As Veerle Pieters explores print and web design, photography, art and type, she uncovers a lot of brilliant design gems. She has compiled a selection of inspirational examples for you in this showcase, and the plan is to bring out a new one every month, so let us know in the comments if you like what you see. But for now, please lean back and enjoy!
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To celebrate all the little moments of inspiration that comes from the colors of your favorite music album, or the typography on a book cover, we have compiled some resources for you which honor the beauty of graphic design and the ideas behind it. Perfect to squeeze into a short coffee break. Enjoy! The variety is endless, and sometimes you’re lucky and find a little piece of art shining through the sheer mass. It’s inspiring to see how designers boil the idea behind a book down to the limited canvas space of one rectangle. What will it inspire you to? Perhaps something extraordinary, like your own series of book covers made with HTML and CSS?
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As digital technologies are implanted deeper in the world, making more and more aspects of life intangible, it’s hard to imagine the world without any kind of banknotes, or paper money. In the dramatic history of our world, money became not just generic objects of payment, but also symbols of societies. And as with any complex task, currency design holds some valuable lessons for us, web designers. In this article, Julia May will try to formulate some of these lessons and, therefore, draw your attention to the inspirational nature of paper money.
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Balancing a composition involves arranging both positive elements and negative space in such a way that no one area of the design overpowers other areas. Everything works together and fits together in a seamless whole. The individual parts contribute to their sum but don’t try to become the sum. An unbalanced composition can lead to tension. In some projects, unbalanced might be right for the message you’re trying to communicate, but generally you want balanced compositions. However, design principles aren’t hard and fast rules. They’re guidelines. There’s no one right way to communicate that two elements are similar or different, for example. You don’t need to follow any of these principles, although you should understand them and have a reason for breaking them.
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Jeremy Girard loves being a web designer and he’s incredibly thankful that he decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, there have been a number of times during his career when his passion has waned. This scenario is called burnout. Do you find passion for your work an important part of your career? If so, what have you found to be helpful in keeping that passion for your job intact? In this article, Jeremy shares his moments of burnout in his career and what you can do to avoid them.
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Compositional flow determines how the eye is led through a design: where it looks first, where it looks next, where the eye pauses, and how long it stays. You have a lot of control over where people look when they’re viewing a webpage you’ve designed. On a text-heavy and graphic-light page, a visitor’s eye likely follows something like a Z-pattern or F-pattern across and down the page. However, as soon as you design page elements and add graphics, those patterns no longer apply. Your visitor’s eye will follow the flow, movement and rhythm you create.
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Emphasis is relative. For one element to stand out, another has to serve as the background from which the first is to stand out. Some elements need to dominate others in order for your design to display any sort of visual hierarchy. By varying the visual weight of some elements and the visual direction of others, you can establish different levels of dominance. Three levels is ideal; they’re all that most people can discern. Designing different levels of emphasis or dominance will create a visual hierarchy in your design, with more important information being more visually prominent. It will help you communicate with visitors quickly and efficiently.
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Every project starts with a briefing sent to your team. Don’t take the content for granted, and make sure you clearly understand the objectives before working out anything tangible. You can do this by including a small learning phase, based on interviews with your client and their customers. Address your learnings and observations in an involved relationship. By simply asking the right questions, you’ll learn a hell of a lot more. In this article, Thomas Joos shares his learnings after years of streamlining creative dialogue.
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Today, Brian Casel is proud to own and operate a business that does not revolve around billing for time. Instead of writing proposals and taking on client work to pay the bills, he’s building an asset that grows in value year after year. In this article, Brian will share five key lessons he learned from making this transition. He’ll share the story of how he iterated and improved the business because of them. His goal here is to show you that you can still find success by doing a lot of things wrong. That’s how you level up from freelancing to owning a thriving, growing business.
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Creative thinkers tend to be balls of energy and productivity machines. Creativity is generally perceived to be something external, out of our control, or an inherent talent for a chosen few. But consider that creativity is fundamentally about ideas. Ideas are generated by thinking, and skills for thinking can be learned. Therefore, creativity, thinking and idea generation are skills that can be learned. Learning a variety of thinking skills will have a dramatic impact on your productivity and output. In this article, Shelley Walsh introduces five books that are bound to stimulate your thinking and reflection on creativity, as well as provide valuable, practical exercises that will improve your thinking and problem-solving skills.
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