Following are the set of business cards ranging from traditional to wacky. --
Despite my aversion to novelty cards like the one above, I admit they’re still fun to look at, mostly as good examples of what not to do. It’s easy to make a design stand out. But it’s hard to do it without upstaging the content.
http://www.lifeclever.com/584-ways-to-design-a-business-card/
It won’t replace your fancy CS3, nor Flash, nor 3D Studio Max.
Some of them are pretty decent alternatives, not only for those who are not willing to spent some big Bucks, but also for those who need some specific tasks done, like resizing a batch of picture without needing to run the almighty Photoshop.
Image editing
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The GIMP 2.2.13
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product.
Note: You will need to download both GTK+ Runtime Environment and The Gimp installers. Install GTK+ before installing The Gimp.
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GIMPshop 2.2.8
GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.
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Picasa 2.7
Transfer, find, organize, edit, print, and share images, all with this easy-to-use product. Watch Picasa automatically organize all your pictures into elegant albums by date. Having all your photos in one place means no more time wasted searching for folders or files. The program works with JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files and is compatible with most digital cameras; it detects your USB driver and imports pictures into albums. Editing tools include cropping (standard or custom), removal of red-eye, and enhancing–even switching from color to black and white. Create slide shows set to your MP3s. Integration with Picasa’s free Hello instant picture-sharing software lets you share hundreds of photos in seconds and chat in real time.
Download Picasa with the Free Google Pack
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Paint.NET 3.08
Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
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ColorPic 4.0
Ever tried using a color picker on a high resolution monitor? It’s impossible. That’s why this color picker has a magnifier attached. Grab palettes of up to 16 colors at once and use four advanced color mixers to select a spectrum of possibilities.
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Magnifier 3.0
Ever needed to see what’s going on the screen down to the pixel level? That’s where the Magnifier comes in. Simple and easy to use, the Magnifier is always handy for when you need to see all the details. Magnifier has the following features: no popup adverts or spyware, easy to use with any other program, resizable magnification area, adjustable zoom factor, overlay a grid.
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Easy Thumbnails 2.91
Create thumbnails and scaled copies of all your images. With Easy Thumbnails, you can find and process images individually, in groups, or in whole folders using a simple file selector and built-in image viewer. Use slider controls to rotate images and adjust contrast, brightness, sharpness, and other attributes. Thumbnails can be created in any existing folder or a new folder, and you can identify them clearly by adding a prefix or suffix to their names.
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FastStone Photo Resizer 1.4
FastStone Photo Resizer is a free image converter and resizer intended to enable users (especially digital-camera owners) to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text, and watermarks to images in a quick-and-easy batch mode. The application supports major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, and PNG. Drag-and-drop mouse operation is well supported.
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ImageDiff 1.0.1
ImageDiff is a pixel by pixel image comparison tool. ImageDiff allows you to compare two images side by side, and see a difference mask showing you the exact pixels that have changed. Features include: Compare images of different formats, including JPG, GIF, BMP, and TIF, PNG. Compare images of different proportions and imageDiff will scale and calculate the difference automatically.
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IrfanView 4
IrfanView is a fast and compact image viewer/converter. It is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals. Many supported file formats and features. Features include: multi-language support, Thumbnail option, slideshow, toolbar skins, fast directory browsing, batch conversion/editing, multipage editing, file search, change color depth, scanning, cut/crop, IPTC edit, capturing, lossless JPG operations, effects (sharpen, blur, Adobe Photoshop filters), EXE/SCR creating, many hotkeys, command line options and plugins.
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FastStone Image Viewer 3.2
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touch the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA.
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Alch Icon Suite 1.2
Alch Icon Suite is a powerful icon editing studio this small application is extremely easy to use and has a range of effects that can be applied to icons, not only can you edit any (16 X 16, 32 X 32, 48 X 48, 64 X 64) existing windows icons you can create your own icons fast and effectively.
*Update* 7/22/2007
Users have reported the presence of the virus “win32 adload.aw” in this program. Download for this app is not supported any more. Thanks for the help.
Overview | Download
Ilustration
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Inkscape 0.45
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more.
