One of the most unique and common forms of art on the Internet these days is called concept art.

Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in movies, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product.

The concept artist generates a visual design for something that doesn’t yet exist.

Most of these pieces are created with Photoshop as well as using more traditional means such as oil paints, pencils and others. The two most common themes are science fiction and fantasy.

In this post, we take a look at 50 great  examples of concept art that are sure to inspire you and let your imagination run wild. Read more

Web designers have a wealth of tools available to them, for doing everything from organizing their thoughts about a particular design to debugging the final design.

But with so many tools out there, how do you ever determine which ones are really useful and which ones are just going to waste your time?

We’ve compiled a massive list of some of the best and most useful tools out there for web designers.

Purposely left off the list are common tools most designers are likely already using (like Dreamweaver or Panic’s Coda, Photoshop or GIMP, and similar common software programs that pretty much every designer already has in their toolkit).

These are tools that will save you time, make you a more effective designer, simplify or speed up your design process, or otherwise make your life easier.

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Cheat sheets and reference guides are useful for both beginners and advanced web professionals.

They can be used to help you remember syntax or as a tool to aid in memorization.

In this post, we aim to cover the reference guides for all of the most commonly used platforms, software and coding languages.

Below you’ll find a compilation of the 30 most useful and well-organized cheat sheets, checklists and reference guides.

If you know of a useful cheat sheet that we haven’t covered here, please share the link in the comments’ section at the end of the article.

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Vintage art reminds us of a time when we were dependent less on technology and more on skill and technique.

But we cannot compare the typography of 100 years ago to that of today, with the arrival of so many new typefaces, new ways to create fonts as well as new ways to get our artwork out into the world.

Even though the application of typography has evolved so much from a century ago until now, the most common use of typography continues to be for ads, store signs, and logos.

Below, you will find 50 typographic examples that exhibit a range of artistic styles from the last 100 years or so.

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Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot Read more

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images can really take your photography to the next level.

But creating compelling HDR images, whether through fake HDR techniques in Photoshop or multiple exposures and tone-mapping, can be tricky.

Creating portraits can be even trickier, because human subjects are often less forgiving in HDR photos.

But you can do a few different things to get better results with your HDR portraits every time.

Below are 20 examples of excellent portraits representing a variety of HDR techniques. Read more

If you’re a power blogger, or someone who blogs regularly, across multiple blogs, with detailed, in-depth posts, a desktop blog editor can make your life infinitely easier.

At least when it comes to the blogging aspect of it. There are a lot of blog editors out there.

Some are browser-based, some are standalone. Some work across different platforms while others are only for Windows or Mac OSX. Some are paid while others are free.

The main thing they all have in common, though, is their ability to streamline your blogging process.

Below are more than 20 great desktop blog editors. There are options for every budget and every platform. Some even let you blog without blogging software. Read more