Graphic and Web Design Blog -Resources And Tutorials

30 WebDesign Must Have Books In Your Christmas Wishlist

Dainis Graveris — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:11:46 +0000

Christmas is coming and we should think how to cheer up yourself or your design related friends and I came up with list where I included all bestsellers and the most popular and recommended design related books I could find. I am reading slowly through these books myself and I plan to review and feature them in future one by one! Of course in blogosphere you can find endless articles you could read,but what’s great with books – books have very clean and detailed content structure explaining and teaching you everything point by point slowly and clearly!

In this article you’ll find books teaching you how to create great websites, get ideas, learn CSS,HTML, usability, typography, be aware about user experience, web standards,markup and much much more! Check for yourself!

Enjoy this collection, create your own wishlist and keep coming back – I will continue soon with article showcasing the most popular free webdesign and development books available as well! And again – if you wish to contribute and create better this website for everyone, just contact me and check contribute section to see what I can offer in exchange. Maybe you are capable on writing good review about some of these books? It would be extremely useful as well!

1. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

By Steve Krug

Visit Website: http://www.sensible.com/

Usability design is one of the most important–yet often least attractive–tasks for a Web developer. In Don’t Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humor and excellent, to-the-point examples.

The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques, and examples presented revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book’s assumptions, such as “We don’t read pages–we scan them” and “We don’t figure out how things work–we muddle through.” Coming to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces topnotch sites.

Using an attractive mix of full-color screen shots, cute cartoons and diagrams, and informative sidebars, the book keeps your attention and drives home some crucial points. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the “before and after” examples are superb. Topics such as the wise use of rollovers and usability testing are covered using a consistently practical approach.

This is the type of book you can blow through in a couple of evenings. But despite its conciseness, it will give you an expert’s ability to judge Web design. You’ll never form a first impression of a site in the same way again. –Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

User patterns
Designing for scanning
Wise use of copy
Navigation design
Home page layout
Usability testing

2. Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

By Dan Cederholm

Web Standards are the standard technology specifications enforced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make sure that web designers and browser manufacturers are using the same technology syntax.

It is important that these implementations are the same throughout the Web, otherwise it becomes a messy proprietary place, and lacks consistency. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with multiple different viewing devices, such as screen readers for people with vision impairments, cell phones, PDFs, etc. HTML, XML, and CSS are all such technologies.

This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and precisely how to apply them. Web standards such as XHTML and CSS are now fairly well-known technologies, and they will likely be familiar to you, the web designer. Indeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challenge: while the browser’s support for web standards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards and respect the need to adhere to them.

The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently. As a simple example of its power, you can use CSS to lay out your pages instead of nesting tables. This can make file sizes smaller, allowing pages to load faster, ultimately increasing accessibility for all browsers, devices, and web users.

Expanded edition containing bonus material.
Teaches how to use Web Standards effectively to build better web sites.
Solutions style promotes learning by work-through examples and assessments.

3. Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML & CSS

By Ian Lloyd

“Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd Edition” teaches web development from scratch, without assuming any previous knowledge of HTML, CSS or web development techniques. This book introduces you to HTML and CSS as you follow along with the author, step-by-step, to build a fully functional web site from the ground up.

However, unlike countless other “learn web design” books, this title concentrates on modern, best-practice techniques from the very beginning, which means you’ll get it right the first time. The web sites you’ll build will:

Look good on a PC, Mac or Linux computer Render correctly whether your visitors are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, or Safari Use web standards so your sites will be fast loading and easy to maintain Be accessible to disabled users who use screenreaders to browse the Web

By the end of the book, you’ll be equipped with enough knowledge to set out on your first projects as a professional web developer, or you can simply use the knowledge you’ve gained to create attractive, functional, usable and accessible sites for personal use.

4. Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting

By Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Ian Lloyd, Cameron Adams, Rob Weychert, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Rubin, Derek Featherstone, Jeff Croft, Mark Boulton, Simon Collison

Be inspired by 10 web design lessons from 10 of the worlds best web designers
Get creative with cutting-edge XHTML, CSS, and DOM scripting techniques
Learn breathtaking design skills while remaining standards-compliant

Here at friends of ED, we know that as a web designer or developer, your work involves more than just working to pay the bills. We know that each day, you strive to push the boundaries of your medium, unleashing your creativity in new ways to make your websites more engaging and attractive to behold, while still maintaining cross-browser support, standards compliance, and accessibility. That’s why we got together ten of the world’s most talented web designers to share their secrets with you. Web Standards Creativity is jam-packed with fresh, innovative design ideas. The topics range from essential CSS typography and grid design, effective styling for CMS-driven sites, and astonishing PNG transparency techniques, to DOM scripting magic for creating layouts that change depending on browser resolution and user preference, and better print layouts for web pages. We’re sure you will find something here to inspire you! This full-color book’s examples are not just stunning to look at, but

5. Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

By David Sawyer McFarland

When it comes to building professional websites, Dreamweaver CS4 is capable of doing more than any other web design program — including previous versions of Dreamweaver. But the software’s sophisticated features aren’t simple. Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual will help you master this program quickly, so you can bring stunning, interactive websites to life.

Under the expert guidance of bestselling author and teacher David McFarland, you’ll learn how to build professional-looking websites quickly and painlessly. McFarland has loaded the book with over 150 pages of hands-on tutorials to help you create database-enabled PHP pages, use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for cutting-edge design, add XML-based news feeds, include dynamic effects with JavaScript and AJAX, and more. This witty and objective book offers jargon-free language and clear descriptions that will help you:

Learn how to control the appearance of your web pages with CSS, from the basics to advanced techniques
Design dynamic database-driven websites, from blogs to product catalogs, and from shopping carts to newsletter signup forms
Add interactivity to your website with ready-to-use JavaScript programs from Adobe’s Spry Framework
Effortlessly control the many helper files that power your website and manage thousands of pages
Examine web-page components and Dreamweaver’s capabilities with the book’s “live examples”

Perfect for beginners who need step-by-step guidance, and for longtime Dreamweaver designers who need a handy reference to the new version, this thoroughly updated edition of our bestselling Missing Manual is your complete guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying websites. It’s the ultimate atlas for Dreamweaver CS4.

6. The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design

By Patrick Mcneil

The Web Designer’s Idea Book includes more than 700 websites arranged thematically, so you can find inspiration for layout, color, style and more. Author Patrick McNeil has cataloged more than 20,000 sites on his website, and showcased in this book are the very best examples.

Sites are organized by color, design style, type, theme, element and structure. It’s easy to use and reference again and again, whether you’re talking with a co-worker or discussing website design options with a client. As a handy desk reference for design layout, color and style, this book is a must-have for starting new projects.

7. Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML & CSS

By Ian Lloyd

8. Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

By Jennifer Niederst Robbins, Aaron Gustafson

Visit Website: http://www.learningwebdesign.com/

Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning — defining how the Web and web pages work — and builds from there. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you’ll know how to get your pages up on the Web.

