Members of military and intelligence forces around the world risk their lives daily to defend their countries and assist in peacekeeping and aid missions both at home and abroad. The men and women who make up the world’s defense forces make sacrifices that most civilians wouldn’t consider to serve their countries.
So, with everything they do for us, shouldn’t they be represented online by website designs that reflect the honor and responsibility they undertake every day? Unfortunately, that’s not the case in many countries out there. Many military websites out there are some of the worst designs in any industry. Whether they’re outdated, broken or designed by amateurs, some of the websites showcased below are bad enough to make you cringe.
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In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn’t very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.
In this second part of the article, I’d like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones that I will carry with me for a long time to come.
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Propaganda is most well known in the form of war posters. But at its core, it is a mode of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Although propaganda is often used to manipulate human emotions by displaying facts selectively, it can also be very effective at conveying messages and hence can be used in web design, too.
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“Art” is something philosophers have spent centuries trying to define, sadly with no satisfactory result (a debate that is far beyond the scope of this article). But illustration, while it covers a broad range of image-making, does have very distinct meanings, and it is very different from just artwork.
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It may be small, but Lithuania is the geographic center of Europe, and the meeting of Western and Eastern culture is evident. Lithuania is one of three Baltic countries, so-called for its proximity to the Baltic Sea. In 2009, it celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of its name.
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Modern Web-building technologies allow designers to realize their most daring and creative ideas. Enhanced interactivity and a remarkable visual appearance can be achieved by means of such tools as Flash, JavaScript and Papervision3D, to name just a few. These strengths usually impress and entertain visitors and thus are often used for conceptual artistic presentations and promotional campaigns.
In this post, you’ll find a collection of amusing websites that, by combining unconventional (and sometimes bizarre) ideas and clever JavaScript and Flash effects, will entice you to play on them for an embarrassing long time.
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Why the Lucky Stiff was one of the brightest and most inspiring programmers in activity. He became famous through a series of blogs and through the incredible amount of open-source projects that he maintained over the course of more than seven years.
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted an inspiration post and I thought I would do one today. Well, I have something special for this post. As we all know, today is Mother’s Day (in the US, not sure about other countries). Mother’s Day happens once a year and it’s a day when we celebrate and recognize mothers and motherhood in general. In this post, I’ve gathered up some awesome Mother’s Day designs for your viewing pleasure.
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I’ve always stressed the importance of practice and experimentation. If you want to get better at something or if you want to learn something, you have to keep on doing it over and over again. This is very true with web design as well. We’ve even published an article here on Design Informer about the benefits of experimentation.
I’m very busy as I work a full-time 9-6 job as a web designer, then I go home and work on Design Informer, soon to be Coding Informer, and I also do a variety of freelance work. With all these on my plate, it’s very hard to find time to relax, open up Photoshop and design, or open up Dreamweaver (code view of course) and just mess around with some code.
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The Netherlands, also known as the “Low Countries,” is a small, crowded, muddy piece of land through which a few big important rivers fortunately run. In this country, you can find coffee shops, wooden shoes, tulips, windmills and a lot of water. And everything is rather small! Well, at least most of the architecture is. How cute is that? But it’s also the land that brought the world many great painters, famous architects, and excellent graphic, fashion and interior designers. We all know Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mondriaan, Rietveld, Koolhaas, Escher, Droog Design and Viktor & Rolf, don’t we?
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