SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

Looking to make a big advertising impact in an overpopulated market? Then drop the extra colors, graphics, and lettering. As counterintuitive as it may sound, contemporary advertising companies know that it’s often best to pare content down in order to actually increase an ad’s effectiveness.

Keeping the message of your advertisement straightforward and simple – by pairing a single logo, image, word, or bright hue with a catchy slogan – creates memorable work that is both eye-popping and intriguing.

Icons come in all shapes and sizes. While the clean and minimalist style is better suited for applications and navigation menus, those highly detailed icons can sure add some eye-candy to your designs.

In fact, a lot of the icons in this post are so detailed that they could be used as feature rather than to complement say an interface or an application menu. I hope you enjoy the showcase. Feel free to chime in and leave a comment at the end of this post.

With all the content-heavy and CMS-powered websites out there these days, I find it refreshing to browse a single-page website where all the content is accessible without loading or refreshing a page.

The sites in this post make great use of things like sliders, carousels, Ajax and auto-scroll scripts to display content in a way that doesn’t hinder the user experience but rather improves it. I hope you enjoy this showcase, and of course feel free to chime in and leave a comment at the end of the post.

The computer sitting at your desk is far more powerful than anything available to all but the largest businesses in the 1980s, enabling us to continue to add layer upon layer without slowing down, and possibly losing focus on why we are here in the first place – to deliver a high quality product.

One possible solution is to this is to artificially limit your design and color options the way Shigeru Miyamoto was limited by technical constraints when designing Zelda and Mario on the NES.

While some of the NES library was filler, there were many standouts that used the limitations of 8 bit technology as strengths, rather than weakness.

The languages, aesthetics, and calligraphy of other cultures can open up new avenues for typography lovers and graphic artists, who can use a script like Arabic as a new framework within which to express their creativity.

By finding innovative ways in which to present Arabic letter shapes and markings, while also striving to incorporate the culture’s handwriting techniques and themes, designers are given a new area of inspiration and challenge.

Web development keeps getting better – there are more increasingly-standardized tools like HTML5 and CSS3, and their features let web designers and developers create advanced and good-looking websites more easily.

But some browsers – mainly Internet Explorer version 6, 7, and 8 – don’t support many of these features, like border-radius, gradients, text-shadow, transparency, CSS animations and transitions, and so forth…