This thoroughly revised edition teaches you how to build web sites according to modern design practices and professional standards. Learning Web Design explains:

How to create a simple (X)HTML page, how to add links and images
Everything you need to know about web standards — (X)HTML, DTDs, and more
Cascading Style Sheets — formatting text, colors and backgrounds, using the box model, page layout, and more
All about web graphics, and how to make them lean and mean through optimization
The site development process, from start to finish
Getting your pages on the Web — hosting, domain names, and FTP

The book includes exercises to help you to learn various techniques, and short quizzes to make sure you’re up to speed with key concepts. If you’re interested in web design, Learning Web Design is the place to start.

9. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

By Jason Beaird

Tired of making web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don’t look nice?

If so, then “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” is for you. A simple, easy-to-follow guide, illustrated with plenty of full-color examples, this book will lead you through the process of creating great designs from start to finish. Good design principles are not rocket science, and using the information contained in this book will help you create stunning web sites. Understand the design process, from discovery to implementation Understand what makes “good design” Developing pleasing layouts using grids, the rule of thirds, balance and symmetry Use color effectively, develop color schemes and create a palette Use textures, lines, points, shapes, volumes and depth Learn how good typography can make ordinary designs look great Effective imagery: choosing, editing and placing images And much more

Throughout the book, you’ll follow an example design, from concept to completion, learning along the way. The book’s full-color layout and large format (8″ x 10″) make The Principles Of Beautiful Wed Design a pleasure to read.

10. Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual

By Matthew MacDonald

Get everything you need to plan and launch a web site, including detailed instructions and clear-headed advice on ready-to-use building blocks, powerful tools like CSS and JavaScript, and Google’s Blogger. The thoroughly revised, completely updated new edition of Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual explains how to get your site up and running quickly and correctly.

11. Designing Interfaces

By Jenifer Tidwell

Designing a good interface isn’t easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology — web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices — may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.

UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence.

“Designing Interfaces” captures those best practices as design patterns — solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You’ll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them.

Each chapter’s introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight.

A book can’t design an interface for you — no foolproof design process is given here — but “Designing Interfaces” does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

12. A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making

By Russ Unger, Carolyn Chandler

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That’s where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.

Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support
Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives
Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep
Conduct user research and document your findings
Understand and communicate user behavior with personas
Design and prototype your application or site
Make your product findable with search engine optimization
Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

13. Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

By Bill Scott, Theresa Neil

Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today’s Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors’ years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you:

Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection
Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a “light footprint”
Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns
Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction
Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions
React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more

Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.

14. Head First Web Design

By Ethan Watrall, Jeff Siarto

Want to know how to make your pages look beautiful, communicate your message effectively, guide visitors through your website with ease, and get everything approved by the accessibility and usability police at the same time? Head First Web Design is your ticket to mastering all of these complex topics, and understanding what’s really going on in the world of web design. Whether you’re building a personal blog or a corporate website, there’s a lot more to web design than div’s and CSS selectors, but what do you really need to know? With this book, you’ll learn the secrets of designing effective, user-friendly sites, from customer requirements to hand-drawn storyboards all the way to finished HTML and CSS creations that offer an unforgettable online presence. Your time is way too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Web Design uses a visually rich format specifically designed to take advantage of the way your brain really works.

15. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

By Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

In Chapter 6 of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the authors discuss the details of good search-engine design. In a bitingly humorous segment, they analyze a Web site’s search-page results: “Let’s say you’re interested in knowing what the New Jersey sales tax is…. So you go to the State of New Jersey web site and search on sales tax. The 20 results are scored at either 84% or 82% relevant. Why does each document receive only one of two scores?… And what the heck makes a document 2% more relevant than another?”

With a swift and convincing stroke, the authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web tear down many entrenched ideas about Web design. Flashy animations are cool, they agree, as long as they don’t aggravate the viewer. Nifty clickable icons are nice, but are their meanings universal? Is the search engine providing results that are useful and relevant? This book acts as a mirror and with careful questioning causes the reader to think through all the elements and decisions required for well-crafted Web design. –Jennifer Buckendorff –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

16. Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition)

By Dan Cederholm

No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control – key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

17. Sexy Web Design: Creating Interfaces That Work

By Jina Bolton, Elliot Jay Stocks

Sexy Web Design is an easy-to-follow guide that reveals the secrets of how to build your own breathtaking web interfaces from scratch. You’ll be guided through the entire process of creating a gorgeous, usable web site by applying the timeless principles of user-centered design.

Even if you’re short on design skills, with this book you’ll be creating your own stunning web sites in no time at all.

Throughout, the focus is on simple and practical techniques that anyone can use – you don’t need to have gone to art school or have artistic flair to create stunning designs using the methods outlined in this book.

The book’s full-color layout and large format (8″ x 10″) make Sexy Web Design a pleasure to read. Master key web interface design principles Design amazing web interfaces from scratch Create beautiful, yet functional, web sites Unleash your artistic talents And much more

18. Robin Williams Design Workshop, 2nd Edition

By Robin Williams, John Tollett

Learn design theory and practical know-how from the award-winning author/design team, Robin Williams and John Tollett! Robin Williams introduced design and typographic principles to legions of readers with her best-selling Non-Designer’s book series. Now she and designer/co-author John Tollett take you to the next level of creative design with practical advice and lessons in composition, visual impact, and design challenges.

Presented in Robin and John’s signature style—writing that is so crystal clear, it’s accessible to absolutely anyone—and illustrated with hundreds of full-color design examples, the ideas in this book tackle design theory, visual puns, and layout and graphics strategies for real-world projects. Developing designers will appreciate the authors’ imaginative approach and well-chosen examples.

Discover practical and effective design principles and concepts—and how to apply them to virtually any project.
Learn why some designs are attention-getting and others are not.
Learn how to choose just the right look—corporate or casual, classic or trendy—for specific types of projects, such as business cards, letterhead and envelopes, newsletters and brochures, logos, advertising, and more.
Test your design acumen by comparing before-and-after examples.
Find a wealth of inspiration for your own design projects.
Gain insight into the design process by studying the work of guest designers, who offer their personal commentary and insights.

19. Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)

By Jeffrey Zeldman

Standards, argues Jeffrey Zeldman in Designing With Web Standards, are our only hope for breaking out of the endless cycle of testing that plagues designers hoping to support all possible clients. In this book, he explains how designers can best use standards–primarily XHTML and CSS, plus ECMAScript and the standard Document Object Model (DOM)–to increase their personal productivity and maximize the availability of their creations. Zeldman’s approach is detailed, authoritative, and rich with historical context, as he is quick to explain how features of standards evolved. It’s a fantastic education that any design professional will appreciate.

