We could not have been more enthusiastic or unprepared for this turn of events. Never had we imagined that a message from Josh and Adelle from FUEL indicating they wanted to collaborate with us, would have ever yielded such a privilege! Talk about having the breath knocked out of you…by a conversation? That was a first for us.

What does this mean for our sites? Ah, therein lies the crux of this post. With us manning (and womanning) the helm at FYC, we will no longer be updating our blog here, and over at Dead Wings and the Social Media Directory for Designers. The amazing content that we have amassed and fallen in love with over the past year from all of our sites will remain so that we do not break any of the links that were so kindly offered to our works. Also, and mind you this will take some time, we will be compiling all of our favorite posts into a free e-book that will eventually be available to download from the Fuel Your Creativity blog. There are a few loose ends we need to tie up here at Arbenting so there will be a few more posts as we wind it down over the next month.

Also, both Arbenting and Dead Wings will remain as personal portfolios for Angie and I, respectively. So we will still be freelancing and updating the gallery of work we showcase at both of those sites. So you will still be able to find us around here, but as for the blogging that has made us fans and garnered us readers, you will have to follow us over to Fuel Your Creativity. We hope to see you there!

Don’t forget to head over to Comment and Win a Kartell – Prince AHA Stool / Table for a chance at a beautiful piece of interior design.

Congratulations!

1. T-Law - Splashes/Splatters Pack 2
2. Cyndi in BC - Snowflakes
3. Elena - Halftone Pack 2
4. Pablo Lara - Halftone Circles Pack 2
5. Moo - Summer Vectors
6. Steve Robillard - Leaves
7. Kylie Larsson - Swirl Pack 1
8. hardiannazief.com - Wings Pack 2
9. Dian - Grass
10. webbografico - Grass
11. Rebecca Calvert - Halftone Pack 1
12. Richard Cave - Buildings
13. Sam - Swirls - Flourishes Vector Pack 11
14. JD - Smudges
15. Yötua - Smudges
16. Matt - Sunburst
17. Gindi - Arrows Pack 2
18. Nancy - Wings Pack 3
19. Alan - Swirls Pack 1
20. Tye - Handdrawn

Article - When Interiors Attack: When Your Feng Shui, Feng Shouldn’t - Design is an eclectic field that has many wonderfully creative facets for the creative community to explore. One area that often gets overlooked by a portion of designers, is interior design.

Freebie - 10 Free Hi-Res Waterlogged Maps Photoshop Brushes - Angie struck brainstorming gold and mined through the web to unearth some old time royalty free map images to age and weather into a mighty fine brush pack. These original brushes are free for the My Ink Blog readers to enjoy and include in their design projects of all shapes and sizes. Commercial or personal designs alike, we want you to find as many creative uses for these Photoshop freebies as you can.

20 Questions To Ask Clients Prior To Designing A Logo - Before starting any project it’s essential to get the right preliminary information from your clients. This will help pave the way to a successful project, assist in bringing client’s vision into perspective and build a lasting relationship.

Five Minute Upgrade – Making Your Design Pop - 8 ways to raise your design from good to great.

20 Excellent Coda Tips - There are quite a few great web development applications out there but if you’re a Mac user, Coda is easily one of the best. Here are 20 excellent Coda tips to increase productivity that I’ve gathered during my use of Coda so far.

10 UI Design Patterns You Should Be Paying Attention To - Design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects. In fact, you may already be using them now without knowing it.

Create a Complete Apparel Tech Pack - So you just spent 10 or more hours creating a crazy t-shirt design and your client has officially signed off…so what now? You may have created stellar photo-realistic mockups and used tons of really cool colors- but none of this means ANYTHING if your screen printer can’t clearly interpret your vision!

10 incredibly cool WordPress shortcodes - Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are a very easy way to display lot of things on your blog posts by inserting a very simple code. In this article, I’m going to show 10 incredible things shortcodes can do.

Essential Practices for Styling Your CSS - With Cascading Style-Sheets you can virtually do anything you want, which is mostly valuable, however, if you are inexperienced, it can most certainly hurt you in the long run. Most of the designers and developers only accomplish to scratch the surface of the amazing abilities of CSS.

Free download: 5 birds vectors - Download this serie of 5 birds silhouette vectors for free. They can be used in any type of work, commercial or not, but I’d love it if you referred to the source.

20 Spray & Splat Brushes for Photoshop - This set of brushes is really nice, especially if you need a little more spray and a little less splat in your design. Give this set a download and try them on for size.

7 Coffee Stained Paper Textures - These textures were made using a high quality textured card, coffee granules and boiling water. The card was soaked in a strong, black coffee over night until completely dry, and the same process was repeated to create the coffee blotches. After creasing, the card was stored flat to dry and scanned in at 600dpi, leaving you with high resolution textures to use for your personal and commercial projects!

5 Free High Resolution Patterned Paper Textures - think these would look fabulous in website background compositions, even more toned down with just a hint of some curvy designs visible. Please feel free to use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions.

