Thinking about setting out on your own? Then check out these essential nuggets of advice on how to start a studio – from those who’ve made it.
Anytime we can avoid using the mouse by utilizing shortcut keys is a good time. It’s one of the many habits that makes a good designer a great designer, and a darn efficient one at that.
Logo design is a tricky business, but there are some rules all the best logos adhere to. We asked leading logo designers to tell us what they are.
When a group wants to generate ideas for a new product or to solve a problem, you will usually hear the clarion call, “Let’s brainstorm!” You assemble a group, spell out the basic ground rules for brainstorming (no criticism, wild ideas are welcome, focus on quantity, combine ideas to make better ideas) and then have people yell out ideas one at a time.
Here's why you'll probably be on this earth for more years than most.
Okay, so there haven't been any definitive studies that prove designers live longer than people in other jobs. But we reckon it's a pretty sure thing. Here are seven solid reasons to believe us designers will keep going, and going, and going.
People don’t spend their money online easily. Think about it: If you had to answer a long list of questions or struggle to navigate a website, how much money would you be willing to part with? Online shopping is about convenience and comfort, and those of us who have at least once ventured into the realm of online shopping know how time-consuming and unpleasant it can be.
Working from home may seem like a pipe dream, but with the right approach you can make it work for you and your clients. Mike Griggs shares some of his tips as a sometimes home based creative freelancer.
Until recently, creating mobile web designs that look and feel like native apps has pretty much been an impossible dream. There are plenty of creative workarounds to try and bring that native ‘feel’ to mobile web browsing, but so far we've struggled to bridge the gap between native and the web.
Well, this article is about easing, so that’s obviously the answer, but to understand what’s really going on here, we need to look deeper into the fundamentals of animation. We’ll take this step by step — we’ll learn the underlying concepts, explore ease-in and ease-out, break down easing curves and finally see how it all applies to UI Design.
Before the facelift of iOS 7, Apple took a lot of flack--much of it from us--for its cheesy use of skeuomorphism, or the ways it would imitate real world textures, like the wood grain shelving in iBooks or the green felt tables in Game Center.
Animate in Xcode without code
Golaem has released version 3 of Crowd, its crowd-simulation system for Maya, which features a bunch of new tools to allow greater control over any type of character.
We have clients come to us and say, “Here’s our average customer:”, for instance, “She’s female, she’s 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids…” And we listen politely and say: “Well, that’s great but we don’t care about that person”. What we really need to do to design, is look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.
“Objectified” – Dan Formosa, Smart Design
Get the most of your developer tools in Chrome, Firebug, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.
Technology tipping points – when something goes from the unusual to the commonplace – can happen with unexpected rapidity. Has 4K reached a tipping point, and if so what aspect of 4K? Acquisition, production, distribution, or all three? If you’re shooting a film today, should you be shooting in 4K?
The person holding the tablet is both viewer and director.
Our sample technical interview questions are effing great.
Grab some paper. It helps to work through sample inputs by hand and draw pictures.
At long last, I found a short mention of using white foamboard from Office Depot (Staples, whatever). Desperate, I went with that suggestion and was very pleasantly surprised with the results. I bought several 2′ x 3′ sheets of white foamboard – five in total. The foamboard’s ultra-white surface has the wonderful ability to gently disperse light. The foamboard is also very rigid and makes it easy to construct a 5 sided box that doesn’t get wobbly or weak.
Recently I was testing an app we’re building that didn’t have an app icon yet. I noticed that iOS 7 provided a new placeholder image. That placeholder just so happens to be a pixel perfect version of the new iOS 7 grid, finely tuned at every size. It wasn’t until I saw this grid to scale—directlyfrom Apple—on all my devices that I decided to create a template of my own that appealed to my obsessive nature.