Adobe Illustrator graphic design software is the industry's premier vector-drawing environment for creating graphics that scale across media. In this tutorial Cheryl Graham will be looking at the Warp Tool and the Bristle Brush settings to make a quick and effective chalkboard illustration. Let’s get started!
Have you ever come across a beautifully designed website and wished you had X-ray vision to see how all those HTML elements on the site work? Have you ever wanted to see how a certain design might look on your site without actually changing the underlying code? Well, you don’t have to wish or think anymore because a powerful and really useful browser extension called Firebug can help you do all that. Any designer or developer looking to experiment with different styles on a website in real-time needs this tool.
Read MoreWhen you first start planning a web design project where do you start? Color scheme, fonts? Probably not. Most of you start with a sketch outline of the site’s structure. And a big part of this structure lies in the grid – a vertical set of guidelines that help determine shape, placement of items and overall look of each website. There are a variety of grid-based structures. A grid can be made of multiple columns and gutters of equal widths. Grids can also be created from columns of varying widths, a technique commonly used when outlining the body of a website that will include sidebars.
Designing an effective and professional business card is not an easy task. A designer must have insightful knowledge about the process of developing professional looking business cards. Furthermore, for the beginners, it is one of the trickiest things to accomplish. Here Jameel Khan has a list of some tutorials that will help you learn how to create impressive business cards, as well as showcasing some creatively designed free business card templates PSDs.
Good Web designers know what many others might not realize: that creating a truly beautiful website requires care, time and craft. And similar to how a craftsperson molds their creation by combining raw materials, skill and unwavering focus on the vision, a beautiful design is planned and executed with exceptional focus on what is to be achieved by the website. It is important, however, not to confuse a beautifully crafted website with one that simply brushes over the content with attractive visuals.
Karim El Husseiny is going to show how to implement a simple user authentication system in a Rails application from scratch. Along the way, he’ll examine best practices to help avoid common – and costly – mistakes. Password-protected actions are a common feature in most web applications. You’ll only allow users with a valid username and password to access these actions. This is referred to as “User Authentication,” which most Rails applications will require in some form or another.
Those of you who enjoy playing with flexible layouts will undoubtedly get a weird kick out of seeing your designs adapt comfortably to small viewports. What was once a beautiful multi-column layout becomes an equally beautiful, snug pillar of readable text, free of clutter and unnecessary nonsense. But how many of you think of your layouts beyond the comfort of a 960 grid?
Read MoreYour website works. Now let’s make it work faster. Website performance is about two things: how fast the page loads, and how fast the code on it runs. Plenty of services make your website load faster, from minimizers to CDNs, but making it run faster is up to you. Little changes in your code can have gigantic performance impacts. A few lines here or there could mean the difference between a blazingly fast website and the dreaded “Unresponsive Script” dialog. This article shows you a few ways to find those lines of code with Chrome Developer Tools.
Every designer has their own workflow when starting a new project, even if it’s only loosely defined in their head. A typical Web project goes through a variety of steps from inception to launch, with a lot of moving parts throughout the cycle. Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and even Web browsers themselves are available to aid you in your work. But with so many choices, how do you determine the right tool to move from concept to functional design?
This is a story that dates back to the earliest days of computers. The story has a plot, well, sort of. It has competition and intrigue, as well as traversing oodles of countries and languages. There is conflict and resolution, and a happyish ending. But the main focus is the characters — 110,116 of them. By the end of the story, they will all find their own unique place in this world.