Freebie: 7 High Resolution Stone Textures - These high resolution stone textures are of the stone siding on the lighthouse at Old Fort Niagara. The park is nestled on Lake Ontario and has all kinds of great places to visit, look around and photograph. I love the weathered stone and moss growing along some of the rock.

Friday Freebie: Old Vintage Paper Tag - The tag is in .PNG format with a transparent background, one with the text and one with it removed. The tag is about 1776 x 578 px so its pretty big to work with, which is always a good thing!

Grungy Polka Dots Photoshop Patterns - Today’s web treat is a another combo pack of tileable grungy polka dot Photoshop patterns (.pat) and a corresponding seamless grungy texture pack (.jpg). The resolution for both textures and patterns is 740px X 740px.

Free Vector Doodles - Women’s Clothing & Fashion - It’s time for another little vector doodles freebie, this time a collection of vector graphics based on the topic of women’s fashion. The pack contains various roughly doodled clothing items, including shoes, dresses, belts, sunglasses and bags. Feel free to use them in any of your designs, hopefully they will fit right in to a fashion website or promo designs for a clothes store.

Free Texture Tuesday: Floral - These textures were made in Photoshop by layering various grunge and paper textures together along with floral patterns. They may not have a wide variety of uses, but I think they’ll really come in handy when you find a place for them in your designs.

RSS Cheese - A free icon set you can taste - The set contains 4 high resolution RSS icons that come in four sizes: 512x512, 256x256, 128x128 and 64x64. Icons are completely free and can be used without any restrictions in any type of project inlcuding commercial projects.

Free Vector Diagram Icons - 12 free vector icons of diagrams and charts in bright cartoon style. Easy to modify, recolor and mix. Free for personal and commercial purposes.

Interview with Mikael Lugnegard, ID’er gone rogue - Mikael Lugnegard is a Swedish industrial designer [who] graduated from the Umea Institute of Design, and worked as a lead designer for Duke Dynamics (BMW styling), as a concept designer for von Braun Sports Cars and as a sketch teacher at a number of Swedish design schools.

Interview with Marco Kuiper, Marcofolio.net - Marco lives in the Netherlands and is an enthusiast in everything on the web and creates innovative web stuff. In this interview you’ll get to know him a little bit better.

Freelancer Interview: Andy Sowards - The first in a new series of interviews on Guerrilla Freelancing featuring the always talkative and highly talented Andy Sowards.

Interview With Todd Garland Founder Of BuySellAds - Todd is the founder of BuySellAds, an advertising network that makes it easy for both publishers to sell ads, and advertisers to purchase ad spots.

Make A Vector Comment Bubble In 5 Simple Steps - A nifty little 5-step process to create your very own vector Comment Bubble. This tutorial is strictly for those who are too intimidated by Ilustrator and who wake up in the middle of the night because they saw the Pen tool in a ghastly nightmare.

Photo Manipulate a Falling Angel - Learn how to combine several photos to create a dramatic ‘fallen angel’ scene.

Tutorial - Create a Folding Circle - A very simple process for doing a fold over effect.

Create a Glowing Globe Icon in Photoshop - In this tutorial we are going to create a simple 3D glowing world globe icon. This can then be applied to a logo or one color image instead of a map.

How To Create a WordPress Theme - Over the next 12 days this WordPress Themes Tutorial is going to show you how to build a powerful, up-to-date, WordPress Theme from scratch. As we go along I’ll explain what’s happening including (for better or worse) my thinking on certain techniques and why I’m choosing one path over another.

Create a Nice Web Portfolio Design with a Watercolored Background in Photoshop - In this step by step tutorial I explain how to realize a nice Web Portfolio Design with a Watercolored Background using two brush sets, a icon pack and some basic techniques.

Create an Online Magazine With WordPress - Many of us have dreamed of writing for a magazine or even being a magazine editor. However, now with WordPress you can be the writer, editor and owner of your very own magazine. With a few steps you can have the magazine designed, laid out and have writers who are writing articles for your own online publication.

Making Sense of the Warp Tool - It’s All About the Lines - What we’re going to do is pick the image up from the part where we have the accordion sections in place with the red coloring applied to the sides. Then we’ll go step by step through adding the diamond pattern to the side of the top wrap. By the end you should have a pretty good understanding of how the Warp Tool works and will be a Warping Master as well.

20 Must-Read Blogs for Freelance Developers

80+ Must-Read Design Blogs to Enhance your Creativity and your Career

30 WordPress Development Tutorials

22 Extremely Useful Tools for Web Designers and Developers

20 New, Useful And Promising Wordpress Plugins

10 Places to Download Awesome WordPress Themes

15 Must Read Articles for CSS Beginners

26 Complete WordPress Blog Design Tutorials

25+ Useful Infographics for Web Designers

30 Most Influential People In Web Design

Random Inspiration

Today I just kind of felt like giving you some random inspiration with no real theme to tie them all together. Hope you like.

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We have a different kind of giveaway here at Arbenting today. Usually we give away items that will aid you as a designer such as business cards, vector packs, and freelancing software. But today we are going to be focusing on a different area of design, the Interior, by giving you a beautiful piece of design for your home.

