Posts Tagged
design
Back in 2009, we reviewed xScope, the then-new comprehensive toolkit for designers. xScope offers precision features for measuring, previewing, and organizing everything on your computer’s screen, from element dimensions to color codes in any format.
The Iconfactory recently released xScope 3: a major update to their popular software, promising over 70 new features and improvements in interface and performance, let’s take a look at what’s new!
Our featured sponsor this week is Ramotion, a fantastic icon/UI design and iOS development company. Typically we reserve weekly sponsorship slots for our favorite apps but Ramotion has such an impressive portfolio that we simply couldn’t turn them down.
One of Ramotion’s primary strengths is icon design. Stop by their icon portfolio for some samples of their work along with a collection of amazing free Mac OS icons.
Beautiful icon design
They also design and develop gorgeous iOS apps. Pick’n'Roll is an innovative Dribbble client for iPad, Tap & Call is a brand new way to organize your iPhone contacts, and Pitty the Conquerer is a wonderfully illustrated iOS game about a small screw traveling up from the bottom of the toolbox.
Amazing iOS app design and development
Follow Their Work!
In addition to stopping by the Ramotion website, be sure to say hello on Twitter and keep an eye on their latest projects on Dribbble. If you have any projects where you want to really push the limits of awesome design, give Ramotion a shout, they are always looking for new opportunities and would love to help you out.
Acrylic Software is known for their beautiful and useful apps for the Mac and iOS. We got a chance to speak with Dustin MacDonald, the company’s Founder, Designer & Engineer. In our interview, we touched on a number of topics ranging from the history of Acrylic Software to their view on the Mac App Store and the interoperability between Mac OS X and iOS.
Enjoy the interview!
A big part of design is inspiration. Graphic and web designers don’t work in a vacuum, they browse around to see what’s come before, and use other designs as references and starting points. Collecting these little pieces of inspiration and reference can quickly crowd your browser’s bookmark folder or your computer’s pictures folder, so the developers of Sparkbox sought to create an easy tool for capturing and organizing these images. Let’s find out if Sparkbox can really help organize your digital inspiration!
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Dribbble is a delightful little online community specifically created for designers to share bite-sized previews of what they’re working on. Each “shot” is a 400px by 300px image that a user has chosen to share with the Dribbble community, often for the purpose of feedback (and a little showing off here and there).
Whether or not you’ve scored an invite to participate in the exclusive community, it’s a great place to stop by and browse for loads of gorgeous visual inspiration. Today we’ll be taking a look at the Dribbble community through the eyes of Play by Play, an awesome new Mac application that lets you check out all the latest Dribbble action without venturing into the browser (and without having an account). Let’s see if the app lives up to its awesome icon.
We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Box Shot 3D.
As a graphic designer, I am constantly faced with the task of creating 3D product mockups. Unfortunately, 3D modeling programs are extremely expensive, quite cumbersome and can take years to master. Box Shot 3D has come to my rescue quite a few times.
Box Shot 3D allows you to render custom software boxes, book covers, magazines, CD, DVD and Blu-Ray boxes, cans, bottles, mugs, bags and much more. No 3D-knowledge is required at all and the results look very professional because of the raytracing rendering technology.
So Easy, Anyone Can Use It
Box Shot 3D provides probably the easiest way to create virtual boxes for representing software products on the web or to create 3D book images for e-books. Box Shot 3D is used by thousands of designers around the world to represent their work to customers, as it supports more than 50 different shapes and most of them can be configured. It is also possible to render external 3D files.
What’s New?
The latest updates feature the support of multiple shapes in a single scene, external Collada files, sample ready-to-use scenes, image transformations and lots of other improvements.
Go Try It Out!
Box Shot 3D runs on Mac and Windows and is available for $80. Be sure to stop by the website to download the free trial version and see what you think!
Over at iPad.AppStorm, Joel Bankhead wrote a fantastic article about what makes a great iPad app icon. It caught my attention, and really got me thinking about the differences between iOS and OS X app icons – Are the principles the same, or very different?
In this article, I’ll be having a look at what you should and should not do in order to make a wonderful OS X icon.
Graphic designers need to consider a number of crucial design elements when creating work – layout, colour, dimensions, typography – you name it, a designer will have to incorporate it into their designs. Although Photoshop can handle most of a designer’s needs, there are many parts of a design which you’ll need other software for.
Art Director’s Toolkit from Code Line tries to fulfill all of a designer’s needs. It has tools for layout, colour, dimensions, typography – a total of 11 tools.
In this review, we’ll discover if it’s a designer’s perfect companion, of whether they’ve made several good tools rather than one great one.
The role of the interface designer is not one that should be taken lightly – Without a great interface, chances are that you wouldn’t be using the apps you currently are. If the Safari address bar was hot pink and created in MS Paint, would you still use it? Probably not.
Luckily, it isn’t, and you can use your Mac in pleasure, thanks to countless UI designers working tirelessly to perfect their application designs.
There are numerous wonderful mail clients for Mac OS X, and everybody has their own preference, for whatever reason. However, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who doesn’t marvel at the Sparrow interface – It really is something else.
Today, we’ll be chatting to Sparrow’s designer, Jean-Marc Denis, about his work, inspirations, and the interface design scene.
Mac OS X has a very high standard of interface design, more so than most other operating systems. This is thanks to designers to work extremely hard to make your software work the way you want it to. They may spend hours perfecting a single icon that you will use once and ignore – but it’s worth it.
Dmitry Novikov is a Russian designer who works for MacPaw, the software company that has brought you beautiful apps such as MacHider, Ensoul, and a personal favourite of mine that I couldn’t live without, CleanMyMac. Today, we’ll be talking to him about his processes, design decisions, and much more.
