Design

In this post I’m going to cover a process I’ve brought in for doing wireframes, I’m finding really useful lately. It involves taking back all the visual style and just focusing on the layout of elements — as a result creating accurate wireframes. Then you build up your visual style from there. The problem for me comes from wireframes that have too little detail, being used as the basis for the whole page.

Vertical rhythm is the typographic practice, to create a vertical harmony between text, images and so on. On the web it’s quite difficult to achieve. Yet understanding what it is, with the aim to maintain it, you can improve your reading experience. If you’re aware of it, but have struggled to understand vertical rhythm, this post is for you. It will focus more on the why, rather than the how. So you come away with a better understanding.

Illustrator has a fair variety of default width profiles, however you may find yourself wanting to tweak them slightly. In my case I needed to tweak one, for creating some eyelashes. It’s not apparent how to do this. So it makes for a good post to explain for anyone having a similar problem.

I think the variety of masking techniques there are in Photoshop are part of its strongest features. In this post I’ll show you the ones I use most frequently. How to clip images to a shape and how the overlay blending mode can be used as a mask to dodge and burn non-destructively.

I find myself needing to remember, how do I create a set of grid guides in Illustrator. As I’m a relatively new convert to using Illustrator, well I find myself switching between Illustrator and Photoshop, for much of the work I do. This is a quick tip to show you how to make a grid, for those who just can’t remember, due to it generally being easier to remember in Photoshop. In the post I will cover how to create a simple grid and toggle it’s visibility.

In the October 2014 update, Adobe added a new grid/guide creator and it’s great. It covers the majority of things extensions like GuideGuide do and has a couple of advantages.I’m not sure it’s been given the attention it deserves, a small feature, yet one we will use so often. It’s simple to use and allows you to save (like GuideGuide) and should sync your grid layouts with Creative Cloud.

In this post I’m going to go through some of the considerations necessary for choosing the right typeface for paragraphs.There are a few factors that come with choosing an appropriate typeface. These are are x-height, contrast, width and context. After reading this post you will gain the understanding necessary to make the right choices to choose legible typefaces.

Good typography is playing a bigger role in the design of websites nowadays. However when starting out it’s something that is overlooked. Considering the web is all about content, it’s important that we give everyone a good reading experience.I’m starting with a few examples that can really help improve your reading experience. I want to help you understand why these things are important and provide guidance as to why it does work.

This feature was added to Photoshop in the last year or so, as of writing. I aim to show you how it will make your PSDs more manageable. It’s become such a large part of my Photoshop workflow. If you’re not using it, this post will definitely make you want to.

I’m always looking up the Adobe generator syntax and yet I never bookmark it. I feel like it would be a valuable resource to clearly show. Something I think the Adobe documentation lacks. This could be the reason I haven’t bookmarked it.

Initially I thought it would be quite frustrating to get going with SVG, but after jumping in and seeing where I got it’s quite simple.