Zeldman is an idealist who devotes some of his book to explaining how much easier life would be if browser developers would just support standards properly (he’s done a lot toward this goal in real life, as well). He is also a pragmatist, who recognizes that browsers implement standards differently (or partially, or not at all) and that it is the job of the Web designer to make pages work anyway. Thus, his book includes lots of explicit and tightly focused tips (with code) that have to do with bamboozling non-compliant browsers into behaving as they should, without tripping up more compliant browsers. There’s lots of coverage of design and testing tools that can aid in the creation of good-looking, standards-abiding documents. –David Wall

20. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design

By Robert Hoekman Jr.

Designing the Obvious belongs in the toolbox of every person charged with the design and development of Web-based software, from the CEO to the programming team. Designing the Obvious explores the character traits of great Web applications and uses them as guiding principles of application design so the end result of every project instills customer satisfaction and loyalty. These principles include building only whats necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity. Designing the Obvious does not offer a one-size-fits-all development process–in fact, it lets you use whatever process you like. Instead, it offers practical advice about how to achieve the qualities of great Web-based applications and consistently and successfully reproduce them.

CSS Topic

21. CSS: The Missing Manual

By David Sawyer McFarland

“Almost 500 pages of CSS help, with more than 100 pages of practical tutorials to guide you through the process of implementing and refining CSS to save you many a wasted hour. At GBP25, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better guide to designing with CSS.”

You can tap into the real power of this tool with CSS: The Missing Manual. This second edition combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you how to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. Witty and entertaining, this second edition gives you up-to-the-minute pro techniques.

You’ll learn how to:

Create HTML that’s simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS
Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders
Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars — complete with rollover effects
Create effective photo galleries and special effects, including drop shadows
Get up to speed on CSS 3 properties that work in the latest browser versions
Build complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs
Style web pages for printing

22. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

By Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Cameron Moll

Over the past couple of years, web designers and developers have begun taking more care in designing and building web sites. Less readily do they turn to old-fashioned techniques such as GIF spacers, tables for layout, and deprecated HTML elements, which can cause accessibility/usability problems and are just bad practice. There are three main web standards married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs – XHTML for data structure, JavaScript for dynamic effects, and Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data.

Working as a companion to our Web Standards Solutions book, this title covers advanced Cascading Style Sheet techniques, and includes are all the techniques you need to master CSS and craft modern, standards-compliant web page designs. You’ll already know why you should be using CSS, so we don’t bore you with pages of theory; instead, we jump straight into practical solutions, allowing you to get what you need as quickly as possible.

Renowned web designer Andy Budd starts off by introducing the elements of an effective CSS toolkit, including good working practices, the cascade, the box model, relative and absolute positioning, floating, and more. He then delves into advanced techniques like replacing images, styling links and lists, creating navigation menus, making forms look good, debugging and overcoming browser quirks, and hacking and filtering. The book is rounded off with two case studies to give you inspiration for your own designs, written by two more of the world’s finest web designers, Simon Collinson and Cameron Moll.

23. The Ultimate CSS Reference

By Tommy Olsson, Paul O’Brien

A complete and thorough and up-to-date reference guide for CSS.

Stop wasting time doing Internet searches only to find inaccurate, out-of-date, or incomplete information. “CSS: The Ultimate Reference” includes all the ins-and-outs you need to know including compatability information for all major browsers, lists of useful hacks, known bugs in CSS, and much more – all presented in a beautiful, full color layout that will have you coming back over and over again.

Coverage includes: CSS 2.1 syntax and specifications, including features from current CSS 3 working drafts that are implemented in one or more major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera), and useful browser-specific features A clear and concise guide to the CSS cascade, including compatability information, known bugs and useful CSS hacks A media type guide, with coverage of which media types apply in which user agents under what conditions. A quick-reference guide to currently supported at-rules (@import, @media, etc.). An alphabetical property reference.

24. The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web

By Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag

Proving once and for all that standards-compliant design does not equal dull design, this inspiring tome uses examples from the landmark CSS Zen Garden site as the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based Web sites. By using the Zen Garden sites as examples of how CSS design techniques and approaches can be applied to specific Web challenges, authors Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag provide an eye-opening look at the range of design methods made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). By the time you’ve finished perusing the volume, you’ll have a new understanding of the graphically rich, fully accessible sites that CSS design facilitates. In sections on design, layout, imagery, typography, effects, and themes, Dave and Molly take you through every phase of the design process–from striking a sensible balance between text and graphics to creating eye-popping special effects (no scripting required).

25. CSS Cookbook, 3rd Edition (Animal Guide)

By Christopher Schmitt, Dan Cederholm

This cookbook provides you with hundreds of practical examples for using CSS to format your web pages, complete with code recipes you can use in your projects right away. With CSS Cookbook, you’ll go beyond theory to solve real problems, from determining which aspects of CSS meet the specific needs of your site to methods for resolving differences in the way browsers display it.

Arranged in a quick-lookup format for easy reference, the third edition has been updated to explain the unique behavior of the latest browsers: Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft’s IE 8, and Mozilla’s Firefox 3.

Learn the basics, such as understanding CSS rule structure
Work with web typography and page layout
Create effects for images and page elements
Learn techniques for formatting lists, forms, and tables
Design effective web navigation and create custom links
Get creative by combining CSS with JavaScript
Learn useful troubleshooting techniques, hacks, and workarounds

26.

The Art & Science of CSS

By Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, David Johnson

CSS-based design doesn’t need to be boring. “The Art & Science of CSS” brings together a talented collection of designers who will show you how to take the building blocks of your web site’s design (such as headings, navigation, forms, and more) and bring them to life with fully standards-compliant CSS.

This full color book helps you to design web sites that not only work well across all browsers, are easy to maintain, and are highly accessible, but are also visually stunning.

Create truly attention-grabbing headings. Discover multiple ways to present images effectively. Use background images to give your site zest. Build usable and attractive navigation. Design forms that are stylish and functional. Learn how to break away from the square box gclich. Create funky tables. And lots more From the Publisher.

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to gain the practical skills involved in using CSS to make attractive web sites, especially if you’re not the type who likes to learn by memorizing a formal specification and then trying to work out which browsers implemented it completely (does anyone enjoy reading specifications?). The only knowledge you’ll need to have is some familiarity with HTML. This book will give designers the skills they need to implement their ideas, and provides developers with creative inspiration through practical examples.

27. CSS: The Definitive Guide

By Eric A Meyer

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more.

Simply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to separate a document’s structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time–you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly.

Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion, exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it interacts with other properties. You’ll not only learn how to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on CSS.

