Learn Advanced Audio Processing for Video in Our Free YouTube Course - envato.com coupon

Professional video production isn’t just about the footage you shoot; the quality of the audio is just as important. But audio processing for video can be a tricky process. Luckily for you, we’ve just published a comprehensive 3.5-hour course, which you can watch completely free on YouTube: Advanced Audio Processing for Video.

What You’ll Learn

This course teaches you everything you need to know about audio processing for video. You’ll learn how to edit, process, mix, and master audio for your video projects.

You’ll learn how to use essential audio plugins like EQs, compressors, gates, expanders, and de-essers.

You’ll learn how to clean up dialog tracks by fixing noise, reverb, and mouth clicks.

Finally, you will learn how to use some mastering plugins like compressors and limiters to keep your audio levels and tone in check.

By the end of this course, you will have the skills you need to be able to tackle the audio portion of your projects like a pro!

Learn Audio Processing for Video Today!

With this detailed video, you’ll be all set to go from audio novice to processing pro. Just make some time in your schedule and watch the video above—or click through to watch Advanced Audio Processing for Video on YouTube.

And as a bonus, did you know that an Envato Elements subscription now includes audio? Take a look at the selection of over 7,000 high-quality royalty-free music tracks and 75,000 useful sound effects to find one you can use in your next project. Or read more of our audio articles.

The post Learn Advanced Audio Processing for Video in Our Free YouTube Course appeared first on Envato.

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Cyber Monday: Get 50% Off on Selected Templates, Add Ons and Presentations - envato.com coupon

Cyber Monday is just around the corner and we’re celebrating early with a massive week of discounts! Starting today, and running until the 27th November, we’re offering 50% off specially selected items in our sale. Yup! You heard that right: 50% off.

So if you’re looking for the best selection of Instagram and Facebook ad templates, fabulous Adobe Photoshop actions, cutting-edge PowerPoint presentation templates, amazing mockups and so much more, look no further than these 17 best-selling items for designers that you can now pick up at an incredible saving.

1. Simplicity 2.0

When it comes to well-designed PowerPoint presentations, Simplicity 2.0 certainly is ahead of the pack. One of the bestsellers in this category, Simplicity 2.0 is a multipurpose presentation template that features a clean, modern design that is extremely easy to customise. The package contains 120 presentations, hundreds of unique slides in 16:9, 16:10. 4:3 and A4 page formats, and 15 colour themes. Once you’ve selected your presentation, all you need to do is drag-and-drop your own photos, change the text, and you’re ready to go. For those who want to do a bit more customisation, a help manual is available.

2. Concept Art Photoshop Action

Turn your photos into beautiful works of art with Concept Art Photoshop Action. Just highlight the area of your photo where you want the action to take effect, press play, and watch as your photo takes on a painterly appearance. You can customise every aspect of the action to increase or decrease the effect, and 10 colour effects are also provided to help add a more individual feel to each of your creations. A fun action that will save you loads of time if you’re looking to transform your photos into digital paintings.

3. 321 Instagram Promotional Bundle

A terrific set of templates for anyone designing Instagram banners, the 321 Instagram Promotional Bundle contains an eclectic mix of 421 Adobe Photoshop designs with creative and unique layouts. Each template’s layered PSD files are easy to customise so that whether you’re designing sales announcements, special offers, launching a new product or promoting a business, you’ll be able to get the job done quickly and easily.

4. Corporate Business Brochure

Need help designing a business brochure? Look no further than the Corporate Business Brochure template. This beautiful 16-page template comes in A4 or letter size and has a clean, modern design that will appeal to the most discerning of clients. The template, which is editable in Adobe InDesign, can be customised as required or used as is. All you need to do is add the company logo, photos and text, change the colours to reflect the company’s brand, and you have a finished item ready for print or to be turned into a PDF.

5. Guardian Photoshop Action

Add some drama and artistry to your photos with the Guardian Photoshop Action, a great action for sports and action shots. All you need to do is highlight the subject of your photograph, and play the action to transform your photos from ordinary to WOW! You can customise the action to increase or decrease the effect, and a ‘How-To’ file is provided in case you get lost.

