How to Enrich Your Brand Using a Smart Photo Editor

Post pobrano z: How to Enrich Your Brand Using a Smart Photo Editor

People who work online, know and appreciate the importance of good visual content. Good visual content is not always easy to come by, and locating superb visual content is even harder – unless you create it yourself.

Creating attractive and engaging visual content necessitates adhering to several fundamental rules:

Images must display a sense of coherency. Images that to not relate to one another can create a sense of confusion. Coherency is also important with respect to image quality. A poorly prepared image can stick out like a sore thumb, and detract from its more professional-appearing companions.
The images must be authentic. They must in tune with your brand, your message, and the textual content they are designed to support. One of the best approaches is to take the photos yourself and process them using a versatile photo editor like Luminar, to achieve professional, eye-catching results.
The images must be relevant. An image can do more than merely attract attention. It can point viewers in the direction you want them to take. To do so, it needs to closely relate to what you are trying to promote – whether it is a product, a service, or an idea.

Image Editors Can Give Your Brand a Boost

The typical Internet user’s attention span is not noted for its longevity. This is why the smart way to capture user attention is through visual content. It is also why the smart use of a Mac photo editor can play such a key role in giving your personal brand, or that of your company’s, a significant boost. Run-of-the-mill images could serve you well if they were the only images on the net; but they are not, and even if they were, they would do little to enhance your brand.

Online professionals often face a situation in which an image editor capable of producing intricate effects is difficult to work with. There is, however, an image editor that’s remarkably easy to use, despite its internal complexity. Check out this Luminar vs. Lightroom comparative analysis, and see for yourself.

Three ways to make your online brand stand out:

  1. Select images that compliment you – This may require some reverse engineering. You need to identify ways that will help establish a positive relationship between the brand and online users. A good way to do this is to select image-editing filters that, when put to use, will draw extra attention to your visual content. It’s not only the image but what you do with it, that can make a difference.
  2. Here’s an example of how you can apply presets to increase the dramatic effect of an image.

  3. Apply different filtering techniques to different sections of your site. – You don’t always have to treat visual content uniformly throughout a blog; especially when different sections address different themes or are characterized by different moods. Matching images to a text’s mood or theme, suggests you’ve done your homework.
  4. There’s no need to keep your creativity on a short leash. – Creativity can admittedly be dangerous if you’re an amateur photographer who’s trying to be “clever”. On the other hand, when you have an easy to use, yet powerful photo editor for Mac, like Luminar, at your fingertips, you can often let your creativity run wild. A little quirkiness here and there can sometimes do wonders for your brand.

The World’s First Photo-Editing App that Adjusts to Your Style and Skill Level

Complex software is often needed to perform complex tasks, and Luminar is no exception. This Mac image editor, with its more than 300 editing features is necessarily complex, but its user interface tells a different story. It’s unbelievable easy to work with; especially with respect to what it enables you to accomplish.

Color Splash

Creating a splash of color within a B&W photo can an effect that may be subtle, or stunning but the eye will always take notice. Doing so is not difficult. Simply upload a color image, transform it into B&W, and use Luminar’s color splash tool to brush color back in.


Use Luminar’s color splash feature to create amazing results.

Resizing and Enhancing an Image
Although a photo can be resized during a cropping process, a tool featuring several modes by which you can resize an image is also available.

When you’ve finished editing, simply click on “Save”. This is true for the other photo-editing features as well, including Luminar’s many tools for enhancing an image.

Luminar’s photo effects allow you to make photos more dramatic, give them a dark, mysterious look, perform color balancing, or create a riot of color. You can increase clarity, vary image contrast, or adjust color temperature, and more. Luminar’s batch processing feature can be a time saver for a busy designer.

With its more than 300 image-editing tools to work, you’ll find it’s worth taking the time to try Luminar by yourself.