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SmoothDraw NX
SmoothDraw NX is an easy yet powerful freehand drawing tool. It’s a limited yet free version of SmoothDraw. It produces the most smooth and expressive stroke through your tablet. It also smoothes mouse input for who don’t have a tablet.
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SPRAY vector generator 0.1
SPRAY vector generator is intended to produce helper objects for vector illustration software like Xara X, Corel Draw, Adobe photoshop. You can easily generate huge number of circles with random position, fill, outline color; random paths, grids, and rays. You can place generated objects thru clipboard at your favorite illustration app. Developed for Xara X but also works with Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator.
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SMN v5.1 ParticleDraw
ParticleDraw is a novel windows drawing program powered by a state of the art general system simulation engine. The brushes are dynamic systems of particles with interesting behaviours, which you can completely customise. Each brush is intricately tuneable with many underlying physical parameters and one can construct arbitrary systems of particles and use these as brushes.
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InsightPoint 3.2.5.2
InsightPoint creates sophisticated illustration and layout for Web and print. When it comes to spell out and share your ideas, in text and in graphics as well, InsightPoint is the fastest and easiest way to get you there. Built on top of XML technologies, comprehensive object-oriented vector design tools, trivial learning curve, and smooth drawing experience.
Please Read about Design Programs in Detail :
Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire artists, scientists and others. Here are six things we can learn from him about web design.
One of the most remarkable things about Leonardo is his insatiable curiosity. Besides being a master painter, here are some of his other interests…
* Botany
* Music
* Human and animal anatomy
* Fluid dynamics (before there was a name for this branch of science)
* Writing great poetry
* Platonic philosophy
* Designing remarkable inventions, including flying machines and a sort of pre-industrial tank
Many of these interests show themselves in his artistic work. Anatomy is obvious, but have you ever compared the ringlets of hair in his paintings to his drawings of water flow? Or thought of how rhythm, which is so essential to music and poetry, also shows up in painting and drawing?
The point is that being curious and learning about many things that are apparently unrelated to web design ultimately gives you more tools with which to design well.
2. Look beneath the surface
I’ve already mentioned Leonardo’s interest in anatomy. His study of what lies beneath the surface gave him an understanding which enabled him to draw and paint his subjects remarkably well. Something similar applies in web design.
For the graphic designer, it might be studying the structure of HTML & CSS.
3. Build on the work of others
What does this mean for web design? Don’t reinvent the wheel. Do your customers need to be able to manage their own site? Maybe all they really need is a little customization for Wordpress.
4. Do quick studies
Before beginning work on a painting, Leonardo would often draw several studies of it, experimenting with different compositions and learning how the various aspects of the painting would interact with each other, all without having to start over from scratch if the first idea didn’t turn out well.
This can be done in web design too. Have an idea for a layout ? Sketch it on paper. Building a web app? Sketch out a use process. If it looks good, go for it. If not, try again.
5. Iterate
But with web design we have it easier. If we want to redo our work and make it better, we don’t have to start from scratch again. We can make continuous incremental improvements.
6. Be careful of experimental techniques
Web designers take note. While experimental technology is wonderful, be very careful about deploying it directly to a crucial system/site, otherwise it could leave you, like Leonardo, trying to mend the cracks.
http://joshuaclanton.com/blog/2007/12/27/6-web-design-tips-from-leonardo-da-vinci/
Everyone need to start measure his/her website Bounce rates. If your website have 80,000 Unique visitor/Month and more then 70% of visitor leave without clicking on any single link within your site.
Sometimes, jumping to deep pages can lead to higher bounce rate because visitors realize that new web page isn't exactly what they are looking for and they leave the website.
Being designer, you need to develop Bounce rate reduction strategies.
slingshotseo give some way to reduce Bounce rate of website
1. Make almost everything on the homepage click-able. That includes flash and images. Make sure that the image maps lead to relevant content, not just some random page.
2. Make sure that your contact information is on every single page of your website except for the homepage. This forces those would be callers to dig at least one page.
3. Come up with catchy tag lines or call to actions. This can be a ribbon, tag, or flash advertisement. Examples would be Free Catalog Download, Competitive Price Matching, Free Shipping, Client Results, Free SEO Tools...etc.