6. Web Showcase Mockup

If you’re looking for a great way to show off a website you’ve designed, check out Web Showcase Mockup. This very stylish package allows you to use screenshots from a website, app and/or mock-ups you’ve made and display them in an attractive and innovative way that’s sure to impress your clients every time. The package contains three PSD files and a PDF help file to help you on your way.

7. 15 PRO Landscape and Nature Lightroom presets

Bring a fresh and exciting look to your photos with these 15 PRO Landscape and Nature Lightroom Presets. The package contains 21 presets that will allow you to warm up, cool down and/or intensify the colours in your images in various ways. Compatible with Lightroom 4 and above, the presets are designed to use with RAW, DNG and JPG photo files.

8. Male T-Shirt Mockups

Get your t-shirt design business off to a great start with this Male T-Shirt Mockups package. Featuring a total of 11 high-resolution PSD mockup files, the package enables you to show off your design on the front and/or back of different coloured t-shirts worn by a male model. This will help give prospective customers a good idea of how your t-shirt will look on them and hopefully lead to more sales. The package comes with both video and text instructions to help you get things set up.

9. Urban Sketch Photoshop Action

If you love the gorgeous effect of watercolours, you’ll love the Urban Sketch Photoshop Action. This oh-so-simple action generates a variety of painterly strokes that give your photos a beautiful, hand-painted look. You can determine the degree of the watercolour effect that you want to apply to each photo, as well as modifying the colour using any of the colour presets included.

10. Business Proposal PowerPoint Template

The Business Proposal PowerPoint Template is another of our favourite PowerPoint templates. This one has more of a classic corporate style and offers an extensive range of charts, graphs, infographics, etc. In all, there are 20 colour themes with a dark and light version of each, which can all be customised to suit your brand needs.

11. Magic Retouch Pro

Photo retouching is a skill that can take months if not years to master, but Magic Retouch Pro helps you apply professional-level retouching to your photos, even if you have little retouching knowledge. This incredibly useful Adobe Photoshop plugin uses sliders to make adjustments and includes a wide variety of features, including blemish removal, eye enhancement, teeth whitening, digital makeup, and more. The package is regularly updated to add new features and includes a PDF User Guide and video tutorials to help you make the best use of your purchase.

12. 550 Facebook Banner Bundle

As the biggest social networking site around at the moment, Facebook is as popular with advertisers as it is with its users. The 550 Facebook Banner Bundle aims to make your job as a designer of Facebook ads that much easier by creating a resource you can draw on again and again. With such a large number of multi-purpose templates to choose from, this pack can be used to build any kind of Facebook ad. Each template contains layered PSD files that are easy to customise. Just add the required images and text, and your ad is ready to upload.

13. 3D Photoshop Action

If you want to transform text into 3D but you don’t know where to begin, the 3D Photoshop Action has got you covered. Not only can it give your text a genuine 3D look, but it can also transform vector shape, pixel layer, smart object, and layer groups. It offers quite a lot of customisation options so that you can create your own unique look. A PDF help file is included.

14. Kacell

Looking for a great Keynote template? Try Kacell, a collection of over 10 templates of 170 slides each that will make your clients sit up and take notice. With its fresh, modern design, Kacell offers a good range of infographics, data charts, portfolios, team pages, price tables etc. to suit a wide variety of subject matter. The template is also very easy to customise. Just choose the best design for your project, customise the master slide to suit your needs, replace photos and text, and you’re ready to go.

15. Realistic Stationery Mock-Up Set 1

Mockup templates are a great way for designers to show off their design ideas to their best advantage, and Realistic Stationery Mock-Up Set 1 is perfect for stationery designers. The mockup comprises 5 templates created using Smart Objects in Adobe Photoshop. To use them, you simply need to place your design in the smart object and it will automatically update the mockup to show your designs translated into business cards, letterheads, envelopes, etc. A great way to impress clients with a realistic look of the final product.

16. Startup Business Plan PPT Pitch Deck

Another great PowerPoint presentation, the Startup Business Plan PPT Pitch Deck is a collection of 4 different templates, each containing over 500 unique slides. Each template has a clean, contemporary feel and uses fresh icons and colours for a look that will appeal to innovative businesses. The templates are all easy to use and customise.

