Win a Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen or a PrintedPiece Premium Account!

PrintedPiece is doing a huge giveaway of 10 Premium Accounts and 1 Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen!

2000 Free Photoshop Patterns

Today I have put together the largest collection of free Photoshop patterns DesignM.ag has ever offered. Enjoy!

Flowers Patters for Photoshop (6)

Quality Athletic Websites

There are not many aspects in life that can bridge gaps between religion, race, and nationality. Although, one that has proven time and time again is sport. There is not a city across the world that you can visit without seeing a team jersey or logo somewhere! Because of this, many sports clubs and teams have a unique challenge of designing their web presence to appeal to an international arena more so then the rest of us. I have assembled what I would consider out of the box and quality athletic based websites.

Whether you love or hate the brand or team, I hope you would agree that these companies are standing out in comparison to what the rest of the field is doing.

Manchester United Football Club

Win 1000 Business Cards from Inkchaser!

Inkchaser.com has offered to give 2 lucky DesignM.ag readers 1000 business cards! To enter this contest you must leave a comment on this post telling DesignM.ag readers what you would use the business cards for.

Company Profile

Based on their experience working with thousands of clients across dozens of industries and product categories Inkchaser helps corporate print buyers, graphic designers and small business owners with anything and everything print. When you choose Inkchaser you’ll be tapping the collective knowledge and expertise of over 200 professional print buyers to help get your project done exactly how you want it. And with thousands of InnerWorkings certified suppliers at their disposal every Inkchaser job is run individually – they don’t need to gang run projects to deliver great pricing. They offer full color business cards, black and white printing, or thermographic raised ink business cards, meaning they have all the options to support all your printing needs.

Inspiration: Interesting & Unique Typographic Book Covers

Books offer graphic designers, illustrators and typographers a great way to expand their portfolios. There are endless possibilities that can be explored when designing for book covers, and often are explored, as can be seen in this post.

I’ve had an increased interest in book covers recently after putting together another showcase at The Inspiration Blog on minimalistic book covers, since then I have been browsing for book cover inspiration daily so thought I would share some of my findings here at DesignM.ag. This showcase presents a collection of 64 typographic book covers, all of which are interesting and are genuinely unique. The books themselves are crossed between a number of

Coney Island of the Mind

Buy on Amazon

36 Cre­ative 3D Typography Designs

3D Typography is an art of collecting and arranging text in three dimension view. So in this showcase we’ve collected 36 creative 3D typography designs

TYPE

FWA – Milk

Head Up in the Clouds: Web Design that Uses Sky Elements

It is always amazing to designer incorporating different element of nature in their designs. This time the inspiration is cloud, sky and blue palette colors. In this post we are featuring some really beautiful website that used sky, cloud images and illustrations in their design.
Some of this website used stock images and some of them used vectors or combination of both. Nevertheless, the outcome is very professional and fun to see.

Yodaa

Collection of Abstract & Retro Futuristic Designs

Futurism is an artistic movement formed in Italy around 1910 that tried to express the energy and values of the machine age. While the style has changed some since its beginning, it still focuses on using futuristic styles for its time. In this post I will share with you a collection of 31 abstract & retro futuristic designs.

55°

5 Essential Office Functions

Creating a unique and inspirational office space is an essential tool to get your employees to put in the long hours. Much has been said of the great work spaces out there, and I don’t intend to beat that same drum. More importantly, I want to break down what makes these offices so special.

1. Make it your own

As you can see below from John Lasseter’s office in Pixar, he has definately made it his own. John Lasseter personally was the director of Toy Story 1 and 2, A Bugs Life, and Cars just to name a few of his accomplishments. Clearly you should not be afraid to make your space yours!

It’s About the Design Not the Tools

I’m guessing that most of you have seen the recent article over on Smashing Magazine, entitled “In Defense of Photoshop,” in which Tom Giannattasio makes a case for the continued use of Photoshop as the primary application for web design. The article makes some interesting points about the creative process, and the even suggests that designing in the browser somehow creates a disconnect between the designer and his work.

I’m not so sure about this second point, though. I understand where Giannattasio is coming from, but I think the argument assumes a singular design methodology. It assumes that the designer needs to actually create the design as one, organic unit, much in the same way that an artist would create a painting. In fact, the article explicitly states that “Great design relies on an open dialogue between the artist and the medium.”

Now that is an interesting statement, which really puts the article’s argument in perspective. The assumption that I see here is that effective design is an organic process, which brings the entire visual composition of the site to the forefront.

“So what?” you ask. Isn’t that what design is all about?

No. At least not entirely. Design is about making intentional and purposeful choices for framing content (as discussed here). Obviously, visual treatment plays a huge part in that, and as designers we pay a lot of attention to that part of the job – maybe even too much from time to time. But that’s not the entire purpose of design.