The most colorful fashion brands I know

I love, love color in bright hues boldly put together. It can be challenging to dress with bold patterns but he following companies do a superb job at it.

 Lilly Pulitzer for me was love at first sight, the designs on the fabric are just so cheerful and vivid. You can shop by prints on their site, and see the inspiration behind their patterns as well as a video showing the process. It's making me itch to design a pattern of my own.

Texture Downloads

And another small resource list tonight, this time featuring free textures. The links will take you directly to the textures.

lostandtaken.com 

Free (Quality!) Font Resources

Below are 5 websites that offer stunning typefaces for free. I like typefaces that offer more than just one font in the family which allow for more flexibility when using them in a project. I just downloaded Quaver (included sans & serif versions), Ostrich (6 weights & styles) and Steelfish (7 free weights!) and hope to use them soon.

theleagueofmoveabletype.com

HTML + CSS for Beginners

These two sites will take you step by step through the process of creating a site using HTML & CSS from scratch.  It takes patience to go through the tutorials but might just prove useful in the long run.

w3school.com
The basic standards set for HTML and CSS are done by the w3school.

Illustration: Choose the King

Based on a Maamer, this poster is about not falling for the 'bling' of the world but to stay focused and connect to what's true. I got inspired by it a long time ago and felt this a good way to reconnect with the idea.

Design Challenge from Smashing Magazine

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

One thing about not getting formal training is that I haven't experienced peer criticism on my projects but after reading this article on Smashing Magazine by Paul Boag, that might change.

The Challenge? Choose a design you created and explain the reasoning behind everything you did. This isn't a web design that I'm going to post, but I would love feedback on it regardless, so if you have a minute or two to write what you would do to improve it, I would most definitely appreciate it.

The Project
The design I chose is the one with the hardest client I ever had. It's my own portfolio created as an interactive PDF using Indesign and published on issuu.com (an awesome website for displaying PDFs). Click on expand to see the design in full. I wanted the portfolio display the variety of work I've done, show the different clients I've worked with and show my personality while not taking away from the designs itself.
Here's the breakdown of the design:

• Grid - Used a four column grid with a nice amount of padding on both sides to bring attention to the designs themselves.
• Layout - Gave each page a focal picture with smaller images on the side to support the main image. Broke this up on some of the pages 1. to give variation to the design, and 2. to display more images in an efficient way.
  Each page has the client and project details in the same location to give the portfolio consistency and a strong structure.
• Color - Kept it simple using black and grey so as not to take away from the designs, and a pop of magenta to show personality and bit of color.
• Typography - Used Adobe Caslon, it's a beautiful traditional font that shows on professionalism and strength and at the same time allows for distinctive swashes and beautiful italics.
• Imagery - displayed most of the designs with a thin grey border to contain the images.
• Styling - used the simple social networking icons on the last page and made them click-able so it's super easy to connect.

So if you have anything you would do differently or perhaps an idea that would add to the design I would love to hear. Thanks for stopping by!

Colorful Mosaic in Illustrator

Awesome mosaic made in illustrator thanks to this tutorial by Chris Spooner. Easy to create and with a little patience you can create beautiful artwork using shapes, gradients and texture. Here's the color pallete I created on Adobe's Kuler, it's my very first color scheme and it's called vintage quilt.