17. Animated Glitch – Photoshop Action

Glitch effects are a cool way to add texture and interest to your designs, and Animated Glitch helps you to do so quickly and easily with a Photoshop action. When you run the Animated Glitch action on your photos, logos or artwork, the Action will generate a sequence of animated glitch effects to transform your work. You can make as many variations as you like with just a few clicks and then export the file as a normal image, animated GIF, or video.

Take Advantage of this Great Offer Today!

Remember, these unbeatable savings end on the 27th November, after that, the prices go back to normal. So head to our Cyber Monday Sale and take advantage of this offer while it lasts.

The post Cyber Monday: Get 50% Off on Selected Templates, Add Ons and Presentations appeared first on Envato.

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Cyber Monday: Get 50% Off on Premium Themes and Plugins for Your Website Project - envato.com coupon

Cyber Monday is nearly here, and we’re celebrating early with a massive week of discounts! Starting today and continuing until the 27th November, we’re offering 50% off specially selected items in our sale. To help you with your bargain-hunting, here’s a selection of 19 useful plugins, templates, scripts and WordPress themes that are now half price.

 

1. Total 

If you’re a web developer looking for a multipurpose theme that you can use as a reliable base for creating websites for a wide range of clients, you need to check out Total. A polished and responsive WordPress theme, Total prides itself on bringing together the power of the WordPress Customiser and WPBakery Page Builder to enable users to build just about any website they dream of. With a long list of great plugins and features including Slider Revolution, Unlimited Portfolio and WooCommerce integration, Total is that WordPress theme that discerning web developers can’t afford to ignore.

2. Essential Grid Gallery

Want to create a beautiful grid gallery for your website? Take a look at Essential Grid Gallery, an all-purpose grid building plugin for WordPress sites that allows you to display all kinds of content in a highly customisable grid. Whether you’re looking for a grid to display your photos, artwork, portfolios, services, products, blog posts, videos or something else, Essential Grid makes creating stylish grids easy. Just select the content source for your grid, select a style for your grid, select your preferred navigation, and then add the grid to any area of your WP site with a simple shortcode. Of course, the plugin also offers tons of customisation for those who have a specific look or function in mind.

3. Porto

Building an e-commerce store has never been easier than with Porto, a great package that has everything you need for your Shopify store. With several layouts and styles to choose from and over 20 beautiful demos to inspire you, it’ll be no time at all before you have your own Shopify store up and running.

4. Noor

Noor is a WordPress theme that’s getting ahead of the competition. This multi-purpose theme is Gutenberg ready and fully compatible with AMP, which guarantees a 5x faster loading speed in mobile devices. It also supports WooCommerce, WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML), right-to-left scripts, is SEO optimised, and much more. Aside from all this, this high-performance theme offers several beautiful, minimalist layouts and more than 300 elements and modules so that you can create just about any site you can dream of.

5. Slaido

Another really useful plugin is Slaido, a huge library of over 300 gorgeous slider templates that you can browse and select to add to your site with just one click. One of Slaido’s recent innovations was to add niche templates targeting popular industries like fashion, food, business, music, sports, etc. Obviously, any of the sliders can be adapted to any purpose, but the categories just make browsing through 300+ sliders a whole lot easier.

6. Materialize

Build your own admin template with the help of Materialize, a multipurpose Material Design admin template with a huge collection of Material Design animations, widgets, and UI elements. The template works seamlessly on all major web browsers and mobile devices, and it has a beautiful, clean design.

7. Epic News Elements

Epic News Elements takes all the work out of building a a premium news site or news page on your WordPress site. Compatible with themes that use Elementor and WPBakery Page Builder, Epic News offers more than 70 features including sliders, carousels, YouTube playlists, an advance content filter, and more.

8. WooCommerce Notification

Marketing is all about psychology, and customers are more likely to shop in a popular store than a store with no one in it. Enter the WooCommerce Notification plugin, designed to show prospective customers that your online store is busy with other customers snatching up all the great merchandise. The plugin functions by displaying recent orders in real time on your online storefront, thus showing buyer validation and showing off new products to prospective customers.

