What Goes Into a MediaLoot Design Resource?

In this video we intend to give you an insight into the process behind making one of our MediaLoot premium design resources.

Designing From Home

Working from home is an extremely exciting, but also daunting lifestyle choice for designers. It can be quite different to going freelance and renting office space, but it is worlds apart from working in a traditional office environment for an employer.

This article aims to cover some of the reasons why working from home is becoming an ever more appealing idea for designers, and share some essential tips for overcoming the potential problems that can arise when you do co-habit your house with your own business.

Infographic: A Visual History of Design Tools

This infographic displays the progression of graphic design tools, on a timeline covering the last 27 years. Starting with MacPaint in 1984, passing by now obsolete applications such as Macromedia Freehand, xRes, and Adobe Pagemaker and ending up with some of the new kids on the block including Pixelmator, ArtRage and iDraw for the iPad.

It is a great, visual way to see how long some of these applications have been in development, especially in relation to their competitors and milestones on the timeline. You might even have a little shock when you realize which tool is the longest running on the timeline.

Fireworks For Beginners: A Complete Getting-Started Toolbox

Despite sometimes feeling like the un-loved, adopted child to the Adobe Creative Suite family, Fireworks remains for a lot of professional web and user interface designers to be the most useful, productive tool in their arsenal, however due to the vast popularity of a certain other graphics application in the creative suite, it doesn’t gain anywhere near the recognition it deserves for what it does best.

5 Tips to Teach Yourself a New Creative Skill

I’m sure at some point we have all seen something, maybe a shot on Dribbble, or a photograph on a billboard, and thought “Wow, I want to do something like that”, but for whatever reason, a lot of the time, that gut instinct we have to teach ourselves a new creative skill is never acted upon.

For example, a designer might read a captivating novel, and all of a sudden become full of inspiration and have aspirations of writing something of their own that could be that awesome. Or maybe you have your have your own personal aspirations of creating something to sell and make your millions, but for some reason, it never works out, usually due to either not knowing where to start or feeling like you would never have the time, or that it is out of your league.

In this article, I will drawn on some of my own and other’s experiences with learning new skills, and hopefully help you feel a little more positive about broadening your own skill set. I’m sure I don’t need to convince anyone of why learning new skills is cool, but suffice to say, at the very least it’s something to add to your resume and give yourself a feeling a self accomplishment (which is always a good feeling to have).

How To Get More Out Of Layer Styles

Using layer styles to style objects is something that takes some time to truly master, understanding layer styles in Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator can mean that your designs will never fall short in visual appeal whatever environment you’re using.

What is the Perfect Web Design Application?

As designers we spend huge portions of our days staring into screens, looking at the same buttons and dialogs and essentially repeating the same processes over and over again, so hopefully it’s not unjustified to sometimes question the tools of our trade that essentially become our lives when we’re in front of our computers.

The MediaLoot HTML5 Compendium

Let’s face it, it’s difficult to keep up with all of the new coding languages. Despite that difficulty, and the fact that some of these standards aren’t even finalized, there’s still a lot of pressure for designers to start using HTML5. The purpose of this compendium is to make it easier for everyone by providing an up-to-date reference on the new features and uses of HTML5.

See the compendium:

The Future of Web Design

The year is 2011 and we have again found ourselves at dawn of a changing web. Emerging technologies like smartphones and web-enabled tablets have left us unsure of how users are browsing our websites, and new coding standards like HTML5 and CSS3 are turning web design into something more like print design. With all of this change comes massive opportunity for growth, but only for those who are prepared…

5 Tips for Creating Perfect Icons

For designers working on important projects, finding the perfect icons to compliment their designs can become a bit of an issue, but there are a few ways in which we usually solve this issue; downloading free and premium icons or outsourcing icon design to others. A lot of the time one of these options will work just fine, but what about the times when you just can’t find those perfect icons?