July 22, 2008 — You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a “backlash” against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such cirlces unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You’ll hear ideas being thrown around like “design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1” or “we are not worried about the design, we’ll outsource it or use a free Wordpress theme, let us focus more on the product”. Read more…

July 21, 2008 — As a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s, pop art aims to emphasize the nature of things popular in our daily routine. In pop art, most artists use mechanical means of rendering techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist. Being an art movement, it has some expressive attributes other styles do not possess. Read more…

July 15, 2008 — Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results. Read more…

July 14, 2008 — Although light is considered to be rather a practical than an artistic tool, it has some properties which designers can effectively explore in their works. Indeed, light can also be considered as a medium for more powerful and more vivid artistic expression. In fact, many artists and crews make use of it creating quite impressive works of art. Read more…

July 11, 2008 — When it comes to beauty nothing can beat the beauty of nature. Although we, designers, can derive inspiration from almost everything, nature often manages to provide us with beautiful eye-catching perspectives we would never have explored otherwise. We have collected hundreds of wallpapers already (see links below). In this post we would like to focus on wallpapers which emphasize the variety and beauty of nature. Read more…

July 9, 2008 — Textures and patterns are used more often than one may think. The reason why we don’t see them is because they usually remain in the background, supporting the overall design, replacing a standard background color and creating a more inviting atmosphere. But they almost never stand out. Used primarily for background images, they need to fit to the overall design making the content easier to perceive. In fact, wood textures seem to have become so popular that designers suggest that wood is the new glossy style and wood is the new white. Read more…

July 8, 2008 — Last week we have presented first findings of our web forms survey. The main objective of the survey was to provide designers and developers with some intuition of how effective web forms are designed; we also presented some guidelines of how an effective and user-friendly web form can be achieved. Read more…

July 7, 2008 — Table of contents is often considered to be one of the most unspectacular design elements ever invented. Because of its simple, usual form, table of contents is often not given the attention it may deserve — after all, it is just a list of the parts of a book or document organized in the order in which the parts appear. But why not use exactly that and surprise the reader of a booklet, brochure, annual report or a book with some beautiful and original table of contents? In fact, many creative approaches are possible. And this post attempts to prove exactly that. Read more…

July 4, 2008 — If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience. We need to invite them, describe to them how the service works, explain to them why they should fill in the form and suggests the benefits they’ll get in return. And, of course, we should also make it extremely easy for them to participate. Read more…

July 2, 2008 — We love free icons and icon sets. In the overview below we present 55 more excellent, free and professional icons for desktop and web design. Some of them can be used for both private and commercial projects. You may always use them for free in your private projects. Nevertheless, it is always worth to take a look at the license agreements — they can change from time to time. Read more…