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A fancy new iPad is the perfect travel companion for any designer. The richness of the large multi-touch screen makes for some incredibly useful and fun apps that can really drive your creativity.
Today we’ll look at 30 different apps spanning several categories that can help designers out with everything from sketching and wire framing, to making notes and staying on task.
( Continue Reading at iPhone.AppStorm )
A user interface (UI) can come in many styles ranging graphically from very simple, all the way to extremely complex. In this article we are going to explore a range of styles demonstrating that there isn’t just one recipe for creating a good looking, and ultimately successful user interface. Of course, not every style is represented in this article; we will be exploring several high-quality examples, representing a wide range of graphical styles from simple to complex. Enjoy!
A minimal style UI relies heavily on type, symbols, and white space to create a clear and simple user experience. Broad solid colors or absence of color altogether are often found in these interfaces. Since graphics are used sparingly, the layout of the elements is extremely important. When done right, this makes for a clear and direct interface.
HelvetiNote™ by cypher13 uses a great mix of font weights and sizes, as well as thoughtfully placed icons and interface elements to form a fantastically minimal UI. This UI proves that you don’t need highly detailed graphics to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
When designer Andrew Kim decided to concept a new piece of hardware, he envisioned a complete solution marrying the hardware and user interface. In doing so, he created a simple and minimal experience. If you haven’t seen his post about it yet, it’s a must-see.
The guys at Cultured Code created a very simple and graceful UI for Things, a to-do list manager. Available for both Mac and iOS, their design features a muted color scheme, crisp icons, and a very Mac feeling UI.
Detailed graphical interfaces rely heavily on graphics to create the user experience. Specifically, you’ll find things like textures, vivid color, gradients, highlights, reflections, and shadows. Though they have a bit more going on than a minimal interface, these UIs are still easy to digest and are generally easy to use.
Bills uses bright color with an Apple-like bottom menu and wood accents to create a user experience for handling bills that is both unique and inherently familar to iPhone users. With its sharp graphics and user-friendly look, Bills has all the makings of success.
Using a non-standard color palette is just on of the many things that makes Beats stand out. Bjango’s mix of textures and gradients, crisp pixel-level detail, and unique styling makes this interface a winner.
Each screen in the Dream Touch UI has its own color palette with a single dominant color. Add glossy effects to that, as well as dramatic lighting and a great presentation, well… you make this list.
The Else Mobile interface has a unique menu system and interaction method… its subtle glows, background graphics and color give it a progressive and futuristic look.
Note: This interface has aspects of all of the sections: minimal, graphical, and futuristic. It really doesn’t fit in any one category, so I put it in as close to the middle as I could.
These UIs will make you think. With these interfaces, limits are pushed and usability is not always the number one priority. They often have odd shapes, unique layouts, high contrast and feature a very high level of detail. There is almost a subculture for this kind of design and it is not regularly found in the mainstream.
The unique lighting and highlights alone make the CYMIC player a great piece. Couple with that a non-standard, high contrast color scheme, and this piece really jumps off the screen.
Ok, I had to sneak one of mine on the list, people tend to like this one, hope you do too. It’s shiny.
Lance Thackeray’s Insignia takes a Midi Keyboard and a Media Player and mates them into a wonderful fantasy user interface. Each piece of this UI is finely detailed and his muted color scheme with bright accents add that extra touch of class.
Found most often in movies and video games, these interfaces usually have a lot going on at once. Things always seem to be moving, flashing, beeping, pulsing, and blinking. Typically there is not a lot of detail in the graphics themselves, but an entire frame is always something to behold.
Zane Bien’s AdvancedUI is a piece that you must see in it’s entirety. At 1454×884 in total size, it’s massive yet each tiny piece fits perfectly with the next; the subtle glows and use of color are also fantastic.
Mark Coleran is a godfather in this style and is cited as the inspiration for the previous piece, AdvancedUI. Mark’s work has been featured in many blockbuster films, and most of it is on his website too. Make sure you click through and see the videos and screenshots of his portfolio if you’re not familiar with his work.
Perception created a lot of screen graphics for the IronMan 2 film, one of the standouts being the PDA sequence. Be sure to check out the “Stark PDA Final Shots” video on their website. What was very interesting is they had to design the UI to respond to mock gestures that Robert Downey Jr. made on a blank device beforehand and then composited it all together for the final shot.
Stereolize created a series of user interface concepts for informational screens on Yachts. What could have been a boring series of gauges was transformed into a visual playground, displaying information in an extremely interesting and engaging manner.
I had a lot of fun finding all these epic user interfaces and writing about them; I hope you also enjoyed reading my article. Check me out on my website or follow me on Twitter to keep up with my latest findings, articles and projects.