9. Bridge

One of our bestselling WordPress themes, it’s easy to see why Bridge is a perennial favourite. With 24 layouts ranging from the classic to the innovative, Bridge appeals both to the web developer who needs a solid and reliable base for building out unique websites, as well as to the do-it-yourself novice looking to build their own site. The theme provides over 376 stunning demos to get you inspired and provides a series of step-by-step video tutorials on how to install, update, and customise the theme.

10. The Grid

Discover another great WordPress plugin for showing off your portfolio, photos, videos, blog posts and any other content in grid form. The Grid is perfect for novice users who want to add the feature to a page on their site, but it’s also great for developers as there are several filters included to help you in adding new skins, animations, navigations, animations, and more.

11. Real3D FlipBook jQuery Plugin

Create realistic 3D magazines, catalogs, brochures and flip-books with the Real3D FlipBook jQuery Plugin. Using a bit of code, this plugin works by transforming your PDFs or images into web-friendly animated files that fit into any theme and are fully customisable. You can change menu and button colours, control page flip speed, page flip sound, camera angle, and much more. Best of all, Real3D FlipBook works well on desktop and mobile platforms alike.

12. Aurum

If you’re in the market for a WooCommerce theme for your WordPress site and your taste tends towards the minimalist, Aurum might just be the site you’re looking for. With its very clean white and black aesthetic, the whole raison d’être of Aurum is to create a pared-back, uncluttered backdrop so your products can shine. Aurum offers 30 well-crafted pages to choose from and delivers all the features we’ve come to expect from a contemporary e-commerce theme.

13. Trawell

It seems lately that everyone has a bit of wanderlust and is looking to develop a travel website to tell their story or support their dream. Well, if that’s you or a client of yours, check out Trawell. This beautifully designed WordPress theme is designed with travellers in mind and creates great pages for showing off photos, stories, and whatever else you have in mind.

14. Ultimate Addons for WPBakery Page Builder

Without a doubt, WPBakery Page Builder is the go-to page builder for WordPress themes, but it’s Ultimate Addons for WPBakery Page Builder that makes the page builder really shine. With 20 updates since its inception, Ultimate Addons for WPBakery Page Builder works consistently to stay ahead of the competition and deliver a product that meets the needs of a wide range of designers. Flexibility and reliability, along with stand-out features like parallax and video backgrounds, over 40 unique elements, 15 demo pages for inspiration, and excellent video tutorials, have all earned Ultimate Addons one of the highest ratings at CodeCanyon.

15. Drag & Drop Email Template Builder for PHP

The Drag & Drop Email Template Builder for PHP helps you create your own unique email template that you can then integrate into any web project. The builder offers a wide range of elements and options to help you create one-of-a-kind templates.

16. Kastell

Kastell is another dedicated WordPress theme. This one focuses on delivering everything you need for creating property websites. Designed to showcase all kinds of properties, be it real estate, house, building complexes or business spaces, Kastell offers six homepage examples, is responsive and retina ready, and is highly customisable.

17. Fuse

Fuse is an admin template built with React and Redux that offers a number of built-in page templates, along with routing and authentication features. It includes 5 example apps, over 20 pages, and lots of reusable React components.

18. Improved Product Options for WooCommerce

If you want to attract more customers to your e-commerce page, try Improved Product Options for WooCommerce. The plugin helps you add and display extra options for products in your WooCommerce store. You can use text, HTML, images and colour to show customers product variations, keeping them engaged and exposed to more of your merchandise.

19. TheGem

With 40 unique and flexible layouts, 150 demo pages, and eight navigation settings with over 20 styles, TheGem is a WordPress theme that certainly lives up to its name. If you find all this choice just a bit overwhelming, TheGem has organised its demos into categories like photography, business, landing page, restaurant, etc., which will make it far easier for you to focus and conceive how you could use the theme to create a great site of your own.

Don’t Miss Out

Remember, this offer ends on 27th November. After that, the prices go back to normal. So head over to our Cyber Monday Sale and take advantage of this great opportunity today.