The 3rd edition contains:

Updates to reflect changes in the latest draft version of CSS 2.1
Browser notes updated to reflect changes between IE6 and IE7
Advanced selectors supported in IE7 and other major browsers included
A new round of technical edits by a fresh set of editors
Clarifications and corrected errata, including updated URLs of referenced online resources

28. Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns

By Michael Bowers

Visit Website: www.cssDesignPatterns.com

Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is a reference book and a cookbook on how to style web pages using CSS and XHTML. It contains 350 ready–to–use patterns (CSS and XHTML code snippets) you can copy and paste into your code. Each pattern can be combined with other patterns to create an unlimited number of solutions.

Each pattern works reliably in all major browsers without the need for browser hacks.

The book shows how to

Code CSS and XHTML
Turn HTML into XHTML
Use CSS Selectors
Use six CSS Box Models
Create rounded corners, shadows, gradients, sprites, and transparency
Replace text with images without affecting accessibility
Style text with fonts, highlights, decorations, and shadows
Create flexible, fluid layouts
Position elements with absolute pixel precision
Stack elements in layers
Size, stretch, shrinkwrap, indent, align, and offset elements
Style tables with borders and alternating striped rows
Size table columns automatically
Integrate CSS and JavaScript without embedding JavaScript in XHTML
Create drop caps, callouts, quotes, and alerts

The book’s layout, with a pattern’s example on the left page and its explanation on the right, makes it easy to find a pattern and study it without having to flip between pages. The book is also readable from cover to cover, with topics building carefully upon previous topics.

A software developer can use this book to learn CSS for the first time. A designer familiar with CSS can use this book to master CSS and XHTML. If you are completely new to coding or completely new to CSS and XHTML, you may want to read an introductory book on CSS and XHTML first.

Typography Topic

29. The Elements of Typographic Style

By Robert Bringhurst

This lovely, well-written book is concerned foremost with creating beautiful typography and is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs. Author Robert Bringhurst writes about designing with the correct typeface; striving for rhythm, proportion, and harmony; choosing and combining type; designing pages; using section heads, subheads, footnotes, and tables; applying kerning and other type adjustments to improve legibility; and adding special characters, including punctuation and diacritical marks. The Elements of Typographic Style teaches the history of and the artistic and practical perspectives on a variety of type families that are available in Europe and America today.

The last section of the book classifies and displays many type families, offers a glossary of typography terms, and lists type designers and type foundries. The book briefly mentions digital typography, but otherwise ignores it, focusing instead on general typography and page- and type-design issues. Its examples include text in a variety of languages–including English, Russian, German, and Greek–which is particularly helpful if your work has a multinational focus. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

30. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)

By Ellen Lupton

Visit Website: http://www.papress.com/other/thinkingwithtype/index.htm

“Worthy of adding to your library; it’s essential if you salivate when you look at well-designed and well-chosen type.”

“Design isnt just about how things look, the answer to a design challenge is more about discovering why certain things work. In steering projects toward visual solutions that deliver clear messages, we have to look at the very building blocks of design. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, – Students aims to get at the heart of this issue.” — Brian E. Young (March 2, 2009)

Share Your Thoughts!

What is your favorite design book you have ever read? Share your recommendations as well so I could maybe improve this article so we all could have ideal Christmas wishlist, you can bookmark for later reference. Now when anybody will ask what would you wish, you can just point to this article and slowly create your own library, which will never disappear as virtual resources could!

http://www.youthedesigner.com/2009/01/16/30-must-have-logo-books/ – logo books atseviski

http://tutorialfeed.blogspot.com/2009/04/15-favorite-e-books-for-web-design-and.html

http://www.uxbydesign.org/2009/06/24/20-user-experience-books-you-should-own/

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/useful_web_design_books/

http://www.tutorial9.net/resources/5-books-every-designer-needs/

http://spyrestudios.com/must-read-books-for-designers-typography-lovers-and-freelancers/

http://www.youthedesigner.com/2007/12/10/30-delightful-graphic-design-books/

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/50-must-read-books-in-web-development/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/30-useful-web-design-books-for-2009/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/24/usability-and-interface-design-books/

http://www.blogdesignblog.com/blog-design/25-must-buy-borrow-or-steal-books-for-web-designers/

http://speckyboy.com/2009/02/16/32-indispensable-bookmarklets-for-web-developers-and-designers/

http://speckyboy.com/2009/07/06/40-free-and-essential-web-design-and-development-books-from-google/

http://bloggingbits.com/free-web-design-ebooks-guides/

39 Free Buttons And WebDesign Resources From Deviantart

Dainis Graveris — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:32:54 +0000

This resource article features many extremely useful resources I found over Deviantart community! I consider these resources mainly for learning purposes to understand how different effects are achieved and of course to get fresh ideas to recreate good examples here! Not only that – many resources are completely free for personal/commercial use, but you need to check author’s copyright or ask for permission before you use them actually.

However enjoy and come back, I will release follow up article in next few days with many more free template resources for especially for web designers to make your job easier and better!

1. WEB UI Treasure Chest v 1.0 by ArtDesigner.lv

This is really one huge treasure chest with more than 100 elements in it!!! Outstanding and creator is from Latvia, same country I am from!

2. Free Interface PSD-Files by chaosLT

Amazing quality – great for learning purposes, psd files for free!

3. dA UI Button Pack 1 by Proxone

4. 150 Badges by stunthacker

5. Free Layout No3 by ZeroniX-Designs

6. One Fancy Icon by nonlin3

7. Website Navigation Menu by MericG

8. iPhone Gradation Set by woopsdez

Could come handy, great colors and free psd file with coloring.

9. Glass Navigation by hapikacsa

10. Glossy Apple Badges by MacTyler

11. Glowing Web Buttons by Mac002

12. Web Buttons by ahmadhania

13. Art PSD by MericG

This would be a really good way to showcase your latest works or designs, beautiful stock!

14. Realistic IES Lighting Effect by shimapa

15. Speech box by Fowz

16. Folders by Autoanswer

17. GreenLightOrb, GUI.S Resource by VidarWestfelt

18. Firstsession sample by woopsdez

19. WebDesigner Mini Kit by LazyCrazy

Just great, I always wanted that cursor buttons, which are useful to show active buttons, show place you’re pointing at and more. Extremely useful for every web and graphic designer.

20. Glowing Styles by Nanie-nyo

21. Win7 Library Icon Template 1.2 by Teri928

22. Stylish 3D Buttons by ahmadhania

23. Download button by SG3000

24. Navigation for web by Bartas1503

25. Vista Themed Template by soflyfx

26. Text Template – BOLD by arnoldisawesome

Template to help new users understand layer styles, effects used to achieve such good looking text.

27. Designer Portal v.1 + PSD by berkayuygun

28. SETUP ICON PSD FILE by LeMarquis

29. iKons Pack PSD by InfinityK4fx

30. Shouts PWN stamps by mindfuckx

31. Windows 7 Taskbar .psd by Carlos-Way

32. etiquette PSD by TLMedia

33. My Orbs by opelman

34. nApple PSD Resource by nonlin3

Good looking psd Apple template, great for testing and analyzing effects.

