designm.ag - Archives (aout 2013)
Back just a few years ago it was required for web developers use JavaScript/jQuery to perform animated effects in-browser. CSS3 has dramatic
Adobe InDesign is a program used for creating print designs like album covers and books. A while back I wrote about some easy tutorials for beginners. But in this showcase I want to share 50 powerful InDesign tutorials which offer a whole lot more complicated solutions. The best part is that you don't need to be an expert with InDesign to understand it all! Check out the gallery and see if any tutorials appear interesting. With a bit of work you can learn how to design this stuff quickly and effortlessly.
Image Reflection
The Adobe Creative Suite has to be one of the more popular design packages. Illustrator is specifically a great tool for any project including website layouts, vector art, illustrations, logos, and so much more. One resource many designers utilize are patterns for backgrounds.
Repeating patterns are often more popular in websites to fill the whole screen at any resolution. Similarly patterns can be placed into posters and other print artwork. And this collection includes over 450 various design patterns you are free to download. Some bulk packs include multiple patterns which you can download all at once.
Pattern Packs
5 Seamless Vector Patterns (5 patterns)
There are so many freebie fonts online that it can be tough choosing exactly what you need. With more options you often feel trapped picking just one solution - so how do you know where to start? I want to present 45 brilliant calligraphy fonts which go perfect in any website layout. Even for basic graphics design or digital branding, these calligraphy fonts offer quite an experience in the realm of beautiful typography.
Calligraphy Unicase
Detailed and customized input fields have been a great focus of modern web development. The jQuery library along with similar open source projects have provided a framework to build with. It has lead to numerous advances within the field of user interface design. Especially for customizing the typical "default" components in form elements.
In this tutorial I want to introduce the Selectize plugin for jQuery. It allows developers to greatly alter the presentation of input fields related to select menus and tag-formatted text fields. This can provide a tremendous benefit on projects where you need a cleaner, updated interface. It is a fairly straightforward process and shouldn't take more than 60 minutes to create. Take a peek at my live demo to see what we are making.
Live Demo - Download Source Code
Textures can be some of the most valuable resources in a graphic designer's arsenal. They can be used to create backgrounds, to add subtle textures to elements within a design, and even to rough up text and give it a grungy, dirty effect. One of the great things about textures is that no two items are ever quite alike. Although there are thousands of textures out there that are available for purchase or free download, there is always room for other quality textures. If you're the type of designer that creates your own textures, from photos or scans, there are always other unique textures available from other designers and photographers that can serve as a complement to the ones you've created for yourself. And if you don't create your own textures, you're sure to love finding quality sources of textures that you can use. Here we'll showcase 40 different texture sets that are not only high quality, but they are also free to download. Free Vintage Seamless Textures
I love the feeling of finding something that makes my job so much easier and more enjoyable in ways that were previously unthought of. That’s why I felt like a winner after a lengthy internet “treasure hunt” for some new methods to simplify how I handle and share my graphic images for various projects. This is the story of how I found a great solution with Smartimage.
Intuitive options and a quick organizing process Step one was creating an account. I honestly thought it would take awhile, but in a matter of seconds I had created an account with a custom URL. The user interface struck me as simple and friendly, but what really made me feel welcome was the sample collection walkthrough that gave me the whole picture of Smartimage’s basic functionality in a matter of five clicks, and then I was able to delete it to start on creating my own. I started by dragging and dropping files for my collection into the upload window. There was a wide range of accepted formats, like AI, EPS, TIFF, PNG, JPEG, GIF, and PDF files, so I had no trouble uploading the files I needed. Smartimage automatically optimized them for download through conversion to popular PNG and JPEG formats, and sorted my content into default sections, like Images, Logos, and Videos. I’m even thinking of customizing a distinct section for Photographs, and another for Brand Guidelines that draws on project-specific requirements in terms of style and colors.
When building a new project you often need to decide how to handle the backend. Should you build something from scratch, or toy around with a CMS engine? I have preferred using WordPress for many online projects because it provides a repeatable strategy for quick launches with fewer issues.
In this guide I want to introduce how you can build quick products online powered by WordPress CMS. The open source PHP/MySQL engine started as a blogging platform which has grown to include custom post types and many other advanced features. It can fit into almost any type of website making it flexible and valuable to new projects.
What does influence mean in the context of freelancing and design? For web designers and other freelancers, the term influence is most often used to refer to social media influence. Influence refers to the ability of a person (such as a web designer) to persuade others to take a particular action or to feel a particular way.
Imagine being able to guide a large number of people to a goal of your own choosing--for example, purchasing your web design services. Would that be beneficial to your web design business?
You bet it would. The benefits of influence for any business or organization are great and that's why social influence has been the topic of a number of recent studies, articles and even books. There have even been a number of tools developed to measure social media influence.
Is social media influence important for web designers? What should a web designer know about social media? Let's find out.
If I haven't introduced you to LearnWebDevelopment.com's WordPress Bootcamp yet, I would like to today. Here's what you get: - 42 complete WordPress training videos that you can download and watch again and again. - Two live sessions with our WordPress experts to better understand what you’re learning and ask any questions you might have. - Personal 1-on-1 support from LearnWebDevelopment.com’s experts so you’ll never be alone as you learn. - $200 off if you purchase by Thursday, August 15, 2013 at midnight. If you'd like to quickly become an in-demand WordPress website designer, sign up here now.
