#design – Gabriel Catalano®

Logo design: where to find inspiration – thnxz to @CreativeBloQ

Staring at a blank piece of paper? Logo Design London has some suggestions about where to find inspiration for your next logo design.

You’ve just taken a new brief from a new client and now you’re sitting at your desk waiting for inspiration to strike. But do you really expect the perfect logo design to pop up, fully formed, in your mind? Believe me, it could be a long wait.

Instead, it’s up to you to seek out inspiration. If you let a wide variety of ideas collide inside your brain, gradually they should coalesce into the logo you’re looking for. The trick? Knowing where to look for inspiration in the first place.

Beyond the obvious

Cast your net far and wide. Don’t just look at the top 20 best logos ever, or you’ll end up with something derivative. Certainly, look at other people’s logo designs, but also look beyond that, at design in general and the wider world. Whenever you see something that stands out or appeals to you, for whatever reason, file that thought; let it inform your design process and contribute as your new logo starts to evolve.

Below are some suggestions of places where you might look for inspiration – but remember this can never be an exhaustive list because inspiration can come from anything, anywhere…

Read all our logo design articles here

How to create a design style guide – thnxz to @CreativeBloQ

(Abstract… full article +INFO Creative Bloq )

A style guide shouldn’t read like the work of a control freak, but nor should it be vague and ambiguous. Paul Wyatt explains how to strike the right balance.

Here are (some of the best) tips for ensuring your style guide does the job right in ensuring others do it right.

It doesn’t have to be perfect

Obviously we’d all love to spend time and energy crafting the perfect design style guide for each project. But in the real world, that’s not always possible. If you’re up against a tight deadline and not able to create a style guide with lots of bells and whistles (and examples), be sure to include the most pertinent and helpful information about the brand or piece of work you’re created in the time you do have.

Full article +INFO 🙂

Essential elements

Start off with:

a written overview of the company it’s for
a rationale for the work carried out
information about logos; font usage; colour palette; tone of voice
photographic guides
collateral information

If you have enough time, it’s worth adding some examples of logo and typographic usage as well as links to master artwork/ brand collateral templates and helpful contacts within your agency or company.

Concentrate on the visible

Look around your workplace and you’ll (hopefully) see colleagues who look presentable and are nicely dressed. Quite possibly a large percentage of these people do not have matching pants and socks or bras and knickers. But who cares? You (hopefully) don’t get to see them. Similarly, in your style guide concentrate on the visible and the relevant. Try not to deep dive into creating colour palettes which then have sub colour palettes and then further sub, sub colour palettes which might never be used or seen.

Full article +INFO 🙂

Work with a copywriter

Big, bold words help energise and communicate brand values in an effective visual way

Work with a copywriter to energise and communicate the brand. This style guide potentially will be used client-side by the in-house creative team or sent out to other agencies to be applied in future work.

For your guide to be applied successfully it’s essential to communicate effectively in written form the brand spirit; the reason behind the work; what the guide is there for; and what the brand goals are that the creative using the guide should be mindful of.

Full article +INFO 🙂

Anticipate questions

At the end of the guide include relevant contacts and create a group email address should the reader have any queries about the guide and need to get in touch should there be something the guide does not explain. Although if you’ve included all the relevant details in your guide this should very rarely happen.

Also consider creating an FAQ as part of the guide and think about the top 20 questions a creative might ask about a brand when they first approach it. “I hate your logo. Do I have to use it?” is a question which isn’t allowed.

Create art-worked examples

Art worked header examples from the BBC visual language guide

Art-working up examples of creative templates can be a great way to showcase how the guide can be interpreted. Also consider supplying these files for download with the style guide.

@topdesignmag :) Are You A Web Developer Without Any Graphic Skills? Then Check Out These 25 Gorgeous Website .PSD’s

Writen by Bogdan is the founder of Top Design Magazine.

Creating a website is not an easy thing because it requires a lot of steps; from the planning and all the way to functionality testing, the process of designing and developing a website needs people with various skills. You need a good graphic designer, a good web designer, a talented web developer, a great content writer and also a SEO expert is you want your website to be great. Sure, you can skip some of them but this can cost you a lot in terms of success.