35. Classic 2 Templates by Kshegzyaj

36. Abode Pickleshop by leca

37. Free Template Number 2 by yiolo

38. Folder Menu Tabs by GraphicIdentity

39. Free menu PSD for you by grafxdesign

21 Sites Where To Find Free Wordpress Themes Daily

Dainis Graveris — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:39:56 +0000

From time to time I am creating free wordpress theme articles, but this time I wanted to showcase several great sites regularly updating and reviewing new themes daily. This showcase will be useful if you like to dig deeper yourself instead of searching premade list articles. It takes a lot more time of course, but there are more chances in this way you will find more unique theme, only few people know about! Enjoy and bookmark this article for later use if you like it! Thanks!

1. Wordpress.org – Themes

I would say this is the most recommended place where to look at first when you want to find quality free themes. They have great ranking system so you can easily filter through unnecessary themes and focus on what you really want.

2. Fresheezy

3. Graph Paper Press

4. BlogOhBlog

5. TopWpThemes

6. WooThemes

From time to time this premium wordpress theme site give away professional themes for free, worth keeping eye on!

7. ThemeLab

Very useful website for wordpress addicts, who are always searching for something new and want to keep up with community!

8. WpThemesFree

9. BestWPThemes

10. ArcSin Templates

11. DesignDisease

Just 13 themes here, but very professional and high quality – site worth keeping eye on for some more in future!

12. Free Theme Layouts

13. SkinPress

14. Wordpress Themes Base

15. Rock Kitty Themes

16. WP Skins

17. Templates Browser

18. Free Wordpress Themes

19. FreeWPThemes.net

20. WPTemplates

21. Wordpress Theme Generator

This online generator creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme. Without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge.

Here you’ll find several previous articles, I created some time ago, you might take interest in order to search for free quality wordpress themes:

60 Free, Yet Premium Quality Wordpress Magazine News Themes

22 Professional WordPress Themes And Resources:Less Is More

70 Free and Premium WordPress Themes

What Can You Do When You Have No Internet Connection?

Dainis Graveris — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:50:40 +0000

Sorry for little silence here – I switched my Internet providers and had no Internet connection for several days. It was strange, I was so used to my Internet related daily work flow, I didn’t know at first what to do! It was like I have no business, no blog, no connection with outside world. I called to several of my friends and when I told it to one girl I know, she suggested interesting article idea.

She said: “Well, why you don’t write about that as well? Your site is full of roundups, some tips in such cases could be useful as well!”. Right and so I took paper and actually wrote down my ideas! This is very short article, but I am expecting you to add your ideas as well! What can we do to get out from daily work flow, from struggling, get organized and feel good?

1. Take a rest

Take a walk out to breathe some fresh air and get work a little bit out of your system or even better look at all from aside to rethink your strategy, future goals and things you could change or do to get better what are you working on.

2. Read design related book

I bet you have several books in your bookshelf you always wanted to read but never got time! At least I have a lot of them, now is a great time to remember about them and use your free time to do what you love to do!

3. Watch Video Tutorials

Again if you are obsessed designer like I am, you certainly should have to be 30-40gb video tutorials you downloaded a while ago, but never got time to learn them! Usually in busy work-flow we forget to learn tools first, we just need to get job done, but if you continue to learn and evolve your skills, you will suddenly discover some more different ways and techniques, how to achieve necessary outcome much faster! It’s amazing how much we still don’t know after many years working in design niche!

4. Create a new design, artwork

It really helps if you store your favorite designs, photos, artworks on local hard-drive for later use, so you can get inspiration also when you have no Internet connection. Anyway you can spend hours playing with effects, fonts, textures, artworks – to perfect your skills.

5. Take a pencil, paints and paper

Take your time and enjoy how creative you can be while sketching or drawing – do something different to enjoy your life even more!

6. Go And Meet Friend

Such things happen to everybody – in all rush, sometimes we forget about really great friends, so this time be first to call them out! If you have some good friends in your own design niche, it’s even more useful – you can meet up, exchange opinions and get fresh ideas. I really evaluate such friends, where we both can contribute in some way from each other.

7. Get out and start to do some sport

We spend a lot of our time in front of computer, but we shouldn’t forget about our health – it’s more worth than anything! Start to do yoga, play football, volleyball, swimming, run or find out where is the nearest gym from your home! You will definitely feel better each day, I assure you!

8. Listen relaxing music

Get lazy, relax, watch movie, listen music – you earned it! Whole life doesn’t consist from rush, struggling from lack of time. Take your breathe slowly and enjoy selfhanded free time!

9. Go out to museum, exhibition – any creative and inspiring place!

Find out if there are any interesting exhibitions, design conferences happening in your town and again get out!

10. Organize, clean up your workspace

It may happen to all of us – while we are working hard, we are creating mess around us and slowly it’s affecting our work-flow as well. Our environment changes us as well as people around you. Maybe you need to change also how your furniture, computer, lights are organized?

11. Organize, clean up your desktop

Sounds obvious, but you cannot imagine how much you waste time while searching through numerous folders necessary file or image, when you could easily organize everything! Clean up desktop, create folders, move files to appropriate directories! Very helpful in daily work-flow!

12. Create organized schedule

In all rush you sometimes forget things you must do? Create schedule and get used to it, definitely will help to organize your daily workflow and you will feel much better, it’s about organizing your life! Article I created a while ago could actually help you as well – Plan Your Daily Schedule: Useful Resources.

13. Don’t do anything!

If you are always running and running you should enjoy something different as well – watch movie, sleep a little bit longer – don’t make it as regular habit, but from time to time it’s really relaxing!

I would love to hear your advices how you enjoy and spend your free time, what you do to get out from struggling in your work and where you find inspiration to keep on doing what are you doing!?!

60 Trendy Web Design Interfaces Created In October

Dainis Graveris — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:03:08 +0000

I am continuing this monthly feature, showing last month best web designs submitted in DeviantArt. I am keeping to be very active member in this community and I really admire high quality designs submitted every day,every week, every month. Here you will see featured 60 best web design interfaces in my opinion! Check also artist Deviantpages to get even more, I get there endless inspiration, only problem is – I haven’t got endless time! Enjoy and create your own amazing design today!

You can visit previous September and August Deviantart web design features as well.

1. WPmonk Wordpress theme by sinthux

Check also homepage of this site – design is really excellent and one of the best I have seen.

2. Portfolio redesign by dioxyzone

3 main colors used in design, usually it’s hard to unite so many, but this design definitely show very good example, how to do it.

3. ShirtShift by AlxDesign

It’s amazing how grunge type design can be created in very stylish way.

4. Tivicik by SencerBugrahan

5. GrungePress by AlxDesign

6. Piratebloggers by SneakyOne1990

I saw all development process to this design – I really admire and love this beautiful outcome.

