SpyreStudios

Web-Design and Development Magazine

20 Best Designed Album Covers for Inspiration

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Album covers are a great source of fresh inspiration for your graphic design work. Not only are well-designed album covers artistic, but they’re effective at marketing as well.

The best designed album covers:

  1. Give you a clear representation of what the content will be
  2. Sell you on the content by looking great itself

In other words, what a great visual design should be.

Think about it: how many times were you intrigued by fantastic artwork, and when you put the music on, it was how you’d imagine it would be like? That was a well-designed album cover at work.

So next time you need a fresh source of inspiration for your design work, take a look at well-designed album covers. And the following list of the 20 best designed album covers will get you started.

Minimalist Design: A Brief History and Practical Tips

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Minimalist design is one of the most significant design movements of the 20th century and early 21st century. It isn’t the flashiest, or the most popular, but it arguably penetrated more fields than almost any other art or design trend. Everything from user interfaces, to hardware designs, to cars, to films and games, to the web and visual designs of today – all those fields and more were influenced by minimalism.

Your friends might not know what minimalism is, but chances are they’re currently using or viewing a minimalist design: a modern phone, a clean web or application interface, looking at a slick brochure or other graphically-presented information, sitting in a simple living space on a sleek sofa, and so forth.

Modernizing Scripts Every Web Designer and Developer Should Use

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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…

Curing the Navigation-itis Syndrome

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More and more content is being published everyday and site owners need to find ways to categorize all this content. And with more content and categories comes greater navigation problems.

Sometimes navigation becomes a problem when there are simply too many options. Thus, it’s of great importance to cure the navigation-itis syndrome and make website navigation user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Hosted vs. Self-Hosted Blog Solutions – Pros and Cons

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There’s never been a better time to start or upgrade your blog. The tools available are fully-featured, polished solutions that make getting a professional and robust blog up and running ridiculously easy. Like, seriously – some of this stuff would’ve blown the minds of web developers in the ’90s.

But with so many options, which should you choose? This article will focus on the pros and cons of some of the most popular blog solutions: Self-hosted WordPress vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress.com.

The Ultimate 20 Usability Tips for Your Website

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Usability is ridiculously important to your website. It doesn’t matter how cool your website looks or how amazing your content is if visitors can’t quickly, easily, and enjoyably access and use it. Many of them will eventually just give up and look elsewhere.

So how do you make your website as usable as possible? Well, you’re in luck, because this article features 20 usability tips for your website. Technology will always change, thus changing the usability tips. So make sure you share your own tips and tricks with the rest of us.