For web developers, coding a website can be a piece of cake if they have all the graphic components but this always means that whenever they want to create something, they are dependent to a web designer. For a company, this issue is solved from the start but if you are a web developer and also a freelancer, then you need to come up with solutions if you want to stick to the deadline. Depending on your budget you can either hire someone to create a design from scratch, either use a template. A .psd template is extremely useful in the following cases: you are a beginner and you want to practice your programming skills but you don’t want to spend time creating the visual stuff; you are a web developer and you don’t have a budget for creating the design; you have a budget but the time is so limited that you can’t afford spending it on the graphical part.

Full article and more PSD’s 🙂

Whatever your reasons are, a .psd website template can prove to be extremely useful so it will be a good idea to save them in your toolbox. In this article you can see a collection of 25 gorgeous .PSD’s which are ready to be converted into fully functional websites.

Intent Creative Free PSD Theme

WordPress blog theme PSD template

Design examples «Lo pedís lo tenés» – thnxz @inspiredmag

Inspired Magazine – @inspiredmag

* Sí, es verdad, había dejado de lado los tutoriales… OK vamos a retomarlos. Un consejo guarden la fuente! @gabrielcatalano

10 Must-Have Free Photoshop Actions

Photoshop actions are incredible time-savers for graphic designers, and the best actions yield incredible visual effects and increased productivity. Photoshop actions are the magic toolkits of the graphic design and photo editing industries, allowing graphic designers and photographers to apply amazing effects in no time. And because the graphic design community is so generous, you can download most of the best Photoshop actions absolutely free.

Add these 10 must-have Photoshop actions to your stable, and you’ll instantly become a better, more efficient graphic designer. Each of these Photoshop actions is free to download, so you don’t have to spend a dime to improve your design time. Enjoy!

1. HDR Tools

Want to achieve the look of HDR photography, without the HDR camera? No problem! Simply download this set of free Photoshop actions.

2. Old Photo Action

Give your photos a high-contrast, vintage, almost grungy effect with this free Photoshop action, which makes your work more dramatic and interesting.

3. Vivid Blur

Give your portrait subjects a sexy, dreamy halo without sacrificing colors when you use this free Photoshop action in your design. In fact, this action actually enhances the color while it softens edges.

Full article 🙂

20+ New Brochure Design Examples – thnxz @topdesignmag

Finding a new brochure design that can inspire you can cause a real headache that can ruin you your time. That’s my reason for collecting for you more than 20 brochure designs that rock. Getting inspiration from these examples will help you pass the first step and start designing.

http://www.topdesignmag.com

10 Properly Designed Promotional Campaigns on Facebook – thnxz @onextrapixel !

The new Facebook page layout also known as Timeline provides us with tons of opportunities to promote and advertise any content or products via visual means. Many brands grasped this idea long go – the corporate Facebook pages design is the key to a brand’s popularity and fans close engagement.

We’ve already examined best showcases of creative incorporation of brand design into social media. In addition to attractive business pages, brands also organize stand-alone campaigns on Facebook devoted to a new product launch, sales and important events such as company anniversaries.

Now it’s time to examine top 10 successful promo campaigns on Facebook that brilliantly integrated their appeal into a special design on their Facebook pages.

Full article & design examples! 🙂

10 Properly Designed Promo Campaigns on Facebook

First, let’s define the criteria of what significant elements make up a successfully designed Facebook campaign:

Cover photo: A cover photo is one of the best helpers to inform your audience about brand news and upcoming events. Some intricate details on their usage are listed below.
Timeline images: Timeline images include branded content, coupons, QR codes, etc. An unusual approach to distribute important content and info in the form of images on the social network increases fans’ engagement.
Milestones: A creative add-on is also able to constitute a harmonious design biosphere of a Facebook promo campaign.
Apps: Promo apps fit the overall design, educate or entertain the Facebook audience, they also inform about news, upcoming events or new services.
Events & Contests: Offline promotional meetings are an integral continuation of marketing activities in social media. Contests ensure maximum reach of the audience that will 100% include a fan’s friends there for broadening your potential audience.

If all these puzzle units merge together (or at least the chosen ones will be joined perfectly), you’ll get thousands of fans who will eye-worship your page and many loyal clients who will stream to your website or store, longing for a new product, service or special offer.

Now let’s look at some Facebook pages for the best design examples of promo campaigns and analyze their tricks.

