DON’T MISS: The Best Design Articles from May 2008

8 July 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Responses
Last Modified: 8 July 2008 @ 18:05

As usual I round up the best design articles from around the web however as I leave in 4 days I am extremely busy trying to get everything sorted before my trip around Europe so instead of going through all of my feeds I have scoured the net for the best round up posts and combined them here on this page. The sources come from Vandelay Design, Noupe and Smashing Apps. This post will keep you very busy.

Tutorials

1- Create a Spectacular Grass Text Effect in Photoshop

How to create a rather cool looking grass-text effect using a photo of grass, the pen tool and a bit of patience. Checkout the Tutorial

2- Creating geometric patterns in Illustrator

It’s just not always that simple to create perfectly seamless patterns, especially with geometric forms. Veerle shows us how to create a geometric pattern shape and fill a background with it using the method described in this tutorial

3- 15 Amazing Photoshop Icon Tutorials

Ever wondered how the great icon designer do it? Well, here are 15 Photoshop Tutorials that lets you peek behind the curtain and get you started. Check it out.

4- Nice ‘n’ Simple Subscribe Badges

In this Photoshop tutorial you’ll be making those cool supermarket-style badges, then you’ll be turning them into subscribe buttons for your website, a must-have for any blog! Visit Tutorial.

5- Amazing Retro Rainbow Curves

In this tutorial, David Leggett will show you how to design some amazing vector based Retro Rainbow Curves using Adobe Photoshop. These retro artifacts have become a popular trend in modern design! Visit Tutorial.

6- Pastel color menu with dynamic submenu using CSS

This tutorial illustrates how to design a nice pastel color menu with a dynamic submenu which appears when you select a link in the main menu, using CSS and some lines of javascript code. Checkout the demo here.

7- Three Simple Uses For The ‘Clouds’ Filter in Photoshop

Here are three simple uses of the “clouds” filter (Filter > Render > Clouds) in photoshop. Using both the foreground and background color, it creates a misty/cloudy fill. This simple filter can be used for all kind of interesting things, especially when combined with other filters, layer effects, and layer modes. Visit Tutorial.

Ajax and Javascript

8- How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery

How to add ajax functionality so that the content loads into the relevant container instead of the user having to navigate to another page. With awesome animation effect. Checkout out the demo here.

9- Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library are thrilled to be sharing patterns and code with the web design and development community. Checkout it out.

10- Animated Collapsible DIV v2.0

This script collapses any DIV on the page and lets users manually toggle its appearance via a smooth “Web 2.0 style” animation. It’s a popular effect on many social networking/ comment sites. Check it out.

11- Horizontal JavaScript Accordion 1kb

1kb horizontal accordion script can be used for menus, images, presentation content and more. Check it out.

12- Context Hover, adding context & feedback to your links

When you put focus on a link in Opera Mini it puts a hover effect on not only the current link, but all other links with the same URL. This script gives you the same effect when used in your website. Check it out.

13- jQuery iPod-style Drilldown Menu

An iPod-style drilldown menu to help users traverse hierarchical data quickly and with control. This drilldown menu provides easy navigation of complex nested structures with any number of levels. Check it out.

CSS

14- A parallax illusion with CSS: The Horse in Motion

An impressive optical illusion using the CSS parallax technique. Check out the demo page and resize your browser to see the effect.

15- Which CSS Grid Framework Should You Use for Web Design?

In this article you’ll get an overview of the current batch of CSS Grid Frameworks and which you should choose to use.

16- Building a Unique Contact Form

How to build a contact form using HTML/CSS, as well as add some validation with jQuery, and make it tick with PHP. Checkout the Demo

17- 5 free HTML editors that get the job done

An excellent review by bitsonewmedia to five solid HTML editors that get the job done.Visit Review

18- CSS Diseases: Divitis & Classitis

Are you one of the CSS coders that use div-tags for anything and add classes to every element? Learn why it’s wrong to do that and how you can cure your CSS disease.Visit Post

19- Typogridphy

Typogridphy is a CSS framework constructed to allow web designers and front-end developers to quickly code typograhically pleasing grid layouts.Check it out.

Design

20- Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs

This article explains what is the Divine proportion and what is the Rule of Thirds and describes how you can apply both of them effectively to your designs. Visit Article

21- Footers

Footers can be much more than an afterthought containing the fine print of a web site. With the right design they can reinforce brand awareness and drive internal traffic. Here is an awesome collection of some of the best designed footers on the web.

22- 6 Ways To Subliminally Tell Users “Don’t Come Back”

Here are a few ways to tell the user to never come back to your website. Visit Post

23- Make The Web a Less Colorful Place

More color does not necessarily equal a better design. There is no need to jazz things up with buckets of color if the site does not warrant it. This article explains why you might want to use a monochromatic design and how it’s done. Visit Article

24- Getting Away With Murder: Design Rip-Off Horror Stories

If someone’s ever ripped off your site design or theme, some of these stories will truly make your blood boil but beyond that, how to fight back! Visit Article.

