tripwire magazine

Using textures in web design have become quite popular. Textures are great for giving the design a more realistic look and feel but should be used with caution. Adding too much texture risk making the design too messy and it easily becomes a bit grunge’ish. I personally like simple textures or simply noise that break the colours a bit and gives depth and brings the design to life when used right. This post brings 25 sites with different use of textures for your inspiration. Drop a comment and share if you like some of them or if you know others I should add.

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Lighting effects are often used in modern web design to give a site an interesting and different look and feel. There is something about strong lights and colours – used right the combination will catch our attention and affect our emotions in certain ways. Skilled designers know this and use it. Light effects are typically used on dark designs as they may the effects stronger – just like we are saving the best fireworks until darkness falls.

This article is a showcase of more than 40 sites using creative and inspiring lighting effects. Hope you like it and feel inspired and tempted to use some of the ideas for your own designs. Please drop a comment if you know any websites that you think should have made it on the list. If you’re ready to try out some light effects but not sure how to get started you should take a look at this post. 130+ Awesome Photoshop Tutorials – Light Effects, Drawing, Manipulation, Correction etc.

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The features, maturity,  and huge active community making Wordpress so popular for bloggers actually makes Wordpress a serious candidate for a quite large segment of traditional business websites. If you’re not already aware of it I can tell you that Wordpress is silently serving a lot of websites that I would not categorize as blogs. Of cause there are types of websites having loads of special and complex requirements Wordpress will never be supporting well but if you don’t have these needs Wordpress is worth considering… it’s free, the most popular open source platform to date, easy to use, fast to set up, there are thousands of good looking themes available… This post show you more than 20 websites using Wordpress for Non-Blogging purposes – hope this will inspire you!

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Most websites and blogs follow same overall structure in their design. At the top there’s a header section with a logo and in some case a few ads and some kind af navigation. At the bottom there’s some kind of footer. Between the header and footer there are one or more column with content. Traditionally most space and focus have been put on the header and the content sections while the footer have been one or two lines with maybe some contact information and a few important links. Many websites still follow this pattern but there’s certainly a trend right now turning this completely around. Modern websites and in particular blogs offer footers that are significant design elements, that become essential for the usability and overall look and feel. Of cause footer contents varies quite a lot from design to design (some having article lists, contact forms, votes, bio, navigation, image feed etc.) but it’s interesting to see how designers prioritize their footer today. Looking at footers created by other designers for great websites and blogs is inspiring and it may help us get ideas on what fits will in our own footer sections. This article showcase more than 40 great looking footers and should be enough to keep you inspired. But I hope you will leave comment if you know about  a great footer we should all know about.

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There are indeed many ways in which designers can use typography to deliver a message and even though humans use many years in school learning to read and write images are still making larger and more instant impact on us and affect our emotions easier than plain text. As you know “A picture is worth a thousand words” and this fundamental principle is often used by designers combining or modelling typography into images illustrating or supporting the message provided in text itself. This is a very large showcase compilation providing you inspiration, ideas and some of the best typography artwork created.

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Working on a design for a new Logo? Looking for inspiration? You have come to the right place! This article “Fresh Logos Inspirational Showcase” will take you through a seriously large series of intelligent, well designed and inspirational Logos. Good Logos isn’t something designers just create – Good Logos need to catch attention and be easy to memorize. This is the hard part really but as you can see below there are plenty of ideas to stimulate the human mind and force us to say…hmmm what is that? Hope you will produce some unique ideas of your own by going through the list below!

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This is a follow-up on 16 Scaringly Realistic 3D Animations – WOW where I promised more 3D goodies soon. 3D animators produce loads of truly stunning 3D images to satisfy our endless demands for better and more realistic 3D effects in games and films. Luckily 3D animators share and collaborate to get ideas, feedback etc. allowing all of us that have not learned to apply this kind of magic sitting in front of a computer to get a sneak peek on their creations… I browsed through loads of posts at zbrushcentral.com to find the best 3D creations for this post. Hope you will enjoy it and hopefully be inspired somehow.

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With the great tools we have available today (Maya, ZBrush, 3ds max etx.) talented and creative 3D animators can create more stunning and realistic 3D images than you may know. We have know for some time that the large film studios like fx pixar can turn the most far out and funny creatures into “living creatures” on the screen but they are not alone any more. The era where amateurs spent days on creating a sphere or rectangle with some very simple lightning on is over (I did try this years ago). Still I think creating the images I have found on cgsociety.org for this post is not easy to do at all! I also found that pixologic.com/zbrush/gallery is an awesome place to find inspiration. Deviant art 3-Dimensional Art category is also worth investigating. I’m going to do a post with some of the material from there soon.

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Manipulating images and photos has become common praxis these days and it is hard to know what is real and what is fake if professionals have created the manipulation. Just as example we can be sure that people in ads for perfume or on the front page of large magazines in reality never looked the way we see them. Polishing and improving what is not perfect over and over again seams just to be a human weakness and strength at the same time and our tool for doing it also keeps being improved. Photo manipulation can be used in many ways and an area that I find really fun and interesting is when people experiment with manipulating humans and the scene they are in and taking it a bit to the extreme. For this post I have simply browsed Flickr with the tag “manipulation” and found some really great and creative art created by talented photo manipulators simply experimenting with reality. What I like about looking at Flickr is obviously the endless amounts of images available and the high quality. Also another great thing is that many og the creaters explain what they did and provide links to textures and original photos. This is great for inspiration and learning the tricks others apply. By the way – another great place to look for stuff like this is the Flickr Group GhostWorks. Please let us all know if you know other places that contain art of this kind that is worth investigating.

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We all know it – “A picture is worth a thousand words“. This is certainly true in most cases but clever use of typography can also turn words into pictures and then interesting things start to happen. Some people experiment with the idea of turning typography into art and pictures and I believe the results can be very interesting and inspiring. In particular this type of art is commonly seen on posters, in logos, on walls (graffiti), etc. Sit back and enjoy the Experimental Typography I discovered on Flickr today. If you fall in love with some of the art featured here I would recommend that you credit it with a comment on Flickr – just follow the link by clicking on the pictures.

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