50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory

While many of us can create something that looks good in Photoshop or attractive when spliced into CSS, but do we actually understand the design theory behind what we create? Theory is the missing link for many un-trained but otherwise talented designers. Here are 50 excellent graphic design theory lessons to help you understand the ‘Whys’, not just the ‘Hows’.

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Step-By-Step Site Planner

This is how you build a house. First, buy lots of wood, nails, windows, doors and paint. How much, you ask? I don’t know – a lot. Next, hire a crew of carpenters and tell them to go for it. Then, ask the guy who drives the concrete mixer to pour his load wherever he thinks the driveway should go.

Blueprints? A plan? No time for all that. You know what a house looks like, and, besides, you don’t want to stifle creativity with a bunch of formalities.

Think again, Sparky. Whether you’re building the family domicile or your organization’s Website, you need to start with a plan. An effective plan starts with quality information, and to get quality information you need to ask the right questions.

Here’s a Site Planner, a collection of focused questions to help you jump-start the information gathering process. Each section (Background, Audience, Resources, Competition and Content) asks several basic questions along with “Next Steps” for detailed follow-up.

For best results involve as many stakeholders as possible — business/process owners, marketing and sales staff, IT folks, content managers, developers and customers.

Ready? Sharpen your pencils and roll up your sleeves. And good luck enhancing your Web presence!

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Best of Brochure Design – Cool Samples and Examples of Brochures

As a follow up to some of the recent sample design blog articles that we have done, we are now adding this one – The Best of Brochure Design. I researched the internet and found these beautiful brochures. These brochures will give you some artistic inspiration when you feel like you are out of ideas. I hope that you enjoy them, however, we are always looking for more beautiful or inspirational brochures to add to this list, so…..Please send us your beautiful brochures and we will add them to our list. Thank you! 

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Biggest List of Photoshop Freebie Sites

Biggest List of Photoshop Freebie Sites Ever: Infinite Amounts of Free Photoshop Stuff

If you are looking for enough Photoshop Freebies to put you into a coma, then we have put together the huge list that you have been seeking. Below you will find sites that offer a huge number of freebies to Photoshop, Graphic Design freaks such as you. Enjoy.

 

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Basic color schemes

Introduction to Color Theory

With colors you can set a mood, attract attention, or make a statement. You can use color to energize, or to cool down. By selecting the right color scheme, you can create an ambiance of elegance, warmth or tranquility, or you can convey an image of playful youthfulness. Color can be your most powerful design element if you learn to use it effectively.

1.     The Color Wheel

2.     Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Colors

3.     Warm and cool colors

4.     Tints, Shades, and Tones

·         Color Harmonies – basic techniques for creating color schemes

·         Complementary

·          Analogous

·          Triadic

·          Split-Complementary

·          Rectangle (tetradic)

·          Square

Colors affect us in numerous ways, both mentally and physically. A strong red color has been shown to raise the blood pressure, while a blue color has a calming effect.

Being able to use colors consciously and harmoniously can help you create spectacular results.

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Flash CS3 Tutorials

This is really good site that showcase videos to learn Flash CS3. It will definitely help Flash users to understand and use Flash CS3 software.

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Monster: Millions of users’ data may have been stolen

The theft of contact information for job seekers in the database of Monster Worldwide may have been much greater than the 1.3 million individuals reported earlier this month, Chief Executive Sal Iannuzzi said on Wednesday.

While investigating the recent theft, the company learned that its Web site had previously been hacked.

“We’re assuming it is a large number. It could easily be in the millions,” Iannuzzi said in an interview with Reuters.

To be safe, he said, each Monster.com user should assume that his or her contact information has been taken.

The company said earlier that the theft of confidential information was not an isolated incident, and said the scope of illegal activity was impossible to pinpoint.

Monster is stepping up surveillance of site traffic, boosting its security staff, and is contacting users about ways to protect their privacy.

“I want to be clear and I want to be frank: there is no guaranteed fix,” Iannuzzi said. “I wish I could say…there will be absolutely no way that the Monster site can be compromised. I cannot ever make that promise, and no Internet company can.”

So far, the company has found no evidence that the data thieves were able to take financial information, he said.

About 200 to 300 job seekers have canceled their accounts as a result of the security issue, the CEO said, but those have been offset by an upswing in new accounts. A “handful” of employers have canceled their accounts, Iannuzzi said.

