If you hail from the U.S., which state are you from and how would you rate the level of design from the schools there? Today we’re going to jump into this topic by examining 50 website home pages, one from a university in each of the fifty states.
We’ve divided the schools up into the best and worst and didn’t pull any punches when it comes to calling out bad design practices. Let’s see how your state fared!

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Overall Impression: Predictably Poor Design

Take a look at fifty university websites and you’ll start to get the feeling that you’re seeing the same site fifty times. This is definitely yet another very specific but very large group of websites that seem to have all come together and decided to be unoriginal.
With a few exceptions, most of the sites below suffer from the same problems. They almost all cram tons of information into a small space with very little effective organization. Many of them contain an overall aesthetic ripped from cutting edge web design… ten years ago. And for some reason, quite a few of them have decided to go with awkwardly narrow page widths as if we’re all cruising around on super low resolution monitors (and no this isn’t mobile optimization at work).

What’s the Problem?

Universities represent some of the highest concentrations of talented and intelligent individuals anywhere on the planet. These are institutions built around people literally engaging in lifelong education. They create amazing inventions, cure diseases, and move civilization forward in countless ways. So why can’t they bust out a decent web design?
I have a little bit of insight into how major universities go about creating websites, and in my experience the major problem is the same that leads to most poor corporate design: Design by Committee. Two heads may be better than one, but ten to twenty heads gets you an ugly website.
As aesthetic decisions become subject to bureaucracy, inner-office politics and groupthink, the quality of the finished product decreases exponentially. I guarantee you that if you let a single talented web design student take a stab at redesigning his university homepage, he/she could easily come up with something more attractive and more effective than the building full of people the university pays to oversee the site.

Today we’re going to learn all about how to make convincing reflections in Photoshop. Text reflections, 3D reflections, product shot reflections, all kinds of crazy reflections. We’ll discuss everything from custom transforms to blending modes and beyond. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, you’ll probably learn a thing or two.
You might be thinking that reflections were all the rage a few years ago, but are currently losing a bit of steam, and you’d be right. However, you can still see plenty of them in practice on Apple.com and other sites. You should definitely beware of over-using them and adding to bad web 2.0 trends, but also know that once in a while they can add class to a boring item.

Text Reflections

We’ll start with one of the most common elements that you’ll see reflected: text. First, set up some simple text in Photoshop. Make sure the background is fairly solid, as reflections don’t really make much sense when placed over photographs or textures.