The post Cyber Monday: Get 50% Off on Premium Themes and Plugins for Your Website Project appeared first on Envato.

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Cyber Monday: Get 50% Off on Selected Music, Footage & Templates for Your Video Project - envato.com coupon

We all know that video editing is a time-consuming process. So why not save yourself some time and take advantage of all the great pre-made templates, transitions, graphics, etc. available on the market today.

Happily, we’re celebrating Cyber Monday, with an irresistible 50% off specially selected items in our sale. The sale starts today and runs all week until the 27th of November, so don’t delay! To give you a taste of the kind of great deals we have on offer, here’s a selection of 15 of the best items for videographers—all half price this week!

1. Instagram Stories

No one likes boring stories, and this Instagram Stories templates pack will take you a long way to creating stories your followers can’t wait to watch. The pack contains 30 amazing Adobe After Effects templates. All you need to do is add your own photos and/or videos, replace the text, and you’re ready to rake in the likes. If you’re a business trying to get eyes on the page, these templates will definitely do the trick.

2. Simple Infographics

Presenting statistical data in an engaging way is always a challenge. But Simple Infographics contain beautiful and professional templates that manage to do just that. The templates are created in Adobe After Effects and saved as .mogrt files, which makes it easy to integrate them into your Adobe Premiere Pro projects. Using the pre-made animated pie charts, timelines, call outs, lower thirds, social media icons, etc., is easy. Just add your data, choose your colour scheme, intro and outro duration time, opacity, and more with just a couple of clicks.

3. 10 Mosaic Logo Reveals

Want an arresting way to open up your vlog or video project? Check out 10 Mosaic Logo Reveals. Each of the 10 clips starts with a full screen image that then zooms away from the screen to become just one image in a large mosaic of other images. This mosaic then transitions in one of 10 ways to reveal your logo. The placeholder images can all be replaced with any digital elements you want: icons, photos, videos, text, etc.

4. Slideshow

If you need help creating a great promotional video, teaser or intro for your next video project, Slideshow is just the thing for you. This amazing Adobe After Effects template has a very cool, modern feel and comes in five versions of varying lengths and speeds. It’s modular in structure, which makes it easy to shorten, lengthen, or reorder segments of the template.

5. Light Leaks and Bokeh Vol 1

Give your video footage a vintage look with Light Leaks and Bokeh Vol 1. This popular pack of 15 overlays brings the feel of film to your video footage by adding light leaks, colour shifts, and bokeh. It’s very simple to use—just drop your chosen overlay over the footage you want to affect, and apply the Add or Screen blend modes. The overlays can be used alone or combined with each other in Adobe Premier Pro, Vegas Pro, Final Cut Pro, etc.

6. Cooking Intro

Video openers whet the viewers appetite for what’s to come and set the tone for your entire video. If you’re looking for just the right intro for a cooking show, check out Cooking Intro. This great Adobe After Effects opener also includes extras like a timer transition card, recipe card, lower thirds, and an outro. All food and appliances images are included, but of course you can replace any or all of them with your own images.

7. Book and Magazine Promo

Book and Magazine Promo is certainly a cool and impressive way to advertise a new book, launch a magazine, or show off your portfolio or photos. Just replace the placeholders with your images, add your text, and voila—you’ve got a beautiful, attention-grabbing way to present your work. A detailed video tutorial is included with the Adobe After Effects project.

8. Photo Slideshow

Photo Slideshow is a sweet and sentimental movie template created in Adobe After Effects that can be used to tell stories using photos and text. It is best suited for celebrating a wedding, anniversary, birthday, or any other event where you want to show a series of photos that tell the story of the people being honoured. The template uses filters, light leaks, and the sprocket holes from film stock to create a vintage look.

9. Transitions

If you’re looking for a go-to collection of amazing transitions you can dip into whenever you need to add some visual interest to your video projects, you can’t go wrong with the bestseller, Transitions. With over 1,500 dynamic After Effects transitions, this package is the perfect addition to any videographer’s resource library.

