Mike Kirby: how I quit my day job and designed a top-tier mobile game
A few weeks ago, we got an email from our friend Mike Kirby, one of 99designs’ top app icon designers, with some exciting news. The Ories: Super Space Monsters!, a mobile game for Apple devices that Mike visually designed from top to bottom for the past 2 years, was finalized and scheduled for release. Since then a …
PPI vs. DPI: what’s the difference?
If you’ve ever worked on a print design, used Photoshop or any other such program for manipulating raster images, you’ve surely come across the terms DPI (dots per inch) and/or PPI (pixels per inch). Chances are, you’ve also received some confusing DPI/PPI-related requests from clients who don’t understand what these terms mean. Before you start …
23 real estate logos that aren’t totally lame
This stock real estate logo on sale at Shutterstock.com looks all too familiar Have you ever seen a house like this before? Of course you have — not in reality but in logo design. The world of real estate logos is littered with such sloping roofs and square windows, suspended in abstract space or agglomerated …
Type around town: 18 fonts proven in print
The amount of new fonts created on a daily basis is staggering. This is awesome — don’t get us wrong — but if we read one more roundup with a title like “50 New Sans Serifs that Every Designer Needs to Know About,” we think we’re going to short-circuit. Seeing typefaces at this quantity, abstracted from any …
Success strategy: how to make the most of your design portfolio
On 99designs, we equip each designer with a public profile page. At the very least, this might function as your personal home base. But it can be so much more than that. Utilize it to the fullest, and your profile will be one of your biggest assets — a place to showcase your professionalism and …
History of the polka dot: art, the cosmos and graphic design
Polka dots. As the only decorative motif worn by the universe itself, we think it merits a pretty serious showcase. In fact, the polka dot has a richer history than we ever imagined. Since first hitting the men’s fashion scene in mid-19th century England, the polka dot (which has no substantiated relation to the polka …
11 must-read design books
With every design blog we follow, every RSS feed we subscribe to and every tablet we lay eyes on, the good old-fashioned book feels more irreplaceable. Besides being a beautifully designed object, the hardcover book typically boasts a more esteemed author, more care in its research and a more thorough editing process than your typical online …
Get ready to go green in 2013
Pantone’s color of 2013: Emerald Feast your eyes on that lush, radiant hue; you are shackled to it for a year. That’s right, Pantone has selected Emerald as the official color of 2013 (replacing 2012′s Tangerine Tango), and as we all know, any designer who strays from Pantone’s decree will be promptly ostracized forever. So …
Logos of 2012: the controversial and the overlooked
If there’s one thing we learned this year, it’s that people take their brand marks really, really seriously. Looking back, it almost feels like 2012 was the year of the logo re-design controversy: from the downpour of outrage prompted by Microsoft’s new branding to the whole University of California scandal that just shook the world …
Know your design history: the utopian De Stijl movement
The De Stijl (Dutch for “the style”) group was one of several art and design movements that responded to the chaotic trauma of World War I with a “return to order.” Headed by Dutch artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, De Stijl rejected pre-war decorative tendencies (think Art Nouveau) and pushed Cubism to new …