Full article & design examples! 🙂

the psychology of color – thnxz gawkerassets.com

Gawker Media Engineering

Source: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18hz1y1ypqji1jpg/original.jpg

Re-Vision — Postcards | thnxz @FormaandCo

http://www.forma.co

RE-VISION — COMIC
RE-VISION

Re-Vision es un ejercicio de estilo y de síntesis de diferentes iconos culturales. Se trata de una serie de retratos de los personajes más representativos del mundo del cómic, del cine, de la televisión, del deporte y de la música.

Re-Vision es una colección que presentamos en forma de postales. Hemos impreso algunas postales y pósters promocionales en ofset con la imprenta Arts Gràfiques Orient y actualmente tenemos a la venta serigrafías en 180hilos, piezas impresas en digital en la galería de arte online Loudart y chapas en Camaloon.
LINKS RELACIONADOS
Ilustraciones
Blog
JESUS CHRIST
SANTA CLAUS
HULK

33 Useful Free Handwriting Fonts // Thnxz to @Creative_Fan

By CreativeFan Team

A font improves the readability, presentation and meaning of a text message. Before the advent of computers, people wrote in their own handwriting to make posters and advertisements. But today, there are so many fonts available, making it easy to create designs and letters with unique effects. Graphics, web and logo designs use different styles of fonts to make their meaning and style unique and distinctive. The font in which an article is written gives it a special meaning. An article written in bold, crisp font makes it formal while one that is written with handwriting font makes it more personal.

Thanks to the developments in the field of designing and printing, there are numerous free handwriting fonts available nowadays. Handwriting fonts are becoming popular as they add a personal touch to the message. These fonts make a message stand out from the rest of the text that is written in standard fonts .The handwriting fonts are unique and different from each other, like an individual’s handwriting. With curves, straight lines and swirls, these handwriting fonts convey different messages and emotions to the reader. The following post includes 33 handwriting fonts that are unique. They give a personal touch and meaning to the message, making it distinctive.

If you liked our selection, perhaps these other posts will interest you too, Letter Fonts, Number Fonts, Typewriter Fonts and Old English Fonts.

Pacifico Font

Here more fonts | Complete article 🙂

Hand Font

Grand Hotel

My Handwriting

Carrington Handwriting

Handwriting Font

Here more fonts | Complete article 🙂

“Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information, but ignore (…) “jazz up” webpages.” Jakob Nielsen @NNgroup – @christianvasile

How to Use Images Successfully – Web Design Usability Guide
VIa 1stwebdesigner.com

Web Design Usability Guide – Dealing with Images

Indeed, users want to see photos on websites, but they want them to be relevant. They would prefer a webpage that doesn’t have visual images rather than a webpage that has lots of photos that just make it heavy and cluttered. The key in using images on websites, according to the study, is based on a few basic ideas:

Image fundamentals – size, composition, quality and exposure are four important things to look for in a good image. People actually look for quality in images, even the contrast makes a huge difference.
Effectiveness – if the picture creates excitement or interest, then it works. It is down to three characteristics:
- Emotional appeal – does the product in the picture look good and make the user want it?
- Rational appeal – does the image show the benefits of the product?
- and Brand appeal – does the picture fit your brand?
Transmitted message – this is about the image sending the right message to the website readers.
Anticipated user response – this is a bit more difficult to put into practice, but the basic idea behind it is that the picture should help decision-making and create a desire for the product. We will talk about this a bit later.

Purely decorative images tend to be ignored unconsciously by our brain. Like a radar, if the images are there only as a filler, the brain will ignore them. The study concluded that pictures and images of real people or real products are automatically categorized as important and are to be studied in detail by the human brain. If you have a personal blog, people would rather see your face than a drawing or a caricature. They want to see the face of the person communicating with them, it is a matter of trust and bonding.

If you own a company, it is a very good idea to take some time talking about the people behind it – using images. It gives a personal touch to an otherwise faceless company and people dig that. People actually want to know (or at least see) who the people are behind a company. If you can afford it, invest in a good photographer and try to stay away from stock pictures (especially from stock pictures that aren’t relevant to your content). It might cost a few bucks, but it will add a lot of value to your company website.

Several eye-tracking study show that the more detail your product images have, the better the results you will have. Yes, studio pictures of a big flat screen TV work just fine, but is just fine good enough for you? People want to see details, show them!

Full article 🙂 !

Quality and relevance

Below I will show you some results of different studies. You will see several websites marked with heat zones. The red areas indicate where the users’ eyes were mostly focused, while the blue areas show the exact opposite, indicating what is ignored or a turn-off for visitors.