10. TypoKing

TypoKing is another great addition to any videographer’s resource library. The pack offers over 500 animated titles, all of which are customisable so that they fit in with the look of your project. Once downloaded, the package uses a simple drag-and-drop installation and is compatible with both Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro. With TypoKing, you never have to rack your brain to come up with ideas of what to do with text.

11. Awards Show

For those times when you need an intro, an outro, a promo, a lower third, or a transition with a big dose of glitz and glamour, there’s Awards Show. This Adobe After Effects collection contains several elements of varying lengths, with the longer pieces being modular in structure so that you can lengthen, shorten, or move them around as needed.

12. Typography | FCPX & Apple Motion

If you use Final Cut Pro, you’ll be interested in this great package. Typography is an Apple Motion template featuring 40 unique text animations which would work well with a wide variety of projects, from corporate to creative. What’s more, the template also offers 40 unique animated background images that’ll add a lot of character to any creative project.

13. History Timeline Opener

History Timeline Opener is a beautifully constructed one-minute intro which uses time and history as its inspiration. It has a nostalgic vintage style and would work well as an opener for a documentary or any other project that’s focused on telling a story about past events. For example, you could use it on a corporate video for a brief recap of the company’s founding and major milestones in its history.

14. Graphics Pack

Yet another very useful collection for every videographer’s resource library is Graphics Pack, a collection of over 750 beautifully executed graphic elements of every description. There are icons, overlays, various kinds of transitions, logo reveals, shapes, backgrounds, callouts, lower thirds, titles, infographics, typography, and so much more. A videographer’s dream.

15. Event Promo

Need help building a promotional video for an event? You can’t go wrong with Event Promo. The 50-second Adobe After Effects template features quick cuts, dynamic transitions, and lots of cool animated graphics. All you need to do is replace the placeholders with your own images and/or videos, edit the text, and add audio. The template is modular in structure, so you can easily make the changes you need to the duration. There’s also a video tutorial to get you up and running in no time.

Get Started Now

Remember, prices go back to normal on the 27th November, so don’t miss out. Take advantage of this great opportunity today in our Cyber Monday Sale.

The post Cyber Monday: Get 50% Off on Selected Music, Footage & Templates for Your Video Project appeared first on Envato.

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Top Audio on Elements Picks: Curated by Specialists - envato.com coupon

Learn How to Animate CSS in a Free YouTube Course - envato.com coupon

Hey, web designers! You probably already know that CSS3 gives you lots of great animation options to help you create engaging, interactive websites. But do you know all the tricks and techniques to animate CSS in the best possible way?

If not, don’t worry! Our free course, 6 Handy CSS3 Animation Projects, will teach you everything you need to know.

What You’ll Learn

Using motion in your web project and adding an extra degree of interactivity can really improve the user experience. In this short course, you’ll build six small but useful projects that use CSS animations.

For example, one of the projects helps you create an elegant SVG “Page Loading” icon made up several arcs rotating around the same point.

See the Pen Project 2: SVG Page Loader by Envato Tuts+ (@tutsplus) on CodePen.

In another project, you’ll create a card notification that slides in from the right side, stays on screen for a few seconds, and then slides back out again.

See the Pen Project 3: Card Notification by Envato Tuts+ (@tutsplus) on CodePen.

Or how about creating a full-screen navigation overlay? That’s the popular effect you’ve probably seen on mobile sites, where you click on the menu icon and a full-screen menu pops up to help you navigate easily on a small screen.

See the Pen Project 6: Full Screen Navigation Overlay by Envato Tuts+ (@tutsplus) on CodePen.

All of these animation effects are easy to create with pure CSS, so follow the course and learn how to do it!

Start to Animate CSS Today!

Creating web animations with CSS instead of JavaScript is such a useful skill for web designers. This free course gets you up and running really quickly. By the end of it, you’ll be confident in creating CSS animations for all your future projects.

So get ready to animate CSS, either by watching the video above or by clicking through to watch 6 Handy CSS3 Animation Projects over on YouTube.

The post Learn How to Animate CSS in a Free YouTube Course appeared first on Envato.