7. Edge v.1.1 by AlxDesign

Really excellent blog design with subtle colors.

8. Simplicity by AlxDesign

9. Warex by SencerBugrahan

10. Teacher Board III by SencerBugrahan

11. AVG-HHBlog by AntoniaVG

12. Web Hosting by BboyWicked

13. Osae by osec

14. AudioTech by DouglasEltz

15. Portfolio J4F 4 Sale by xXxadO

16. Royal Mag by AlxDesign

17. Touch of Purple Portfolio by deadlinesdesign

18. XS studios by versesdesign

19. Guifx – Services Page by SmarTramS

20. PH Designs concept 2 by SneakyOne1990

21. Europhia by alighandour

22. Pieza by badboythemer

23. Salleedesign v1 by LeMex

24. Fire Clandesign by elemeNt-XY

25. Design-Solution.pl – online by PanthereNoire92

26. CoffeeCup by Pilej

27. Coffee blog by Pilej

28. Eastern Drilling Services by Nas-wd

29. My new blog by miko434

30. Old Folio by inspiredMark

31. Cartoon Max by gdnz

32. Studio Portfolio by luxxxoR

33. Upcoming-Pixelzeesh by pixelzeesh

34. My Diabitic Clinic by Nas-wd

35. Interactiv by yehsper

36. Water Design Portfolio by waterdesign

37. Ready Made Designs v2.2 by bassmansgz

38. Alex Raschi rally driver web by luqa

39. Webee by zee7

40. New Folio Site by inspiredMark

41. BVD WP Theme by bestofthemeforest

42. Financial webdesign by SneakyOne1990

43. Vox blog design by C4br4×1z

44. Panoetic – Web Layout by detrans

45. Myportfolio.com by koenigpersoenlich

46. Tango Folio V2 by asherzgfx

47. iLyrics.com by proviewz

48. My folio 02 by aadi-f

49. Receptenboek by CyXo

50. Harbi haber by gdnz

51. SvenGraph.net v2 by Svengraph

52. VUE Technologies by LOUDAMedia

53. SOLVERE s.r.o. by ArtMark

54. Cloudblack WP by gdnz

55. Charitwy by velcgartist

56. Cooling Systems by Frozz

57. AutoWebber by Laurie-J

58. Portfolio design by mynameisfredrik

59. Atomia by shizm

60. Browsergametipps.com by fERs

How To Create Great Typographic Wallpaper In Photoshop

Daniels Mekšs — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:51:41 +0000

This tutorial will lead teach you how to create really interesting and unique typographic wallpaper in few easy steps. Really even beginner will be able to recreate this effect, add their own style and thought in it, I am sure you will enjoy and learn a lot from this tutorial! You will learn how to create good looking background, add lightning effects and work with fonts, sizes, colors to make just necessary places stand out! Let’s get started!

Step 1 – Creating background

First open blank document with size 1920×1200 pixels. Fill the background with color #242424. Duplicate the background layer and name it Film grain. Then go to Filter – Artistic – Film Grain. Apply settings shown below.

Set layers opacity to 50%. So far your wallpaper should look like this.

Step 2 – Lightning

Create a new layer and name it Lightning. Then select Radial Gradient Tool with black and white color.

Draw the gradient as shown below.

Set layer to Overlay and opacity to 55%. You should have something like this.

Step 3 – Adding Brushes

Download Adys grunge brushes, create new layer and brush around little bit. Set layers opacity to 15%. Download Concrete texture, place it in your document and set it to Overlay and opacity to 10%.

Step 4 – Creating Main Text

Download BEBAS font, create a new layer and type your text. I chose 350 pt size with smooth mode. Color really doesn’t matter. Name layer PEACE.

Step 5 – Add Background Text – Important Step

Lower your text opacity to around 15%. Create a new group (Layer – New – Group) and name it Words. Create new type layers in this group and start typing. Try to use different fonts and sizes. Try to avoid large spaces between words. Fonts I used:

Arial
Cambria
Candara
Impact
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Verdana
And little bit more default fonts
Some free fonts from dafont, Colaborate, Extravaganzza

Step 6 – Creating effect

When you’re done duplicate your words group (Layer – Duplicate Group) and merge it (Ctrl+E). Make invisible your unmerged words group. Find your large text layer (in my case it’s PEACE), hold CTRL (Command on mac) and click on layers thumbnail. That should load it’s selection.

Then click on your merged words layer and press Ctrl+J. If you make invisible your merged words layer (and unmerged words group is still invisible) you should get something like this.

Step 7 – Create Background Text Effect

Make merged words layer visible again and apply following layer style.

Set layers opacity to 30%.

Then duplicate merged words layer and place it under merged words layer. Then go to Filter – Blur – Motion Blur and apply following settings.

Set layers opacity to 15%.

Add text under your title if you want.

Step 8 – Final touches

Locate your PEACE text layer and lower its opacity to 4%.

Create new layer, go to Image – Apply Image, then go to Filter – Render – Lightning Effects and apply following settings.

Set layers opacity to 30% and we’re done. I also added gradient map to one of the letter layers. Here’s final result. Click to enlarge.

Download wallpaper (various sizes):

You can download *.psd version as well here! Enjoy!

30 Photo Effect Photoshop Tutorials Every Designer Will Love

Dainis Graveris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:39:30 +0000

Few days ago I created this article 105 People Photo Manipulation Works You Will Really Marvel with amazing photo manipulation works. This time I went step further and actually tried to find tutorials teaching you how to achieve such effects! Of course, I didn’t find the same effects there, but if you look closer and really study these tutorials I showcased here, you will understand you’ll have all the skills to create such artworks! More or less techniques are the same and with little creativity you can create your own masterpiece even today!

I wish you good luck, while exploring and learning so you could spice up your own photos, impress friends and evolve your design skills! This list is a little bit shorter than other ones, but I thought I better focus on quality than quantity, because we already have many, many useless list tutorial articles around here repeating same stuff over and over again.

1. Water effect photo montage tutorial

Outstanding tutorial, you really must try this one and understand how to use this effect, giving you unlimited opportunities to express yourself.

2. How to Create a Sparkling Fantasy Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial, we’re going to create a photo manipulation using different techniques. We’ll be adjusting each layer and element to make a compact final image. We’ll be using multiple photos and a handful of effects to create this work. Let’s get started!

3. Dance Photo Manipulation Part 1, Part2

I love this one, you can really learn several advanced techniques from this two part tutorial, amazing advanced level tutorial!

4. Create dynamic distortion effects

Extend feel of dynamics and create work, you cannot take eyes of! Really advanced techniques!

5. How to Create Super-Malleable Effects with Colorful Lines

Very trendy tutorial, teaching you how to create beautiful artwork out of almost nothing!

