This week MightyDeals have arranged a great offer for Access All Areas members. They are giving away any of their current deals to 5 lucky winners! Fancy some new vector resources, a premium font to add to your collection, or maybe a book to learn something new? Log in and …
Follow this step by step Illustrator and Photoshop tutorial to create a cool poster design of vibrant shard graphics. We’ll create the array of shapes with Illustrator’s vector tools before finishing off the poster with some subtle textures in Photoshop.
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Taking a black and white photograph and adding partial color to certain key points of the Read the rest of this entry »
The Art & Design Inspiration fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from Stewart Scott-Curran, Justin Kamerer, Chris Honeywell, Ben Thomas and Tom Whalen.
The Flaming Lips by Stewart Scott-Curran
the I enjoyed this post by Golden Krishna on the Cooper blog about how error messages are becoming increasingly less useful in helping you identify what has gone wrong.
Fortunately, some suggestions on writing good error messages are included towards the end, including this one from UXmatters.
I’ve always loved browsing the insanely detailed and realistic artwork created by digitally painting in Photoshop, so this year I’m planning on setting aside some time to learn the basics myself. I’ve read through numerous online tutorials and have hand picked the best to share with you today. All the tutorials showcased in this post describe the step by step process and offer useful tips to help you get started with the art of digital painting.
Despite being an extremely popular subject it’s pretty difficult finding guides or tutorials that actually explain the process in detail. There’s stacks of ‘speed painting’ videos you can watch in awe, but they don’t really offer any tips or advice. There’s also plenty of design process explanations, but most seem to be aimed at advanced artists and often resemble the image above, where the design goes from a rough sketch to the completed piece in just a couple of steps! Thankfully there’s a small bunch of tutorials that explain the basics and provide useful information such as brush settings and sensitivity levels. The best of which are featured below:
Dianae Digital Painting Tutorialthe Read the rest of this entry »
This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the Read the rest of this entry »
A few months ago I updated the live chat tool for one of the websites I manage so that it would proactively pop up after a visitor had been on the site for a couple of minutes and had viewed several pages. The pop-up is pretty intrusive which concerned me from a user experience standpoint, but I thought I would try it out anyway.
Here’s how the chat popup looks — you can’t navigate the site without closing it:
We’ve now been running the proactive for four months, and the increase in the number of online chats it has generated is quite substantial:
| Month | Increase in # of chats |
|---|---|
| September 2011 | 433% |
| October 2011 | 211% |
| November 2011 | 195% |
| December 2011 | 195% |
| Average | 258% |
A 200%+ increase in the number of chats was certainly more than I had expected. Not surprisingly, I was also concerned about the negative impact in might have on other visitors who might find it too intrusive and instead choose to leave the site.
Fortunately, we have not seen any spikes in exit rates that could be attributed to this, nor has our conversion rate gone down. In fact, over the last quarter the site has experienced its highest ever revenue, although this is likely to be due to other activities and campaigns we have underway.
Despite its intrusive nature, we’ll be sticking with the proactive chat popup. If you are running an online chat service on your website — especially if it is an ecommerce site — and do not have it set to proactively pop up, you might want to test whether you can drive more chats this way.
This week Access All Areas members have the chance of winning $50 worth of credits to spend on website templates and themes from 4Templates.com. Choose from hundreds of beautiful designs, each built with standards compliant code and supplied with the PSD source file.4Templates.com offers website templates and themes that are …
Follow this step by step tutorial to create a realistic pewter style metal text effect in Photoshop. The best part is it’s really easy! Just a couple of Photoshop layer styles is all it takes to create the basic effect, with a subtle tweak or two to perfect the lighting to maximise the realism.
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In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to adapt a simple HTML blog layout into a WordPress the Read the rest of this entry »
