A blog by Kelly Barkhurst featuring articles about Full Stack Design and Full Stack Development.
I recently helped a local business polish their WordPress site built with Elementor. From homepage setup to search functionality and restricting page editing for specific roles, here are a few practical fixes that made the site cleaner, more functional, and easier to manage.
Learn how to make diagonal shapes in CSS Code and Adobe products, including demonstrations for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
A nearly perfect cereal box can be a designer’s best classroom. In this critique, I break down subtle alignment issues on the back of a Quaker Oatmeal Squares box and show how tiny adjustments—hanging punctuation, optical tweaks, centering, and type alignment—can take a layout from 95% to polished and intentional. Video and full transcript included.
Fix Photoshop’s “unknown or invalid JPEG marker” error fast. Learn why iPhone images mislabeled as JPEGs break and how to fix them on a Mac in minutes.
Convert Elementor gallery captions into semantic H2 tags using a safe, update-proof Code Snippets method. Improve on-page SEO and accessibility in minutes.
Ever created a beautiful PowerPoint pitch deck and thought, “This would make a great LinkedIn post”? In this tutorial, I show how I transformed one client deck into a swipeable LinkedIn carousel and an animated social video—using simple tools like PowerPoint, Canva, and a free video upscaler. It’s a fast, creative workflow for repurposing your design content across platforms.
Ever stretched a pattern in Illustrator and wondered why it looks distorted—or why it won’t move with your shape? Learn how to precisely align, scale, and reposition pattern fills using the Transform Patterns option and the tilde (~) key shortcut. Perfect for designers who want more control and cleaner results.
Recreate the bold Smartwool “CHASE WOAH” postcard in Adobe Illustrator. This step-by-step tutorial covers Pathfinder cuts, text-to-shape techniques, embedding images, clipping masks, and exporting a print-ready PDF. A perfect copycat exercise to sharpen your print design skills while learning Illustrator essentials.
In this Illustrator-based tutorial, we’re taking a closer look at an iconic piece of design history: the logo designed by Alan Fletcher for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 1989. Not only is this logo visually striking, but it’s also a masterclass in typography, iteration, and creative problem-solving. Today, I’ll show you how to analyze it and even create a “copycat” version to learn...
Learn how the DOM tree affects heading hierarchy in web design. Improve accessibility, SEO, and UX by mastering H1–H3 structure and real-word example of using Wix Studio effectively.