Eco web and logo design blog

The importance of building a congruent color palette for web design is paramount. A person’s eye will automatically make judgments on color based upon their human instinct. Green is seen as a representative of nature, purple reflects that of royalty, and white portrays a feeling of neutralness and so forth. When selecting your own color scheme from a photo, online color palette generators can be a helpful tool to practice with.

We wanted to start a collection of great eco based companies around the world that are really making a difference. We are starting with 101 companies and will be expanding this list in the future to include some up and coming bright start-up companies. If you have any other suggestions for this list please feel free to contact us with your ideas.

As a graphic designer, the practice of prowling the web for the latest trends, tips and tricks is a common one. Here we have composed a list of common resources we use. The primary focus of this list is inspiration, it can come from a photograph, font, or a website. The secondary focus is improving your design skills, which can be done by keeping up to date with tutorials and reading other graphic design blogs.

Why choose eco-hosting?
Deforestation, global warming and polluted waterways are just a few of the myriad of environmental disasters hitting the headlines each day. As web professionals, there’s something substantial and economical we can do to help address the problem and to demonstrate to our clients our social conscious.

Once in a while we come across a fantastic website that we find very helpful in our daily reading. Deziner Folio is a blog full of fantastic design resources with an emphasis on tips, tricks, and downloads. The site is run by a talented photographer who understands composition and colour theory, and how to apply those elements to design. Check out the Flickr stream for examples of some amazing photography.

Here’s a brief list of some areas of interest that we found very useful for web and graphic design:

Simple Photographic Results in Photoshop

If you’re new to editing photos, or are just looking to expand your bag of Photoshop tricks, this post is for you. The focus here is on four different ways to enhance images: Overlay, Gradient Map, Levels, and Curves. Also, as an added bonus, all of the actions described are offered as a free download.

Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles Download

One of our absolute favourite resources on this site is the free download of a custom Web 2.0 Photoshop Layer Styles set. When doing web design, achieving the perfect Web 2.0 look is very important. These styles will speed up the design process by having this glossy look achieved in one click.

A Great Approach to CSS and XHTML Coding

For all of the coders out there, this post describes a great way to organize your CSS files. This is a major issue for a lot of companies when files are getting passed around because everyone needs to be able to find what they’re looking for in order to keep things moving forward in a timely manner.

Top 50 Super Cool Free Icon Sets

This post features 50 cool free icon sets. This is a great way to personalize your computer and avoid having to use the default icons. Another great use for these is to jazz up website navigation by representing each section with an icon beside the navigation text.

We hope you enjoy exploring this site. There are many useful posts that link out to other blogs of interest.

We find it very helpful to build on our current design skill sets on a daily basis. An excellent resource site we have found (and check daily) is a site called PsdTuts. They offer Photoshop tutorials, inspiration, articles and an entire community of design related people. Another great design resource if you have time to check it out is the Flickr stream of user submitted artwork and completed tutorials.

What is the core reason for creating Sprout?
At our core, we want to free people from having to think about how to get information. People shouldn’t waste their time and brain power on where information is and how to find it. So, we created Sprout to give users news and blog articles that they’ll enjoy with a minimum amount of effort. Sprout is just the beginning in our low-cognitive load, information solutions.

How did you enter the world of graphic design?
I’ve always been interested in design. Even when I was a child, I loved to draw and had an eye for detail and colours. I didn’t go down the traditional route of university. Instead, I taught myself how to use programs such as Photoshop and Cinema 4d to create art, and eventually built up a basic portfolio of work. I then applied for jobs locally

How did you first come up with the concept of Mailplane?
I’ve used and tried many different email clients and services and was never happy with them. Spam was a problem, or I didn’t get my attachment through or email never reached me. Plus, I was always deleting mail to make room and searching my inbox wasn’t working right. Then came Gmail. It solved most problems and suddenly email was good again.

Where did the idea for Corkdump come from?
The idea came to me, like most ideas do, right out the blue while I was browsing a popular web design/developer resource website. This particular site, and many others like it, is set up as a huge list of links that are divided up into categories and then thrown together on one giant page. I thought there had to be a more organized and easier way of compiling this information.