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How metallics became basic - envato.com coupon

(And the golden rule to avoiding tackiness)

It’s become blindingly obvious. From rose-gold shoelaces to cutlery that looks like it belongs in the backside of a magical egg-laying goose, metallic colouring is back in vogue. But before we leap to turn our branding, homewares and wardrobes into oversized pieces of fishing tackle, let’s spend a moment exploring the usage and abusage of this shiny new trend and lay some ground rules for navigating its risky terrain.

[Envato Elements]

The rise of shine.

It’s impossible to talk about the rise of metallic colours without exploring the obvious catalyst: the technology industry’s prominent use of them on their products. “The design language of Silicon Valley (influences) other design sectors,” says Fast Company, describing the sector’s use of metallic colours as “the ultimate sign of the times”.

Looking back at phones of the early 2000s, the attention paid to the design of gadgets like phones has gotten significantly more sophisticated. No longer are cheap, recyclable plastic frames and rubber keyboards the standard. Instead, glass and aluminium finishes are preferred, making these devices feel more like jewels than portable computers.

Far from being an afterthought, for companies like Apple the design of the device has become a central element to the business strategy. Ben Thompson, the blogger behind Stratechery, called out in 2016:

“The fact that smartphones are such an important part of people’s lives, combined with the fact that physical objects can have additional consumer benefits like status, enables Apple to sell each iPhone with a huge amount of margin.”

With metallic choices ranging from ‘Silver’ to ‘Coral’, everything about Apple’s current iPhone colour line-up seems designed to inject a status of luxury and timelessness into a product which, by design, refreshes every twelve months.

Despite this steady stream of newer models, consumers have embraced these lavish colourways, largely because the company has, for more than a decade now, gone to great pains to instill the phone’s interior with a story of cutting-edge innovation and craftsmanship. Apple is making a coherent symbolic statement; both its hardware and software are of a pristine standard.

[Apple]

It’s not always a silver bullet.

The etymology of the word “tacky” relates to the adhesive, sticky quality of the word “tack”. In essence it speaks to something literally stuck to something else, thoughtlessly. And with the rising prominence of metallics, not every brand’s use of the precious colourways is as thought-through as Apple’s.

A trip to a homewares store reveals a marketplace flooded by brands employing metallics to paint a facade of prestige to everyday consumer products. This tidal wave has brought with it everything from water bottles to throw pillows and even disposable birthday party supplies, all supposedly turned insta-aspirational with a simple addition of a splash of gold or bronze.

In response to the rising trend, colour empire Pantone recently unveiled a “collection of lustrous metallic and pearlescent tones” which comprise its new “metallic shimmers” range. In doing so, the number one ‘colour partner for design’ have armed many-a-brand with an arsenal of precious metallic colours with which to belie less-than-precious surfaces.

Just as it’s Pantone’s job to cater to the needs of designers, so too is it the job of a designer to use their colors responsibly.

[Pantone]

A few Golden Rules.

So how does one leverage the precious metallic trend and avoid the inherent pitfalls of tackiness that come with it? The answer is to take a leaf from Apple’s playbook and be guided by the meanings behind the colours themselves.

All precious metallics (bronzes, silvers, and golds) are weighted with meaning; they convey with status, prestige, and scarcity. In short, they communicate quality. Furthermore, their immediate association with the raw elements of their namesakes also means they carry within them a sense of timelessness.

With this in mind, the golden rule for employing precious metallic colours is as follows: is the item you’re coloring and the message it’s sending both worthy of a precious metallic colorway?

A rose-like bronze, used sparingly, can make a festive season invitation feel special, warm and traditional. It doesn’t, however, give off the same effect on, say, a spatula. Silver can instill corporate logo with a sense of understated class. But it’s far from home on a throw pillow bearing an inspirational Pinterest quote. A drop of gold might just be the thing to give your wedding invitation a sense of luxury and distinction. But unless you intend to make a piece of satirical commentary, it’s a questionable color for the handle of a toilet brush.

It should go without saying that less is always more. That said, here I am writing this article. So remember, using metallic colors when the occasion calls for it can help a design connect with its intended audience and fit the right occasion. Using it on everything makes you look, well, kind of basic.

The post How metallics became basic appeared first on Envato.

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