Online CSS galleries have been around for decades providing great ideas for web designers. There has been a tremendous influx of ideas tackling all kinds of new unique web design concepts. These newer CSS galleries are often focused on a specific topic or type of website style. Notably responsive and mobile templates, along with many other ideas for webmasters.
I have put together 33 tightly-focused CSS galleries which are worth your attention. Each site is full of web design inspiration catering to a specific audience. I know designers are always looking for new resources and this definitely includes new galleries. You may not be interested in all of these topics, but have a glance at some of the website galleries and see if you can find any resources to help when building your next project.
Mobile Awesomeness
The open source PHP/MySQL WordPress platform is one of the most stable scripts for any webmaster. With the advent of Custom Post Types it is now possible to turn any WordPress website in a full-blown gallery of social network. I have been so impressed with recent advancements that I feel it's worth cataloging some of the best resources for WP developers.
In this gallery I have put together 25 must-know WordPress blogs and online resources. From helpful code snippets to finding new plugins, there are always plenty of resources out there for WordPress lovers. Even premium themes and inspiration galleries can help when you sit down to code your own WordPress theme. I do hope these resources prove beneficial to webmasters all around the world. And if I have left out any great tools, feel free to share with us in the discussion area below.
We Love WP
The idea of moving your website can be pretty daunting these days. I dread the entire process. Here are some of the thoughts running through my head. What if I miss something? What if I fail to get it running correctly? What if I cancel my old hosting and failed to remember that there were a stash of secret files I never backed up!? What if the new system is slow? What if the data migration takes 10 days instead of 2 hours? These are the kinds of ideas going through my head when I consider changing hosting. This is my business and I'm nervous about disrupting the server environment. Recently I was at a dinner in Austin Texas hosted by my friends over at BuySellAds. There were 10 total people there and 2 of them were a couple of guys from MediaTemple. I had actually never used their service although I heard good things over the years. Hosting talk is a bit boring to me so we never really got into the ins and outs of what I needed etc but they did give me a good picture of how broad their offering was. They seemed to have a good solution for just about any kind of hosting scenario I would need. While at dinner I explained to Mark (one of the MT guys) that the thought of moving my network of design sites was a bit daunting and that I was not looking forward to it although I felt it was about time to move on. He asked me a few questions and then mentioned that they had a service that does the move for you. I left the conversation and tucked the information away for a later time. Heading into the summer I started feeling like it was time to make a move. I wanted the sites to run faster. I was having some trouble with server connectivity error logs that my devs could not explain. I was ready to take a serious look at what other hosts had to offer. I spent some time reviewing several of the larger players in the space. There were lots of options to choose from and at times it was difficult to know how to compare hosts to each other. I finally decided that I wanted to host the sites with MediaTemple. All the hosts I reviewed seemed very similar to one another. It seemed I really could not go wrong on the surface. However, the thing that stood out about MT was a service they have called Move. For $150 the MT CloudTech team will move any site anywhere to MT hosting. They have a simple lead form where you enter a few lines of information.
Everyone’s been there: you set up a website for a small business and a sudden intake of traffic from Reddit, Slashdot or Digg renders it temporarily unavailable. All those visitors interested in your online content, left with a blank screen and an impersonal message which politely informs them that the server had to take five. It’s not OK.
Looking at the HTML5 range input element you can see a number of advancements. Forms are able to take in restricted information from users sliding between number segments. But unfortunately these HTML5 inputs are only supported in modern browsers. So although there are a few limitations we can try to work around them.
I want to demonstrate how to build a more customized version of the range slider using jQuery UI. The slider widget is a part of the jQuery UI core library so it comes prepackaged with the script. This makes it really easy to play with because the documentation has been well-sourced and easy to consume. Check out the live copy of my sample demo to see what we are creating.
Live Demo - Download Source Code
In the past few years we’ve seen a lot of changes in this big World Wide Web land, with a lot of different emerging devices, techniques and tools. HTML5, AJAX, Accessibility are the kind of stuff that just didn’t exist back when things were simpler, websites were created using front page and table tables were used to structure your layout. A few things may sound pretty crazy now, like this old habit of creating websites using tables, but others are just equally crazy and people are still doing it, like obtrusive JavaScript. JavaScript can be used in so many ways (especially after jQuery emerged as a must-have tool in any site) that sometimes we forget one simple and important thing: it will eventually break. Yeah, it's that simple, one day or another it will just break. The difference between Jedi Masters and Padawans is how prepared you are for those hard times when things don’t work as you wanted to.
Like many designers, you may have a side project. You may even be sure that your idea is a really good one.
The trouble is, it will take money to really pursue your idea. That's the end of your really good idea and your side project. Or is it?
There are many funding options for business startups including the bank, investors, and begging for money from friends and family. Thanks to the internet, there's now another source of funding for business startups.
Crowdfunding made big news recently when open source developer, Ubuntu, got into the crowdfunding arena with their planned entry into the already crowded smartphone market. You'll find the Ubuntu Edge on the popular crowdfunding site, Indiegogo.
Is crowdfunding a great way for designers (and others) with big ideas to get their ideas to market? Or is it just another fad?
In this post, I'll examine crowdfunding in more detail. I'll also list a dozen crowdfunding sites. If you liked this post, you may also like How to Evaluate a Business Idea and What to Do Next.