Beautiful Vintage Design: Showcase and Resources

The vintage style is very popular in web design right now and has been mastered by many designers. Vintage-style designs typically include textures, colors and some items that give it that vintage feel. In this post we’ll showcase some excellent examples for your inspiration, and we’ll also feature some resources, like textures and Photoshop brushes, to help in your own vintage-style design.

Showcase of Vintage Inspired Design:

If you’re looking for inspiration for some of the best vintage-styled web designs, here is our collection of more than 25 of them. You’ll see that the vintage approach to design is used in a wide variety of industries and for all different types of websites.

Heartbreaker Fashion

Comment to Win a Design Treasure from BundleHunt!

BundleHunt is a new project of Noura Yehia (the founder of Noupe) that provides designers with a wealth of resources for a fraction of the price. Bundle Hunt has offered to give free bundles to five readers of the Vandelay Design Blog!

Bundle Hunt offers $1,400 worth of resources for a ridiculously low cost of $49. The bundle includes the items shown below.

WordPress Ecommerce: 30+ Resources

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for blogs, portfolios, and other types of sites, but with the right plugins and/or themes it can also be used for e-commerce. While WordPress is not specifically intended to be used for e-commerce sites, the quality of available plugins and themes has increased in recent years. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 resources and tutorials to help you get started with e-commerce for WordPress.

WordPress E-Commerce Plugins:

WP e-Commerce Pluign (free with premium upgrades available)

Announcing the Launch of Vandelay Premier, Exclusive Resources for Designers

Through this blog we have always been committed to providing our readers with fresh, helpful, and inspiring content. Today we are excited to announce that Vandelay Design is extending beyond the blog and is now bring high-quality resources to web and graphic designers! We’ve launched Vandelay Premier, which is a membership-based community, in effort to provide designers with resources to make their lives easier, their work more effective, and their business and careers more successful.

There are a lot of marketplaces, membership-based communities, and stock sites where designers can purchase resources. We see value in this variety, and we think Vandelay Premier is different from the others in a few key ways:

• Career resources in addition to design resources. In effort to help our members achieve greater levels of success in their careers as designers, we provide informational resources (like interviews, short e-books, and special reports) that cover various topics relevant to designers and freelancers.
• Extended license. Our design resources come with an extend license that allows mutiple uses on personal and commercial projects, including use in themes, templates, and other resources that will be distributed in mass. Extended licenses can get very costly with most resources, but with Vandelay Premier there is no additional fee.
• Marketplace with exclusive discounts. We have partnered with a number of companies that provide products and services for designers, and we’ve negotiated discounted rates for our members. More info on these partner companies in a minute.
• Low price. Members get unlimited access to our design resources, career resources, and marketplace for just $9 per month. Or if you would like to save a little bit of money there is an option of $79 annually. You can sign up here.

25 Embossed Business Cards for Your Inspiration

Designers are often looking for examples of creative business cards for inspiration, whether it be for designing their own cards or for client work. In the past we have showcased letterpress business cards, die cut business cards, and double sided business cards. Today we’ll look at 25 examples of embossed business cards.

Jaclyn Studor

25 Beautiful Travel and Tourism Websites

Websites in the travel industry often place an emphasis on the design and appearance because a good-looking site will hopefully draw more interest and excitement for the destination. Many of them also use nature-inspired designs (see last week’s post 35 Beautiful Web Designs Inspired by Nature for more examples). Here you’ll find some of the best websites from the travel and tourism industry.

Roadside Heritage

15 Proven Ways to Gain Exposure for Your Design Portfolio

With so many web and graphic designers out there, getting the attention of potential clients and landing work can be a major challenge. The portfolio site is one of the most important assets for a designer, and an effective portfolio site will be an invaluable resource for keeping the business moving forward.

For many designers creating an attractive portfolio site is not the problem, getting people to see it is often much more of an issue. In order for the portfolio site to truly do it’s job it must be well-designed and it must attract the right types of visitors. In this post we’ll look at 15 things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your portfolio site by getting more exposure for it.

1. Have a High-Quality Design for Your Portfolio Site

Not only is the quality of design of the items in your portfolio important, but the design of your portfolio site itself will also have a big impact on potential clients. Clients will expect a designer to have an attractive and usable site, otherwise they will question the work that the designer will be able to do for them.

When designing and coding your portfolio site be sure that it is getting all of the attention that it deserves. After all, it will be one of the most important aspects of your business, so it should not be rushed.

Impressive portfolio sites are great for encouraging visitors to contact you about their project, and they are also more likely to attract links and attention from other designers and bloggers.

35 Beautiful Web Designs Inspired by Nature

When creating a beautiful and memorable web design, many designers turn to nature to be inspired by the beauty of what surrounds us. Nature-inspired web design has become more common in recent years as large backgrounds and extensive use of images are being used. In this post we’ll take a look at some amazing examples of designs that can be created to incorporate various aspects of nature into a website.

Ecoki iPhone App

Client Retention: A Key Ingredient for Freelancing Success

Working as a freelance designer is a challenging job. Not only do you have to be a skilled designer, but you also need to be able to find work and run a profitable business. Landing new clients can be a lot of work and can require a considerable amount of time on your part. Once you have the client, retaining that client can be highly beneficial for your business.

A long-term or repeat client could be any number of things. Maybe you’ve designed a website for a client a few years ago and they just came back to you because it’s time to update their site with a fresh design. Or maybe the client needs on-going work each month and they’re hiring you to provide that work in addition to your one-time services of designing their site.

With content management systems most clients no longer have to hire a designer to make basic updates and additions to their sites, but many clients still have a need for a designer to perform various services on an on-going basis or at some point in the future. Hopefully the information presented in this article will reveal the potential that this presents and will help you to land a few on-going clients of your own.

Comment to Win a Free License for SlideShowBox

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