4 If you or your client is using Adwords or CPC programs, make sure that your ads directly relate to your website. Google still includes CPC traffic when calculating the bounce rate for each keyword or phrase.
Being Internet Marketing Expert, SEO or Designer how you can reduce bounce rate of website ?
Source / Read more at Sticky design tricks to keep your visitors from bouncing.
What is a Good Bounce Rate For a Blog ?
Creating a logo design is a pretty exhausting task what with having to think of all those ideas and going back and forward with the client. But after reading this article I hope that it will become a little easier for you to knock out some pretty sweet designs.
Its also good when showing the client to present at least 5-10 different versions, even if it's something simple like a change of colour or some font styling. Ive had many clients often ask to see a design with a slight change just becuase it was hard for them to visualise it in thier heads, I guess its the same for all clients and in the most part why they are hiring you.
So check out some of the examples below and hopefully you'll feel better next time you have to come up with a few good logos :)
Try flash drawing tools
If the thought of learning to use the drawing tools in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator makes you sigh, try Flash, no really iam serious, Flash is also vector based the same as Illustrator but it offers a very different approach to design and illustration.
When you create a line or shape element in Flash everything stays seperated, even objects on the same layer are selectable. This is great for when your playing around with ideas and you want to just move things all over the place. Plus you can also export your final designs to loads of other formats including Adobe Illistrator when your done. Many of the logos you will now see have been designed using Flash.
Fonts help Inspiration and Evolution.
If any of you have read the Graphics Design Guide you'll have heard me talk about how a good selection of fonts are great for both inspiration and evolution of your design style, updating your font folder with a few more additions every once in awhile will help you develop new concepts and ways of arranging information. Here’s a great selection of freely available fonts to play with (Font Collection, includes the ones above plus more! ).
Tip: If anyone comes to you with a design they’ve done using a font like "Times New Roman" it’s a good idea to grab their head, then grab a cold wet fish and slap it around their face a few times. This will hopefully jog their brain cells around enough to realise what they have done to the world!
Play with font layouts
When trying to think of ideas for a logo be sure to play around with font types, just try grabbing the company or product name and stick some copies of it around the page, now give each of the text boxes a different font type, this can help you see what kind of font will be suitable for the words or particular brand.
Be sure to also experiment with various font formatting and colours, and as you’ve probably heard me say many times before, try to use closely related colours or a mixture of low contrast high contrast to avoid horrible tick tack style clashes.
Another way to play around with font ideas is to think about adjusting sizes, for instance if one of the words in the company name or service has greater meaning think about maybe making this bigger than the rest to emphasise it, (see some examples above).
For some more font styling effects see the tutorial Jazz up Text with Gradient Effects
Fonts can make a logo
These examples use the actual characters in the word to create parts of the logo, inspiration for design such as these will most certainly come from the chosen font type (the kind of moment when you say, hang on a minute that letter looks strangely like a…) then bang it hits you.
Play with shapes
Now here’s a good one for corporate, less creative style logos, the use of shapes in different positions and colours can often give unexpectedly good results. When creating many of the above logos I have simply played around with the many drawing tools available to create some random shapes. I have then copied, rotated, and positioned them randomly until each of the shapes simple came together (I will often use this technique when I’m totally out of ideas and don’t want to use my brain cells too much he he.
Simplifying objects for logos
Here’s one of my favourite logo techniques, it involves using objects relating to the product or service behind the logo itself. So for instance the pasta pronto logo above has a vector version of a pasta swirl, if you look closely you will see that this was simply created from a series of simple shapes but when you put them altogether it looks so effective.
Another example is the Quest tree (shown above), with this one I’ve probably decided to take the most complicated item in the known world (a tree). I guess at first glance this would seem like a nightmare, but using this simple shape technique I have managed to simplify it.. (I have also incorporated the use of the letter Q of the company name as talked about in the previous "Playing with fonts" section)
So try it yourself, find an image of an object that represents the logo or service your trying to put across, then draw around it and try to simplify it into a few different shapes. I will usually use the line tool in Flash for this one as it's easy to adjust your selections as you go. Once you have your shapes give them some colour and use your new found knowledge of font layouts and you'll be well on your way!