Psychedelic art (as you may have guessed) is a type of artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences that are brought on as a side-effect by various drugs and substances known as hallucinations. The art movement began in the 1960′s (known as the “hippy years”) where sex, drugs and rock and roll played a huge role in the culture, and before long this artistic style was being used in concert posters, album art covers, comic books and newspapers. One particular style of psychedelic artwork was inspired by the hallucinations experienced by a drug called LSD, which was known for its kaleidoscopic patterns, similar to those the younger generation experienced with the popular kaleidoscope toy.
As life moves on everything is becoming digital, and over the years digital psychedelic art, although not in vogue, has been slowly increasing in popularity. Bright colors and fractal patterns are fairly easy to produce on a computer, so it only makes sense that psychedelic art is being produced digitally. This showcase presents thirty unique, interesting and out-of-the-ordinary colorful and psychedelic inspired artworks. What’s your favorite, and do you think digital psychedelic art is the way to go, or will it never be quite the same as those produced with traditional media? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of the post!
Sweet Dreams combines doodle style drawings with bright colors, repetitive patterns and photographic textures and stock images to produce an interesting and modern psychedelic style photo manipulation.
Symmetry uses three-dimensional shapes and simple fractal backgrounds in the background of the piece merged with some strong colors and textured images to create a unique piece. The typography is cleverly mirrored; although back to front, it is extremely easy to read.
Line Emotions is an incredibly simple piece: an black on white illustration brought to life by some vivid watercolor textures.
Black Hole Sun is a t-shirt design (click through link to see t-shirt). It combines clean-cut shapes, splashes, bright colors and subtle textures to create a very visually appealing piece that can have us mesmerised in seconds.
Color Pleasure Machine has a very dramatic feel to it, created by the use of glaring, bright light effects and three-dimensional shapes.
Head Explosion is another piece whose primary shapes are simply black lines on a white background. This piece, however, is brought to life using cleaner and smoother colored shapes rather than the strong textured images that were using in Line Emotions. A subtle texture in the background is also used, bringing out the best of the colors used in the main illustration.
Desire is a very engrossing piece, making use of a handful of styles, from lighting effects, blurs, and both two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes.
This piece is probably the piece that comes closest to traditional psychedelic art in this showcase, combining a bunch of bright and vivid colors that you normally wouldn’t dream of putting together in such a way.
This psychedelic vector piece of artwork uses quite a minimal color palette but manages to pull of the psychedelic look very well, using certain colors for shadows and others for highlights.
This slightly more grungy and dull approach to psychedelic digital art combines textures and light, fractal-style patterns to produce an interesting and gripping piece.
Psychedelic Wool is an amazing and beautiful fractal piece, merging the use of a vivid color palette and superb highlighting and shadowing detail to make it burst with viewing pleasure.
Psychedelic Bomb is one of the more subtle and lighter pieces here, and combines the use of psychedelic colors with modern day vector trends such as drips, swirls and light texture.
Psychedelic River is a reasonably simple piece, but at the same time is very detailed. It’s bursting with color and full of tiny little images that you can only see when staring at the piece for a longer period of time than that you would looking at most other pieces.
Here we have another fractal piece; Psychedelic Swirls, however, is a much more swirly fractal piece of artwork, using the colors from the traditional style and merging it with an increasingly popular modern day trend.
This three-dimensional rendered digital piece uses the power of a professional rendering software and is then finished off with an image editing application to give it some great texture, colors and glows.
One of my personal favorites in this showcase, Postmodern Psychedelic is an extremely intricate digital piece of art. The highlighting is so detailed that when viewed at full size could be mistaken as a glass painting.
Psychedelic Splendor is a very vivid abstract piece of psychedelic art, uniting several circles together and bringing each one to the viewers attention by using shadows and highlights.
Psychedelic Trip is a powerful piece, and when viewed full size feels like you are being taken into a different world. Almost (but not quite) symmetrical, the piece uses repetitive patterns and vivid colors to draw in and keep the viewers attention.
This piece, like the above “Psychedelic Trip” piece, uses repetitive patterns to keep the viewer engaged.
The following five pieces (all of which are by the same artist) are packed full of color and lots of different medias, from photographic elements to sketches and vector shapes to patterns. All five pieces are extremely detailed, interesting and compelling.
Parashroomer is a modern digital painting, combining some visual effects of those used in traditional psychedelic artwork such as glows and patterns.
Psychedelic Desert Dreams is an unusual yet interesting digital piece. The desert floor is made up of circles in various colors and the sky using various glows, highlights and shadows among ray patterns to draw the viewers eyes into the centre of the piece.
Art Is Everywhere is a remarkable abstract piece packed full of subtle patterns, swirls and gorgeous colors to bring it all to life.
Repeated flowers, patterns and a strong color scheme bring this piece to life. The use of flowers forming a star shapes makes draws the viewers eyes into the centre of the piece.
This fractal piece titled Most Beautiful Fractal us almost hair like, combining hundreds of thin stroked lines to form a swirly and colorful unique piece.
Like a piece featured earlier in this showcase (Psychedelic Bomb), this piece combines modern day trends such as vector shapes, drips, sprays and textured images with a psychedelic style color scheme.
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