The company, which said last month it would invest $80 million to $100 million over 18 months to improve its technology, will dedicate “a large measure of that money” to fixing the security issue, Iannuzzi said.

Monster shares closed Wednesday up $1.24, or 3.8 percent, to $34.15 on the Nasdaq. Its shares were little changed in extended trading.

Flex Designs

Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Virtue Info is specialized in flex web application development and flex website designs. Developers & Designers at Virtueinfo can develop flex shopping carts, flex e-commerce applications, flex content management system, flex clothing designs, flex desktop application, web based applications, database applications and product based applications.

 

Flex provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and Action Script, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich internet applications (RIA), as well as an interactive flex application debugger.Flex include both a standards-based programming model that will be familiar to professional developers and a set of products designed to enable efficient delivery of high-performance Rich Internet applications. Rich Internet applications combine the responsiveness and richness of desktop software with the broad reach of web applications to deliver a more effective user experience.

The Designing team of Virtueinfo has educated themselves to cope up with any requirement in flex technology. Virtueinfo team has started working in this feature rich tool already. At Virtueinfo we offer flex website design, flex web applications, flex open source framework, rich internet application development. 

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Design Principles

 We can group all of the basic tenets of design into two categories: principles and elements.  

The principles of design are the overarching truths of the profession. They represent the basic assumptions of the world that guide the design practice, and affect the arrangement of objects within a composition  

“The principles of art are the set of rules or guidelines of art that are to be considered when considering the impact of a piece of artwork. “

The Design principles are of eight types: movement, unity, variety, balance, emphasis, contrast, proportion, and pattern.

principles-of-art (Clickfor more information)

Colors

Color Meanings and Colors That Go Together

Colors are more than a combination of red and blue or yellow and black. They are non-verbal communication. Colors have symbolism and color meanings that go beyond ink. As you design brochures, logos, and Web sites, it is helpful to keep in mind how the eye and the mind perceive certain colors and the color meanings we associate with each color.

In addition to understanding color meanings, it helps with mixing and matching colors to know the relationship of adjacent, complementary, and clashing colors.

Adjacent or harmonizing colors appear next to each other on the color wheel. Harmonizing colors often work well together but if too close in value they can appear washed out or not have enough contrast.

Complementary colors are separated by another color on the color wheel. Complementary colors printed side by side can cause visual vibration making them a less than desirable combination. However, separate them on the page with other colors and they can work together.

 Clashing or contrasting colors are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. Despite the name, colors that clash are not always a bad combination if used carefully. They provide great contrast and high visibility. On each of the cool, warm, mixed, and neutral pages are links to profiles of specific groups of colors with descriptions of their nature, cultural color meanings, how to use each color in design work, and which colors work best together. On the next few pages we’ll explore the color meanings of four different groups of colors.

 Cool Color Meanings (calming): Blue, Green, Turquoise, Silver

Warm Color Meanings (exciting): Red, Pink, Yellow, Gold, Orange

 Mixed Cool/Warm Color Meanings: Purple, Lavender, Green, Turquoise

The traditional primary colors are RED, YELLOW, and BLUE.

• Mix two primary colors to get the complementary colors.

• The traditional complementary colors are ORANGE (Red plus Yellow), GREEN (Yellow plus Blue), and PURPLE (Blue plus Red). In grade school you probably had plenty of opportunities to mix primary colors and make new colors. It was magic! The way we see color is a bit different. You’ve probably seen a prism break a beam of light into a rainbow of colors. The visible spectrum of light breaks down into three color regions: RED, GREEN, and BLUE.

• Add RED, GREEN, and BLUE (RGB) light to create WHITE light. Because you ADD the colors together to get White, we call these the additive primaries.

• Subtract one of the colors from the other three and you are left with yet another color. RGB minus RED leaves CYAN. RGB minus the BLUE leaves YELLOW. RGB minus GREEN leaves MAGENTA. These are called the subtractive primaries (CMY).

Try mixing GREEN and BLUE paint and I bet you don’t end up with a nice CYAN. Why? Because the color we see is reflected light and light and ink don’t work in quite the same way. Each of those individual colors is a hue.

Red is a hue. Blue is a hue. Purple is a hue. You can change the saturation of a hue by adding black (shadow) or white (light). The amount of saturation gives us our shades and tints. Add varying amounts of black to get shades.

Think of the coming darkness and the darkening shadows to remember that a hue plus black equals a shade. Add varying amounts of white to lighten a hue. The light hues are tints.