I’m a junior web designer and now I try to learn a lot of techniques and how to design visually stunning layouts and so far it wasn’t easy. I always find myself in a spot where I don’t know how to do this and that. In order to find out something, I use the always friendly Google that leads me to a lot of cool sites; I linked a few of them in the article below:
Time, as a designer (and it does not matter your skill level or what kind of designer you are), is something that you never quite have.
The good thing is that there are some designers out there whose job is to find catalog and present for us all the cool, awesome, clean designs that are found scatter over the internet.
Usually all this info is found in blogs and with the help of twitter (which is a spread the word service and kinda acts like an RSS service) the information gets faster to anybody who searches for it.
Here is a list of 100 web designers to follow on twitter.
Another site to follow on twiter is DesignerDepot which posts every neat piece of design they find on the internet, a lot of inspirational work.
A while ago I posted a link to a 5 minute tutorial that told you not to be lazy with your designs. Well here’s another “do not be lazy” link but for designers who want to land a gig/job.
Since the link there is from the envato network of sites I think all designers are aware of psdtuts. You can find out more about envato from their tuts+ network in the upper right corner of psdtuts.
Another great resource that every designer should know by now is smashingmagazine.com, an online magazine that posts tutorials, techniques and features amazing designs and just about everything about design. Check the link out if you’re not familiar with smashing.
A lot of us, new designers, need “inspiration”, so in order to do that we tend to browse the internet until we find something that makes us look at it for hours, drop a bookmark and show to our fellow junior designers.
Heres 101 free web layouts that can provide a lot of insipration!
I’m a dedicated gamer, actually I was, since I only have 2 hours at night game time. I’m bringing this up, because designers like to play with their designs, I found a cool little aplication that lets you play around with color schemes to see how a site would look like, you can find it here.
I recently bought a Bamboo A6 wide graphic tablet. When I was younger I had the capacity to reproduce someone’s work pretty quickly and almost duplicate everything they did. Somehow I have lost that ability, my wife says it’s all the damn games i played before, but now since I got the tablet i started medling with it in web design. I always get crazy ideas like “hey, in this design it would be cool to have this bar break and have some green fluid gush out of it:
Like you see here I did this for CSS Luxury and its soon to be implemented.
There are a few other sites that have this kind of work done on them.
Usually when a client asks for a site he also wants a logo. Most of the times I have the idea of how the logo will look like in my head, but there are those times when you can’t think of anything, so when you can’t imagine the logo take a stroll over these sites that provide logo showcase like Logo of the day or my personal favorite LogoPond. After I browse a few pages of content inspiration comes fast.
I din’t put that “header” image at the beggining of the post for nothing.
I love typography, I used to draw letters with graffity tendancies. Type is one of the elements that gives visual impact to your site. A fresh font always makes the user stick around just because the font is so cool, he wants to read more. Sadly this theme doesn’t quite handle this issue, i’m designing a new one. The site I linked at the beggining of the sentence specializes in typography, please take a look, it’s inspiring.
Everybody uses resources. My main resource of free stuff is this site right here. The dude that owns it is really creative and lately started video tutorials which is pretty awesome. I always download a psd of his and try to reverse engineer his designs because I want to see how he did something, why did he use this and that etc..
Speaking of resources, I didn’t forget about you Illustrator users. I’m pretty newbish with Illustrator but I try to make things work and after hours and hours my usually 20 min of PRO work gets done. Here’s 80 of the best illustrator tutorials, brushes, eps and resources.
I remember that my 1st job as a junior webdesigner was to do a business card according to the standards and that it was supposed to be CMYK.
At first I freaked out because I didn’t know what CMYK was and what were the standards, until i found this little site here that helped me a lot.
After following the instructions there, these were my first two card designs:
I hope you enjoyed the read and please do post your opinions.
i like the furniture one. keep up the good work.
Thank you, I will, be sure to check back