Trends in Design

If you are searching for a web site or a web template with nice interactions, then I advise you to consider Swish as a good substitute for Flash. I had been working for a web design studio for several years already and when we first tried Swishmax. We bought a Swish template at Flashmint.com to try it out and the results we got were quite good.

Now we produce Swish websites on a regular basis. Our customers seem to be pretty satisfied with their websites and we save our time, since it would take more time to do similar things in Flash. And you know, time is money, so it’s up to you, of course, to choose.

From time to time I’ll see a list of ‘logo design resources’ being circulated around social media websites, but more often than not, I’m disappointed at the quality of links. So I’ve searched through my bookmarks, trawled the other ‘resource’ articles, and asked some designers for their input.

Here I present a choice selection of logo design resources that I believe are beneficial to serious designers (with a touch of humour here and there).

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More free tools for your designer’s toolbox, this time our focus is high quality free typefaces. Usually it is a little bit more of a difficult task to find the perfect font out there, that’s why we should not miss Urban Fonts.

Urbanfonts is a web 2.0 Ajax style font directory, containing an amazing collection of over 8,000 free fonts and dingbats in PC and Mac format along with a huge commercial fonts archive. Not all the fonts are of the highest quality, you just have to digg through to find something of a higher quality but with over 8,000 free fonts you should find something that will suite your projects.

The site offers various ways to get a live preview of the fonts, either by clicking on a font which lets you preview the font in many different ways (sample text, character set, different sizes, etc) or by dynamic mouseovers to let you see the full character set without refreshing the page which can be real time savers.

The site is cleanly laid out and easy to navigate, it also has a blog with the latest font news and some interesting histories of various fonts such as Helvetica.

These are great! The brand new design blog Vibr8bros.com shows us they are worthy of this title - design blog. They just released a free vector pack full of glossy and shiny, colorful Web 2.0 badges (or stickers). If you use Adobe Illustrator, you should check these out: you get the source AI and EPS files to change, alter and use them with your own text!

For those who don’t want to customize this freeibe, the Virb8 Bros. included 20 seperate transparent PNG files. These you can use directly and put them on your blog or elsewhere with no hassle.

You can download this free vector pack right here.

1. Creativity is nothing. (Without skills)

Some people are born creative. They slop over with insightful bubbles and always come up with a brand new and ground-breaking idea. But what makes a creative person a good designer?
What matters is your ability to produce. Creativity alone is highly valuable, agreed, but what if you can’t turn it into someting of true value?

Take a look at the advertising industry. The classic creative team consists of a Creative Director (CD) with at least one Art Director (AD) and Copywriter (CW). Now - how exactly did the CD get his job?

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