25- What Everybody Ought to Know About Usability and Web Design

Usability has become a hot topic and everyone wants a piece of it by writing their own list of guidelines. This article focus on two rule of thumbs. Those two are to make it easy to read and make it easy to find stuff. Visit Article

26- A Design is Finished when… 23 Pro Designers’ Opinions

One of the most important and hardest things to overcome when designing is to understand when the piece you are designing on is actually finished. So 23 Pro Designers share their opinion here .

Freebies

27- Free Vectors: Hand-Drawn Decorative Elements

These were hand sketched on pencil/paper then scanned and converted to a nice decorative vector element. Checkout it Out.

28- Free 278 Page PDF eBook- The Photoshop Anthology

Sitepoint are giving away a free download of an extensive e-book for designers for a limited time only! IF you are interested in downloading the free eBook simply go to the The Photoshop Anthology Home Page.

29- Free Calendar Icon Set

A new calendar icon set has been released on graphic design forums! Simply head on over the design forums to download the free calendar icon set.

30- Free eCommerce icons

32 free icons to use or remix in your eCommerce projects complete with master SVG file. Enjoy.

31- Milky, a free vector icon set

Milky is a fresh, crisp and beautiful vector icon set. You can use Milky for both personal and commercial work with free of charge. Milky is available in vector format (EPS), as well as transparent PNGs.

General

32- Find Similar Users on del.icio.us

A short Python script that lets you know how to find similar del.icio.us users who share similar interests. Check it out.

33- Duplicate images finder

This application can search through your images collection and find duplicates not only by file name or size, but also by visual similarity.

It done by implementation of some public domain algorithm to do its work. Check it out.

WordPress

34- Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File

Dissecting the default WordPress theme’s comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier. Visit Tutorial.

35- How to separate comments and trackbacks

Explanation on how to separate comments from trackbacks. Visit Article.

36- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Visit Article.

37- 45+ Free Premium WordPress Themes with Magazine or Grid Layouts

A stunning collection of Free Premium WordPress Themes, most of them have magazine or grid layouts. Checkout it Out.

38- How To use a Frontpage Slideshow on your Wordpress-Blog

How you can create a fancy frontpage slideshow on the frontpage of your WordPress powered site. Visit Tutorial.

Inspiration

39- 30 Inspiring Poster Designs

By looking at great posters, you can learn a lot about composition, typography, and use of color. Here is a list of beautifully designed posters guaranteed to leave you inspired. Visit Post

40- Calligraphy

Calligraphy is the art of writing and the best thing is that you just need to things to start learning and improving your skills: a pen and a paper. Here are some examples what you can do with it. Visit Post

41- 36 Cool Business Cards You Should’ve Seen

A well designed and printed business card can impress and make people take notice and remember you . A badly designed or printed card can leave a bad impression or even worse be simply forgotten. Here is a collection of cool business cards to inspire you. Visit Post

New Launches

42- Free Clipart & Vector Art search engine

A new search engine for finding free Clipart works by searching through millions of web pages to bring you back the most accurate free clipart and free vector art search results possible. Visit Site

43- AudioJungle

Eden launches a FlashDen sister site, with AudioJungle, growing the microstock audio market and targeting musicians and sound effect creators.Visit Site

Resources

44- 40 Options for Converting PSD to HTML

Steven Snell compiled a list of 40 different options for Converting PSD to HTML with some details on their services.Visit the article.

45- 25 resources for ornaments, fleurons, and “frilly bits”

An excellent set of resources for ornaments, fleurons, and frilly bits compiled by Cameron Moll. Visit Post.

46- 50+ Designers to Follow on Twitter

An amazing compilation by Steven Snel to over 50 designer’s Twitter profile, which should give you a great start to following some talented designers.Jonathan Snook, Jeffrey Zeldman, Veerle Pieters and more. Check it out

47- 30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development

A post highlighting some of the best sites that covers fields relating to web development - such information architecture, user interaction, and web/graphics design. Luckily Noupe was one of them :). Visit Post

Interviews

48- There is No Pattern: an Interview With Chuck Anderson

Chuck Anderson worked for clients for whom the words ‘high-profile’ seem like an understatement: Adidas, Microsoft, Pepsi, Absolut, Rolling Stone, Nokia, Sony, Reebok… the impressive list goes on. Collis Ta’eed, recently had the opportunity to ask Chuck how all this success came his way. Checkout the interview

49- Braintalk with Andrew Egenes

Andrew, the creator of Designfloat, answered 15 questions about his work. So if you want to know the guy behind Designfloat a little better: here you go. Checkout the interview

50- Success Secrets from Rick Valicenti

An exciting interview with Rick Valicenti sharing his secrets of success and his thoughts on having faith in his creativity.Visit the interview.