Working with Visual Weight in Your Designs
In design, visual weight is the notion that design elements have varied weights; that is, some objects, even on a two-dimensional medium, can appear to be heavier than others. Visual weight is a powerful concept that allows us to create visual hierarchy, symmetry, balance, and harmony in designs. When applied strategically, the concept of visual weight can help us guide the viewer’s attention to the places we want in a design. This article covers the concept of visual weight and the factors that affect it.
JPEG 101: A Crash Course Guide on JPEG
JPEG, a compression algorithm optimized for photographic images, is something we encounter on a regular basis. JPEG is not limited to a certain amount of color (unlike GIF, for example) and is popular due to its variable compression range, meaning that you’re able to more easily control the amount of compression, and consequently, the resultant image quality. In this guide, we will discuss the important things you need to know about JPEG.
5 Branding Basics Every Logo Designer Should Know
While many articles try to dissect the process of designing a logo itself, I will attempt to share tips from my experiences with branding-focused logo design for the real world.
Photo by lpwines
Beautiful Designs with Smoke Typography
There is something very beautiful and mysterious about smoke. Using smoke in a design can produce some amazing visual effects, as you can see in this collection. In case you want to incorporate smoke effects in your own designs, we’ve also included some design resources in this article that you can check out.
Smoke Typography Showcase
Intuition Smoke
By Hautalken
A Comparative Design Look at Remakes of Movie Posters
Movie posters have been around for longer than most of us have lived – thus, studying them can give us insights on how design has progressed throughout recent history. They were the main way of advertising film 70 years ago, and although we now have television commercials and the internet, posters are still one of the best forms of advertisement. In this collection, we will look at how poster design has developed over the years, looking at films that have been remade.
Comic Sans: The Font Everyone Loves to Hate
It seems like every designer out there has an opinion about the Comic Sans font, and it seems the overwhelming majority of those opinions are negative. How has a single font become the focus of so much ire? And what, exactly, is behind all the hate?
10 Wonderful Letterpress Type Tutorials
The letterpress type treatment (or as I call it, inset text treatment) can be easily done in Photoshop. In this article, you’ll find a collection of tutorials from various parts of the web that will teach you how to create this awesome text effect using common graphics applications (and a couple using just CSS).
Check out my own tutorial here on Six Revisions called How to Create Inset Typography in Photoshop. You may also want to peruse the Beautiful Examples of Inset Typography in Web Design collection for design inspiration and usage examples.
1. Web Design Trend Showcase: Letterpress Text Effect
