting thinner every day and that allows these logos to be applied on almost anything – having the 3D logo really working in the 2D world was only a dream just a few years ago.