26 Shock & Awe Electric Logos

Post pobrano z: 26 Shock & Awe Electric Logos

If you’re like me, you probably don’t know much about the form of energy that powers our everyday life. For that reason, here are 10 quick facts about electricity to get you up to speed:
Courtesy of kickassfacts.com

  1. A platypus hunts via electricity and has 80 different kinds of venomous toxins.
  2. The annual electricity cost of running the Large Hadron Collider is about $23.5 million.
  3. A typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food.
  4. The word “electrocute” is a combination of the words electro and execute, meaning you were killed by electricity. So if you don’t die, you were not electrocuted, you were shocked.
  5. Ore trains in Sweden traveling down to the coast generate five times the amount of electricity they use, powering nearby towns and the return trip for other trains.
  6. The amount of energy consumed by U.S. homes for air conditioning has doubled in the past 12 years and now accounts for nearly 20 percent of our electricity use.
  7. So many British people make tea after the TV show “Eastenders” finishes, that backup power stations go on standby to cope with the massive surge in electricity usage.
  8. In 1999, 40 million people simultaneously lost electricity in the Philippines, including the presidential palace, sparking fears of a possible coup, only to find out that the power grid was compromised by the cooling pipes of one power plant which sucked 50 dump trucks’ worth of jellyfish.
  9. Daylight Savings doesn’t actually save electricity. It still exists because it helps the economy.
  10. In 2005, an Australian man wearing a nylon jacket and wool shirt built up 40,000 volts of static electricity, resulting in burned carpets, melted plastic, and a massive evacuation.

Cool right? So cool in fact that I decided to put together a collection of electricity related logos for your inspiration. Enjoy!

Credit to respective artists.


credit:Adrian Gabry?

credit:Ivana Sivac

credit:Daniel Q Halt

credit:Amanda Hakanson-Stacy

credit:Mike Erickson

credit:Dane Storrusten

credit:Anaïs Romand

credit:Andrew Berkemeyer

credit:Damian Kidd

credit:Eduard Kankanyan

credit:Matt Rancatore

credit:Chris Inclenrock

credit:Jake Goble

credit:Gareth Hardy

credit:Ryan Houk

credit:Jason Rose

credit:lyle hebel

credit:Barnyard Collective

credit:Carl Raw

credit:Mersad Comaga

credit:Brett Garwood

credit:Tito

credit:Mikael Johansson

credit:Filip Lichtneker

credit:Roberto Brambila

credit:Ashley Marlow for Zipline Interactive


Conclusion

I would love to know your thoughts and opinions on this roundup so feel free to make use of the comment section below!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s logo design roundup! Thanks for stopping by!


Design deals for the week

Post pobrano z: Design deals for the week
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Every week, we’ll give you an overview of the best deals for designers, make sure you don’t miss any by subscribing to our deals feed. You can also follow the recently launched website Type Deals if you are looking for free fonts or font deals. The Big Design Bundle Filled with plenty of useful design stuff like (among other […]

Creativity to the blood in the advertising campaign of White Square Festival

Post pobrano z: Creativity to the blood in the advertising campaign of White Square Festival
first image of the post
IX International Advertising Festival White Square, Belarus, one of the leading creative events in advertising and communications industry of Eastern Europe, has launched a campaign with famous advertisers shot in unexpected images. The key idea of Festival’s corporate identity this year has become the image of boxing ring. On April 27-29 White Square Festival will […]

Squeezy Stretchy Flexbox Nav

Post pobrano z: Squeezy Stretchy Flexbox Nav

I saw an interesting take on off-canvas navigation the other day over on The New Tropic. It wasn’t the off-canvas part so much. It was how the elements within the nav took up space. They stretched out to take up all the space, when available, but never squished too far. Those are concepts that flexbox makes pretty easy to express! Let’s dig in a little.

Here’s the nav, a video showing what I mean:

My favorite part is how there are submenus. When a submenu is toggled open, the same rules apply. If some stretching has happened, the nav items will shrink in height, making room for the submenu. But never shrink too far. If there isn’t room, the menu will just scroll.