Read in Detail at Tips and tricks for designing logos
1 Universal Selector - This sets ALL html tags to have zero border and padding. You then build your css up from there:
*{padding:0; margin:0; }
2 Image Replacement is the process of using images instead of text yet still using semantic html code. Whilst image replacement is great for static sites, the SiFR method is better for dynamic sites. Sifr uses a mix of Javascript and Flash to produce the text in any font. Both are great methods of making your site and typography more attractive and “designed”.
3 Comment tags are a great way of organising your CSS. Comments are inserted like
/* Details about the Css are help within is very useful tag */
They are very useful for breaking up sections of your CSS code. For instance you could have
/* ...All link styles ...*/
a:link, a:hover{ color:#f00; }
a:visited{ color#000; }
/*...Below is the left nav system section ...*/
#nav{ clear:both: float:left; }Im sure you get the idea
4 Structure of the file ( the order in which selectors come etc ). There are many methods of doing this but the way I work is generally from the top of the page to the bottom. So the top divs and everything within those divs such as list items progress down the page. I tend to put generic html tags such as the links and list items before the main stucture:
*{padding:0; margin:0; }
a:link, a:hover{ color:#f00; }
a:visited{ color#000; }
li{ padding:5px; }
#nav {clear:both; float:left;}
#content{ width: 550px; padding: 5px 15px;}
..........….
#footer{clear:both;}
This method is logical and therefore you can find things easily.
5 Shorthand:- This is a code saver and is quicker to type when you get used to it. Instead of
background-color:#f00;
background-image:url(background.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-attachment:fixed;
background-position:0 0;You can have:
background:#f00 url(background.gif) no-repeat fixed 0 0;
Another quick shortcut is for colours “#f00″ is short for “#ff0000″.
6 Centreing :- ( I’m from the UK) elements is very easy with CSS, simply give a width and a margin of “auto” to the left and right margins:
#div-id{width:550px; margin 0 auto;}
7 Font Sizes:- For accessiblility its better to use ems instead of pixels for font sizes. Simply set:
body{font-size:62.5%;}
p{font-size:1em;}
Setting the body to 62.5% rounds 1em off to 10px in most browsers. That allows you give almost pixel perfect measures, for example 1.3 em would be equal to 13 pixels.
8 Conditional Statements:- Internet Explorer is the enemy of most CSS designers and while version 7 is a lot more standards compliant, many users are still using version 6 and some are still using IE5. These browsers can easily be targeted by using Conditional Statements though.
I highly recommend you read this article about conditional statements if you are serious about web design!
9 DIVS:- Don’t be diagnosed with “Divitus”! While divisional (div) tags are great - don’t over use them
Larger Font size goes here as a heading
Smaller text goes in here, bla bla bla, like a paragraph
Can be rewritten as:
Larger Font size goes here as a heading
Smaller text goes in here, bla bla bla, like a paragraph
The 1st (the h2) and the 2nd ( the p) tag can then be targetted like this:
#mainholder h2{ font-size: 1.3em;} #mainholder p{ font-size: 1em;}
DIVS - Tip 2
CSS classes can be used twice for instance you could have:
Larger Red Text
Larger Red Text
Larger Red Text but underlined
At then this CSS:
.warningtext{ color:#f00; font-size: 1.3em;}
.underlined {text-decoration: underline;}
This keeps our stylesheet tidy and clean, which is never a bad thing.
10 ZERO equals ZERO:- Short and sweet for the last tip: There is no need to use any px or % when stating zero. For instance:
#divname{padding: 0px 4px;}Can be replaced with:
#divname{padding:0 4px;}
Ok its not going to halve your CSS load time but every little helps.
Summary Hopefully these CSS Web Design Tips will help you order and code your web pages that bit cleaner. If you have anything to add or know of an ever better method please leave a comment.
Source : http://www.mediasurgery.co.uk/articles/2007/01/24/10-quickfire-practical-css-web-design-tips-and-tricks/