6. Create a Sleek Illustration that Fades from Line Art to Color

Combine reality with line art in beautiful poster and learn advanced techniques from this high quality tutorial!

7. How to Turn Humdrum Photos into Cinematic Portraits

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to transform usual photo into regular, humdrum portrait, even faking HDR effects a little bit.

8. The RoboHorse Turn Ordinary Animal to a Robot

In this tutorial I will show you with an example of horse how to turn an ordinary animal to a robot.

9. Design a Colorful Illustration Using Patterns and Shapes

This is really beautiful tutorial using patterns,coloring and 3D shapes to gain outstanding effect! Tutorial is easy to create and modify, so you should really enjoy it!

10. Awesome Snowboard Poster Tutorial

Simple tutorial, showing how to gain great effects using just few brushes and basic Photoshop skills.

11. Create a Funky Perspective of a Model Riding Digital Volume

Learn how to create photo manipulation using perspective achieving depth and motion in artwork. Easy to follow up – enjoy!

12. How to Create a Steampunk Style Illustration in Photoshop

Learn through simple steps how to montage many different elements in one picture and make it look really good with lightning, shadows and image grading.

13. Make your image look awesome with a few light effects

For every beginner – advance effects!

14. How To Create A Vibrant Image Using Photoshop

Explore how to add dynamics, energy to photo turning it into great artwork! Excellent learning piece!

15. Beautiful Lady Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Colorize and extend this great photo to look it even more beautiful and artistic!

16. Electrifying Energy Beam Photoshop Tutorial

Great and very easy to archieve effect I really love to use in many works I create as well!

17. Tutorial: Use lighting effects to make photos sparkle

Add some simple brushes,lightning and color to make your photo stand out!

18. Dazzling Dance Photo Manipulation Tutorial

Detailed and really well explained Photoshop tutorial, which will learn how to combine several photos, add special effects and get outstanding results!

19. Create A Glowing Extreme Wallpaper in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you’ll create a complex glowing wallpaper using Photoshop, which is really easy to follow up.

20. Stylish Light Effect in Photoshop

Yet one more stylish image effect achieved playing with blending modes and adjustment layers.

21. Super Fast – Speed Lighting Effect Tutorial

Add speed of light in your works!

22. How to Create an Abstract Photo Manipulation

Nasty photo manipulation, which can be used in really various ways. Lots of useful techniques included in this tutorial!

23. Fashion Shot Photo Manipulation Tutorial

Enhance your photos with simple effects and get unbelievable effects!

24. Make Photos More Suggestive Tutorial

Subtle effects, great outcome, easy to follow up steps! Enjoy!

25. Add Another Dimension Photo Effects Tutorial

Use brushes and colors to spice up your photos to really stand out!

26. The Making of Mystic Tutorial

In this tutorial Nik Ainley walks us through the process of making a spectacular image. Completely outstanding!

27. Expressive lighting effects tutorial

Learn how to combine several lightning techniques to achieve stunning outcome!

28. Displacement effects tutorial

You’ll learn here how to use several filters and techniques to show you the way how to experiment, use lightning effects and recreate those effects in your own style.

29. Seriously Cool Photoshop Explosion Effect Tutorial

Very cool explosion effect tutorial, teaching how to break apart a body, add lightning and glow!

30. Create a Powerful Mental Wave Explosion Effect

Crazy and very powerful work. This tutorial will teach you how to combine photos and filters to produce wave explosion effect.

40 Incredibly Useful Web Design Tools You Should Use Daily

Daniels Mekšs — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:05:37 +0000

This article will showcase tools which should and could be used by designers daily. If you need some inspiration – you can visit the most popular and recommended design showcase sites to find really good works and examples. Check out design related tools, online generators, free font sites, template sites, great websites helping to test and manage websites – those all have been created to save your time! Remember - not always the best way is to create everything by yourself. Be smart and you will accomplish your tasks much easier and quicker without struggling!

I strongly suggest you to go through this article and bookmark tools, which could help you or just bookmark this page and come back whenever you feel discouraged or struggled! Enjoy!

Inspiration

1. Deviantart

Deviantart is one of the largest artist showcases on internet. You can find some great inspiration here.

2. Web design library

Web Design Library is an internationally refereed resource that provides a platform for the dissemination of design thinking and research. It covers all theoretical and practice-oriented aspects of the effective, efficient and attractive presentation of information on-line.

3. Stylevault

Stylevault.net is a design showcase where web designers can show off their talents and get inspiration as well as giving it.

4. Behance

Behance is a very great place for inspiration, because there are more professionals with stunning designs.

5. The design inspiration

The Design Inspiration is created by a group of designers who are seeking various design inspiration every day.

Design tools

6. Colour lovers

COLOURlovers is an international community of designers and artists of all kinds who visit the site to get color inspiration, ideas and feedback for both their professional and personal projects. COLOURlovers’ loyal members create colors, palettes and patterns to nurture their ongoing love affair with color.

7. Adobe kuler

Adobe kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes.

8. Color hunter

Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images.

9. Colorotate

With ColoRotate, you can work with colors in 3D, in real time, and in a way that matches how our minds process color.

10. Stripemania

Stripemania is a simple and free web 2.0 tool to create seamless diagonal stripes for your designs. You are able to choose the size of the stripes and the spacing between those. You can even add color gradient effect for all of your stripes.

11. Fontstruct

FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.

12. Dafont

A great website which allows you to browse fonts alphabetically, by themes, or by date. Most of the fonts are free to download.

13. Icon finder

Icon search engine with over 100 000 free icons.

14. Whatthefont

Seen a font in use and want to know what it is?

Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in our database. Or, let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum

15. Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Coding tools

16. Typeteste

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of different typefaces. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.

17. Typeface.js

With typeface.js you can embed custom fonts in your web pages so you don’t have to render text to images.

18. Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

19. Smush.it

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality

20. pForm

HTML form creator.

21. Zend Studio

Zend Studio 7.0 is the next generation of our professional-grade PHP application development environment. It has been designed to maximize developer productivity by enabling you to develop and maintain code faster, solve application problems quickly and improve team collaboration.

22. Fire FTP for Firefox

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

23. Expandrive

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac or PC. It lets you open, edit, and save files on remote computers from within your favorite programs. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

24. W3C Validator

The W3C validator is a free service by W3C that helps check the validity of Web documents. Also available CSS validator.

25. jQuery UI

jQuery UI is an open source library of interface components — interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects — based on the stellar jQuery javascript library . Each component is built according to jQuery’s event-driven architecture (find something, manipulate it) and is themeable, making it easy for developers of any skill level to integrate and extend into their own code.

26. Clean AJAX

Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology.

27. Refelction.js

Reflection.js allows you to add reflections to images on your web pages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.

28. Blueprint CSS

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

29. CleanCSS

CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.

30. XHTML Character Entity Reference

This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C.

31. Pingdom

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. We use a global network of servers to monitor our customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS and email.

