There are a lot of social networks available for every niche you can think of, some of them aren’t as good as others and the good ones always need a little attention. I’m sure a lot of you have been to a few of these but should be members of all of them. Interaction is important when it comes to social networks. Ensuring that you do your part as a member and contribute to them by voting on content or contributing to a conversation.

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The year is getting close to an end and it seems that in these last couple of weeks of the year only the most dedicated bloggers are taking time to write posts. Which is great for those that are looking for content, but difficult for those of us that want to be sure to get all of the great stories we have read throughout the week out to those looking for great design content. At any rate, I have compiled a pretty good list of content. Thanks for everyone’s submissions for this week also. Be sure to submit your submissions by the end of day Friday this next week, and only submissions for posts that happened between Monday-Friday will count. I got a lot this time dating before last weekend.

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We all have our different practices that we use for starting a design of any kind. Sometimes we start with paper and pen or sometimes we may even jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and begin tossing around ideas. One step we can’t skip though is choosing the right color scheme for our design. It is always important to ensure that we understand the color we use in our design. Whether our design be a web site design or print work the color combination we choose is one of the most important choices. In order to ensure that we have a combination that will work well there is always some research that may be done. Especially when it comes to designing a logo or doing branding for a company.

There are several web sites available for designers from Oklahoma to Japan to find color schemes that will match their client’s or own design ideas. There is even color software available for web designers to use for pulling color from images.
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It is an interesting topic, most of us consider ourselves the masters of our field or talented enough to be able to figure everything out on our own. this just isn’t the case for any of us. We have to be sure to infuse our lives with a little modesty otherwise we risk becoming pompous and stuck in creative ruts.

It is important to understand how other people are doing things, if you can take some time out of your day to possibly even watch someone else work in Photoshop or in CSS you may find that you learn something completely new by just watching someone else work. (more…)

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It is important to remember why your web site is around, if you lose direction with it you can easily fall prey to having a lot of fancy web site but not much purpose for your visitors. I see this all to often in the web design field where a client wants a lot of fancy stuff and they lose track of why they have a web site in the first place. If you sell clothing, you want it to be extremely straight forward about how to find and buy clothing. Not how cool your flash/ajax looks. (more…)

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The much anticipated follow up to my 4 part series on CRAP design (CRAP is Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity). I didn’t plan on taking this long to have this article up but as it happened work got in the way of things. But on to the good stuff.. Alignment is impossibly important in design because it is the basis for everything that is design. Without alignment you have elements that are seemingly unrelated and randomly placed. This easily applies to web, print and other media just as the other CRAP principles do. Alignment is used to create order in your design. (more…)

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There are a lot of books out their to get inspiration from or to learn how to design better. There are a lot. So, picking the right books instead of just a ton of useless books that aren’t worth your time or just regurgitating the same thing developed by someone else. I have compiled a list of the top 10 books I have found that give me inspiration or are truly worth reading for web designers, graphic designers, writers or just hobbyists. All of them will be helpful for graphic designers and web designers but a few are great for writers or anyone in the creative industry. (more…)

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This is part two in the four part series about CRAP web design, which of course stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. This article is of course about repetition and the uses it has in any type of design. It allows the user to understand that the design is similar to other aspects of the design. For instance, like a web site having the same navigational structure throughout the entire web site is a kind of repetition that can make the user more comfortable with the web site. (more…)

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Typically when people call something crap it isn’t a good thing, but in the design world if your design is C.R.A.P then you are doing something right. As some of you may know and some of you may have heard before, CRAP stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. These are all design characteristics that can enable you to make a design that is worth being seen. Without these traits for a design you just have stuff on a document. In this four part series I will go in to detail about how to make your designs look like CRAP. I will go ahead and begin where every good thing starts, the beginning (cheesy!). (more…)

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Most people can grasp the basics of getting the right colors in the right places and ensuring that you are following simple principles when you are designing an item for print or designing a web site. For those of you that don’t consciously know why you should be using what color where or are curious about better understanding the fundamentals and psychological aspect of color. This article is made for you and will help you better make that next logo, site design or print design. (more…)

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