Jim Basio, ON THE TOPIC OF General

Stock imagery can really make or break a good design. Searching for that perfect image(s) to complement your design can be a very time consuming task—not to mention budget limitations we may have to consider.

Luckily, there are lots of great stock image resources available on the web whether to meet any budget size.

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Mindy Wagner, ON THE TOPIC OF General

The rounded corner style has been around for a quite a while now, and one thing (beyond wanton overuse) has always bothered me about it. When working with rounded rectangles in Photoshop, there seemed to be no elegant way to resize them. The corners don’t remain intact when you use Transform (Ctrl/Cmd-T) to scale the shape. Instead of lightly rounded edges, you end up with ugly mishaps like this:

My default method for getting around it was to rasterize the shape, move the ends around, and then fill the gaps by resizing the middle. Darren Hoyt has a good walk through of that trick here. Another workaround is to create the shape in Illustrator and then paste it in as a Smart Object. But both felt like bad hacks for doing something that should be inherently simple.

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Mindy Wagner, ON THE TOPIC OF General

During a recent moodboard review, the design team got to wondering what the best solution was for getting rid of Photoshop "jaggies," those jagged edges that show up on your nice clean shapes; especially when you start rotating them. I had a few ideas but decided to do some tests to see what REALLY works best.  I started my testing with a common design element that falls prey to jaggies: a photo with a white border, slightly rotated. The photo I’m working with happens to be of my ultra adorable dog Bruiser.  First, I created two versions—one photo with an 8-pixel white inside stroke (Layer Style > Stroke) and one photo with a white square shape layer behind it. Then I rotated both sets 8 degrees clockwise. 

Continue reading "Getting Rid of Jaggies on Your Photo Borders"

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Samantha Warren, ON THE TOPIC OF Tips and Tricks White space (or negative space) used with typography enhances its legibility and makes it more inviting for the user to interact with it, so why not use more? A common mistake for many designers and developers is to fill the page with as much stuff as they can. If you walked into a room and everyone was talking at the same time, wouldn't it be difficult to pick who you wanted to talk to first? Less is more. The cleaner your body copy, the better it will make it for users to comprehend what they are reading.

Continue reading "Typography Tuesday: Let it Breathe"

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Tom Osborne, ON THE TOPIC OF General

As designers, we often think (read: "know") we have great ideas and intuition coupled with the ability to turn around a design that a client will love. If we love it, then s/he should, too (because it rocks ... or so we think). We can spend hours upon hours leading up to a design presentation getting a design to a wow level only to see our passions wilt in the face of someone who so desperately wants to love it but simply doesn't. A good practice to avoid this is to start with a mood board.

What is a mood board?

Mood boards, being a lot like they sound, are typically used to help establish a style, theme, expression, environment, atmosphere, or feeling. They often consist of found objects from magazine tear outs or digital imagery to fabric or color swatches, but really can be anything that inspires (like a favorite saying, or phrase, for example). We'll collect these inspirational tidbits to help establish a general look and feel direction prior to jumping head first into a full, precise design. It's all about starting loosely and getting specific as you progress through the design process.

Continue reading "Getting Moody: A Look at Inspiration and Style in Early Design Techniques"

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Mindy Wagner, ON THE TOPIC OF Tips and Tricks Up until about a week ago, Bridge was merely an annoyance... an application that fired itself up every now and then when I clicked the wrong button in Photoshop or Illustrator. I knew it came with Adobe Creative Suite 3, but beyond that I didn't know much. I've been successfully ignoring it for quite a while because as a web designer I didn't think I had much use for it. As it turns out, I was wrong.

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Rob Soule, ON THE TOPIC OF CSS and General

A few weeks ago, 37signals brought up a great question -- one that was echoed by a friend of mine just a couple of days ago: When can we finally ditch IE 6?

A few notable companies are taking the first steps. Facebook has been warning users about the perils of using IE for a while. And now it looks like Apple's newest web apps won't be supporting IE 6 at all. Frankly, I'm not surprised. I think they are taking a necessary step forward by forcing users to use a modern web browser. After all, it is 2008, not 1996.

Continue reading "Is it time to ditch IE 6?"

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