32. Lightbox 2

Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

33. WIX

Free flash page builder.

34. Best free templates

BestFreeTemplates.info offers exclusive CSS templates of various categories, available for free downloading. Our free templates can be easily called one of the best free templates in the Internet. Qualitative CSS layout, absolutely unique professional web design – all this being an incontestable advantage of our free webtemplates. That’s what allows us to characterize our website templates as the best free templates.

Testing and managing site

35. Browsershots

BrowserShots is a web-based browser compatibility check tool that lets you easily preview how your website looks in all popular browsers. No email or registration required, submit your web URL and wait 3-5 min for BrowserShots to generate screenshots for each browser.

36. Browsercam

See your web design on any browser on any operating system. Check javascripts, DHTML, forms and other dynamic functionality on any platform. Not just yours. Use our bank of testing machines remotely to test your website.

37. Are my sites up?

Are my sites up is a simple service that notifies you when your sites goes down.

38. Google analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

39. W3Counter

W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them.

40. eLogic

Track and monitor the activities of your website. Knowing what your web page statistics are is the key to running a successful online business.

3 Smart Ranking SEO Tips You Better Be Aware Of

Ayaz Malik — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:21:23 +0000

This article will take a little insight in several most popular ranking systems around here and teach you how to get better Google pagerank, get better results on Alexa and Moz ranking systems as well. Many of these tips will seem very basic and easy, but that’s so through – optimization is not hard, bust just requires small but regular time investments. If you can use those tips in daily basis, then you definitely get some great results! For example, check on 1stwebdesigner.com website which is only a little bit more than one year old, but has got really high rankings!

I wrote a post Learn SEO by Improving Important Web Ranks a few months before but now I guess it’s the right time to upgrade and elaborate it because Google and other search engines are changing their policy at high pace. First we need to get head into three of the most important ranks on web:

Page Rank
MOZ Rank
Alexa Rank

1. Page Rank:

Nowadays there is a big fuss that Google removing page rank or it’s the end of page rank. Well yes Google have removed page rank from webmaster tools, but still I don’t think it’s an end to page rank because this topic is going on from past 4 years. That is why we will talk about improving page rank as well.

Page rank is one of the most important and commonly talked about ranks on web. its the heart and soul of SEO and getting traffic from search engines. Page Rank is said to be an estimate of your site’s popularity on the web by measuring the number of websites linking to your site, assigned by Google. Page Rank is determined by Google Links not Inbound Links!! This is an important part to understand, Google links and inbound links are not same. Inbound Link means that links pointing to your site from another site, while Google links are an extract of the quality inbound links. In Short Google links are taken from the inbound links, but only quality links.

How to improve your site’s Page rank:

Improving page rank is a difficult but still not so difficult task to do. You can easily get about PR 3 in first two months. Sounds impossible? Well not actually I can do that with a challenge :), I have done that to plenty of sites. So how to? Some very Simple Techniques!!!

Optimize your homepage for search engines.
This includes proper page Title, Proper Keywords, Proper Description and most of all Proper Content. Now what do i mean by proper?

By Proper I mean that your title, keywords and description should not consist of extra stuff like numbers, stop words (and, or etc.), same keywords must not repeat more than 3 times in title and description. In Content Optimization Keep your content clean, fewer images, Use your main keyword in H1, also try to use keywords in h2 and h3. (For Details see this post : on page Optimization)
Install Google Toolbar
Start using Chrome Browser since they take data of sites you are browsing.
Post your site’s Links to these social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Deddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkzDirect etc.
Nofollow outgoing or not so important links. How to do that?
Normal Links: sitename

Nofollowed Links: rel=”nofollow”>sitename (See This post for more: Nofollow)
Ask for sites with same focus for link exchange, Don’t hesitate to ask they won’t say no trust me :)
Avoid using URL Shorteners if you are bookmarking your site’s link in social bookmarking networks, because with this the inbound link goes to the URL Shortener site not you. Twitter is exception since it nofollows all links.

In about two months u will achieve Page Rank 1-3. If you want to improve your site’s Rank and push even further please see this post: Link Popularity Building

2. MOZ Rank:

Moz rank is some what like link juice estimation. Link Juice just like page rank flows from page to page of your site or links to others sites on your pages.

Install Quick Search Status toolbar or SEO Moz Bar
Nofollow outgoing or not so important links (See This post: Nofollow)
Use SEO MOZ Tools to get info about your site.

In simple words the more quality inbound links you have the better moz rank you get. Quality links are considered as inbound links on sites whose page rank is higher than your site. For example if my site’s page rank is 2 then putting link on site who’s page rank is higher than 2 or 3 would be considered as quality Inbound link, of course by using proper link posting method.

Proper Link posting is something like this:

Normally if u post a link u do it like this. Site Name. Well yes u did made a link but not quality link. Here is how u can optimize your link. Your Keyword

Now what’s different in it? You are using a title attribute which strengthens your links focus and instead of using link on your site/brand name it’s better to use your keyword in it.

Once you do this and get a grip on SEO Moz tools you will easily control the flow of your link juice in your site and can control your site’s SEO to some extent

3. Alexa Rank:

Ok, everybody knows what it I won’t get into details is. Just simple to improve alexa rank just install alexa toolbar and browse your site daily. Refresh after a few minutes or so in a week you will improve your rank to about 200000 places. Note also this will work only to really new and fresh sites, for well established websites you still need traffic to get ranked.

Want even more??

Optimize your homepage for search engines (it’s very simple just read this post : onpage Optimization)
Ask members of your site or friends to install alexa toolbar and browse your site.
Even More?? Install alexa toolbar on a network of computers and set your browser’s homepage to your site so whenever its opened your site sends a hit to alexa , thus your rank improves..

When u will go through all these steps just to improve your site’s rankings once, you have learned SEO.

105 People Photo Manipulation Works You Will Really Marvel

Dainis Graveris — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:33:51 +0000

Oh, I am really marveling those photo manipulation works with people and countless amazing, colorful effects! Somehow I don’t think I have seen many tutorials out there teaching really how to come up with something so beautiful like that. Right, but that’s understandable, you will find many separate effect tutorials, but you really should learn to put it all together – but don’t worry effect and photo manipulation tutorial roundup will be featured in next article!

You must be thinking – man..105 artworks, is this guy completely crazy? Well, I must admit I went crazy, but I couldn’t not feature those works here, you must see how amazing this art is if you haven’t seen something like that before! At least I have crazy inspiration now to put something like this together myself – how about you?

One more thing, if you want to see even more of these kind photo manipulation artworks, check out my Deviantart profile favorites #photomanipulation folder, I’ll be updating this one regularly! The same is about web and wordpress theme layouts – I am putting the best works in my favorites daily and sometimes creating new works myself as well! Check out my DeviantArt profile if you are interested, guys and enjoy this article!