Eye-tracking study on Adelphia’s website

Besides the fact that it is an incredibly outdated design, you can clearly see that none of the heat zones are on images. It is because all the images embedded in their webpage are purely fillers. Had they been using relevant pictures, the heat zones might have been a bit different, but for now it shows how much of a waste of space images are on their site.

Full article 🙂 !

Another good example can be seen below. New York Magazine’s restaurant section has also been part of the eye-tracking study and it shows that even if worldwide known chefs are featured in images, the quality is still important. So even if the pictures are somewhat relevant, low-contrast and small size images are simply ignored. Image quality is as important is the relevance of the image being used. There has to be a balance, where quality and relevance are the two guiding principles.

Eye-tracking on NY Mag’s website

Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice wrote an article entitled “Images as Obstacles” some years ago. The images above are courtesy of Peachpit and the amazing heads who published the study. Thank you for your tremendous work!

Guiding the user
Full article 🙂 !

A Collection of Interesting WordPress Icon For Free // thnxz @naldzgraphics :)

Via Naldz Graphics

We constantly showcase different icon designs here in NaldzGraphics which are definitely useful in all types of your application and web designing needs. Today, we would like to share another compilation of attractive icons we have gathered from around the web which are perfect for WordPress fans out there – the WordPress icon.

These icons are available in various sizes and file formats thus there is no need for you to rescale the icons for them to look great on your web and print projects. Please be reminded to read the license agreement indicated by the creator of the icon that you want to use for commercial purposes to avoid conflicts in the future. Have fun browsing!

WordPress Icon Set + Here 🙂

The Importance Of Color In Web Design – 30 Brilliant Examples Of Colorful Schemes

As a designer, when you create a website your primary concern is how to capture the viewer’s attention without compromising the usability.

The only way to do it is by pushing up your creativity level and in order to create something truly impressive.

Colors acts differently and there is a strong concept of chromatic psychology in web design. Red, green, purple, orange…all of them stimulate the viewer’s feelings and emotion, so when you choose your color scheme you need to make a little research. A colorful website is a great choice when it comes to deliver a positive message or spread the word about an upcoming event.

These types of colors are good to raise the awareness and to capture the attention, so use them wisely because the downside can go as far as mistrust, especially when these colors are trying to promote an apparently sober idea, such as a law firm or a government campaign. In this article you can see a collection of 30 gorgeous websites which are using bright colors.

Behind The Brutes

Every Last Drop

55 Brand New Adobe Photoshop Actions for 2013

In the past we have written on Photoshop actions for touchups related to photography enhancements. But it is common for designers to release their actions for free attribution on certain projects. And many of these newer releases are difficult to track down without scouring the Internet for links!

Thus I have put together this collection of 55 fantastic new Adobe Photoshop actions for photo enthusiasts. Graphics editors will adore many of these which provide a solution for generating clean effects in many different photos. Plus each of these examples is completely free to download from the source! Most of the actions posted are from DeviantArt which keeps download links in the sidebar area. But spend some time poking around the showcase below and see if you can locate any actions which look particularly interesting.

by Jake Rocheleau

Idiot Actions

21 Examples of Beautiful Color Use in Web Design // @webdesignledger

There is no doubt that choosing the right colors for a design is a very important step of the creative process. We need to think about the message and the style we want to communicate, besides also thinking about the best combination to please our viewers eyes and to deliver a nice result. Today we gathered some good examples of color use in web design. From subtle colorful details to colorful background images or bold colorful type, there are different styles here to show you how to add color to your next project.

Shot of Inspiration: Beautiful Website Backgrounds

Website backgrounds have a reputation of being “in the background”, when in fact they are very important in setting the mood of the entire site and creating a strong impression with visitors. When you make your own website, the background needs to be one of the first things you decide on – will you use an eye-catching image? Or will you go for an elegant pattern to attract more focus to other parts? Are you going to make the screen shine with colors or create a unique atmosphere with monochromatic shades?

There’s no right answer for these questions. It depends on the type of website you want to create and the brand identity you want to project. There are many different styles you can choose for your website background and they all have a different effect.

Here you will find some outstanding examples of various types of backgrounds. Have a look, visit the sites and get a feel of what each background is good for. This will help you understand what kind of background is the best for your website.

One Grand Image