Design is always changing, new trends are always up and coming so it’s important to be well-read and as knowledgeable as possible about your field. Coming up in August is a group of great new books to inform and inspire you designers.
After the success and popularity of our recent article 50 Must-Read Design Books, we decided to pull together an all-new list of yet to be released books about design so you can stay ahead of the game. We’ve done the hard work for you in this post, now all you have to do is order these books and—read them!
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Maps are very relevant to modern day designers. Web designers often place maps for directions to a business on the contact pages of sites they build. App designers make heavy use of maps — augmented reality anyone? The saying is true, there really is nothing new under the sun. Maps have been around for a very long time as have cartographers. Get some inspiration from these old map designs. If you look closely, you’ll find some excellent patterns, flourishes, line-work and attention to detail. There are also many different styles to be found within the maps in this roundup. Some of these maps are truly ancient from hundreds of years ago while others are simply “old” in the sense that they weren’t made in the last 10 years. Still other maps in this roundup simply look. Aside from gathering some inspiration from this roundup, you may also find some of these maps make great textures or backgrounds, especially those with old wrinkly paper that looks very worn. The next time you need to include a map in your design, why not create a cool custom map design and ditch the screenshot from Google Maps you like to paste into everything…
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There are so many things a graphic, logo or web designer can pull from architecture to use in their own designs and projects. Things like lines and angles, colors, materials and settings are all “cross-platform” ideas that can spark inspiration. In this particular post we are focused on the color usage in architecture. Most of these examples feature bright color schemes but you will also find toned down colors as well as color used as highlights in an otherwise colorless place.
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You’ve probably heard about the cool photography technique called lightpainting. If you haven’t, it basically involves using a slower shutter speed at night to let in more light. If a photographer wanted to “draw” or “paint” with light, they would simply need to move the lightsource(s) around during the long exposure. Lightsources can range from cell phone screens (there’s a lightpainting iPhone app), flashlights, stars in the sky, car lights… the list goes on. Just be creative. This roundup contains lightpainting shots from professionals and amateurs alike.
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Check out these inspiring vector character illustrations! If you’re looking for ideas, you’ll love this post because it features a wide variety of vector techniques and unique styles. Pay especially close attention to “skin” colors, shadows and shading, background elements and reflections/gloss effects. You’re sure to pick up a ton of good ideas by browsing through — enjoy!
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According to Wikipedia, bokeh is defined like this: In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Recently there’s been a deluge of bokeh posts in recent months on various design blogs, but we decided you can never have enough bokeh — it’s just plain cool! This collection showcases some really creative bokeh effects — using different camera lens covers to create shapes like hearts and stars, using a wide variety of subjects such as mugs, bridges and even entire cities. If you can’t get enough bokeh, you’re sure to find your fix in this post.
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For one reason or another, posters make a great canvass for displaying incredible typography skills. The web is just now beginning to try to start catching up to print in terms of designing with cool typography in mind, but for now, print mediums such as poster designs remain the place to find the best typographic inspiration. This collection features everything from clean and simple typography to crazy and complex typography treatments that must have taken hours upon hours to complete and perfect.
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Freelance Review is a Page Rank 6 design blog with a global Alexa popularity ranking of 66,444 (out of all the sites in the world) and we are growing fast. This is good news for advertisers who want to lock-in a good monthly sponsorship rate and ride the wave of growth we are currently experiencing. We’ve got ad opportunities for small buyers as well as medium to large buyers with prices that will surely fit any marketing plan. We’ve already attracted top-notch advertisers such as SiteGrinder, Central Desktop, Nextiva and Crunch. Read on to learn more about how we can connect you to your target audience of graphic, web and logo designers!
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While creating this post, I literally got chills from a few of these pictures. Nature can be truly breathtaking as these photos prove. I can’t imagine being the photographers behind these pics — I wouldn’t believe my eyes to experience such magnificent beauty first-hand. Most of us are so busy day to day and so used to sitting in front of our computer screens that we can’t get out into the truly isolated places nature has to offer and experience the awesome views and vistas up close. While it’s not the same as being there in person, I hope this post can at least bring you a little closer.
There are really two things to appreciate in this post. The awesome natural beauty and the skilled nature photography. You can tell that a lot of thinking went into each of these photos. The right settings had to be chosen along with the perfect time of day for lighting conditions among many other factors. Personally, these pictures make me think about how cool God is to have created these incredible works of art — kind of like when I see a cool logo or website, I get a feel for the personality of the designer behind them.
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Don’t you love infographics? Ya, us too. This is a follow-up post to our very popular 100 Seriously Creative Infographics post which we published a few months back. This time around we’ve got Apple infographics, colorful infographics, 3D infographics, complex infographics and simple infographics (didn’t know those existed, did ya). If you truly love infographics as much as I think you do, be sure to tweet about this post so others can fall in love with them too.
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