Standard Two-Level Nav HTML

Pretty easy to mock out with Emmet:

<nav class="main-nav">
  <ul class="nav-list">
    <li><a href="">Lorem ipsum.</a></li>
    <li>
      <button class="submenu-toggle-button">+</button>
      <a href="">Explicabo, perspiciatis.</a>
      <ul class="submenu nav-list">
        <li><a href="">Lorem ipsum.</a></li>
        <li><a href="">Culpa, qui!</a></li>
        <li><a href="">Repudiandae, eaque.</a></li>
      </ul>
    </li>
    <li><a href="">Sit, dolor.</a></li>
    <li><a href="">Dicta, possimus?</a></li>
    
    <!-- etc -->

  </ul>
</nav>

Flexbox the Column

Let’s make sure that list is as tall as the browser window, which is easy with viewport units. Then make sure each of the list items stretch to fill the space:

.main-nav > ul {
  height: 100vh;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
}
.main-nav > ul > li {
  flex: 1;
}

We’ve already gotten almost all the way there! Stretching works great, only when there is room, like we want:

Quick Toggles

We have a <button> in place to toggle the submenus (arguably, we should probably place those buttons with JavaScript, since they don’t do anything without). Here’s how they could work. The submenus are hidden by default:

.submenu {
  max-height: 0;
  transition: 0.5s;
  overflow: hidden;
}

We can open it with a class:

.submenu.open {
  max-height: 200px; /* non-ideal magic number */
}

We’re animating to an unknown height here, which is tricky. We hope to have a good article addressing this out soon (there are options).

Toggling classes is plenty easy:

var buttons = document.querySelectorAll('.submenu-toggle-button');

[].forEach.call(buttons, function(button) {
  button.addEventListener('click', function() {
    var submenu = button.parentNode.querySelector('.submenu');
    submenu.classList.toggle('open');
  });
});

That gets those submenus behaving like we want:

Demo

You’ll probably need to pop over to the Pen to play with the vertical stretching stuff.

See the Pen Squeezy Stretchy Nav by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.


Squeezy Stretchy Flexbox Nav is a post from CSS-Tricks

“lives in a sort of purgatory”

Post pobrano z: “lives in a sort of purgatory”

Brad Frost:

A front-end designer … lives in a sort of purgatory between worlds:

  • They understand UX principles and best practices, but may not spend their time conducting research, creating flows, and planning scenarios
  • They have a keen eye for aesthetics, but may not spend their time pouring over font pairings, comparing color palettes, or creating illustrations and icons.
  • They can write JavaScript, but may not spend their time writing application-level code, wiring up middleware, or debugging.
  • They understand the importance of backend development, but may not spend their time writing backend logic, spinning up servers, load testing, etc.

A front-end developer is aware.

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“lives in a sort of purgatory” is a post from CSS-Tricks

“Write a script”

Post pobrano z: “Write a script”

Jeremy Keith, on teaching people JavaScript for the first time:

A lot of that boils down to this pattern:

When (some event happens), then (take this action).

We brainstormed some examples of this e.g. „When the user submits a form, then show a modal dialogue with an acknowledgment.” I then encouraged them to write a script …but I don’t mean a script in the JavaScript sense; I mean a script in the screenwriting or theater sense. Line by line, write out each step that you want to accomplish. Once you’ve done that, translate each line of your English (or Portuguese) script into JavaScript.

Pseudo code. I’m a big fan.

Writing a code flow out in plain English works great for beginners, and in my experience remains useful forever. I find myself regularly writing pseudo code in Slack and in bug/idea tickets, although I’ve perhaps graduated from plain English to my own weird non-language:

IF (user_is_pro? AND has_zero_posts)
  OR (signed_up_less_than_three_days_ago) {
    // ajax for stuff
    // show thing
}

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“Write a script” is a post from CSS-Tricks