One of our readers will win a Kartell Prince AHA Stool from All Modern in their choice of color. The stool also doubles as a beautiful corner or end table.

All Modern has a great selection modern furniture, home accessories and lighting from brands like Knoll, Herman Miller, Heller, Alessi and iittala!

Contest Details

To enter the contest, simply leave a comment here telling us why this wonderfully functional interior design element would tie your room together.

• Due to shipping costs of large items this contest is only open to US residents.
• Winner will be contacted via email so make sure you leave a valid email address when you comment.
• Only one comment per person, multiple comments will not be counted.
• Winner will be chosen randomly using Random.org
• The contest will run from now until July 15th, 2009.

ArtBox7 is a small design studio specialized in high quality, premium vectors and design elements. You can see this for yourself by simply giving their vector packs a gander.

Contest Details

Entering the contest couldn’t be simpler. Just reply to this post with the name of the vector pack you would like to win. That’s it. Of course the hard part is choosing only one, but you will understand what we mean by that when you check out all of the vector packs here.

• Winners will be contacted via email so make sure you leave a valid email address when you comment.
• Only one comment per person, multiple comments will not be counted.
• Winners will be chosen randomly using Random.org
• The contest will run from now until July 9th.

So we put together a Cliff’s Notes guide of sorts to this coding champion that will hopefully prove useful to both beginner and seasoned coder alike. Below are several categories to help you with all of your CSS needs, from education to galleries, with related sites linked up and a light list of related articles that comprehensively cover the topics at hand. As with a lot of topics this involved and in-depth, it is easy for one to get in over their heads, and lose sight of the important track they were on. This is our attempt to help streamline that effort a bit. Hope it helps.

Learn CSS

CSS Basics - 18 chapters on CSS basics that can be read online, downloaded or printed. A great place for an absolute beginner to start.

The Complete CSS Guide is a reference to every aspect of cascading style sheets. If you need help learning CSS or if you’re looking for info about selectors, properties and all the other aspects of cascading style sheets, this is the place.

More on Learning CSS

• 20 Websites To Help You Learn and Master CSS
• Top 5 Sites to Learn CSS Online
• 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

Websites

CSS Play provides experimental CSS demonstrations that use no javascript or any other programming language.

Css Globe is a community news site where members can publish news about web standards, css, web design and web development.

CSS Zen Garden - is a demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.

CSS Tricks is a great CSS community run by Chris Coyier featuring a blog with some of the best CSS articles I’ve come across, forums, screencasts and downloads.

Eric Meyer: CSS Considered by most to be the ultimate CSS guru, Eric Meyer’s CSS site is a must read for any web developer.

Cheat Sheets

Leslie Franke’s Single Page Cheet Sheet

Helveticss

Added Bytes CSS Cheat Sheet

Interactive CSS Box Model Demo

Frameworks

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.

Blueprint CSS 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.

Elements is a down to earth CSS framework. It was built to help designers write CSS faster and more efficient. Elements goes beyond being just a framework, it’s its own project workflow.It has everything you need to complete your project.

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

CSS Tinderbox is geared towards supporting CSS-based web design by providing basic, open source frameworks that people can use as a starting point for their own templates. The framework can be used as a head start instead of starting everything from scratch again and again.

More on Frameworks

• Top 12 CSS Frameworks and How to Understand Them
• CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch
• Definitive List of CSS Frameworks - Pick Your Style
• 5 Popular CSS Frameworks + Tutorials, Tools and Getting Started

Tools

CSS Typeset allows you to interact with web type, see your changes in real time and get the CSS code for the finished product.

PXtoEM is a simple px to em conversion tool.

CSS Optimizer is an online tool based on CSSTidy which cleans up and compresses your code.

CSS Redundancy Checker finds CSS selectors that aren’t used by any of your HTML files and may be redundant.

CSS Color Editor allows you to change the entire color scheme of your website without manually going through your css code. I haven’t tried this tool yet but I’ll admit I have a few doubts about how well it would work. If anyone has used it please comment and let us know your experiences with it.

CSS Galleries

CSS Elite

CSS Drive

CSS Vault

The Best Designs

CSS Flavor

More on CSS Galleries

• CSS Gallery Attacks
• 74 CSS Gallery Roundup
• 25+ CSS Galleries to Promote Your Work

Your Turn

Are there any ‘Notes’worthy CSS resources you feel we left out? Comment and let us know.

Roundup - A Showcase of 3D Typography: Tutorials & Examples - First in the post, we are going to point you to a few different tutorials that will teach you how to do a variety of 3d typographical effects to incorporate into your work. Then we are going to show you some beautiful examples of 3D typography to inspire you into using your newly learned techniques.

Inspiration - Print Design – That Was Then, This Is Now! - We wanted to look back at the earlier days of print ads and see the styles and techniques that were prevalent back in the days. But we wanted to go just beyond a simple showcase of retro print designs, we also wanted to compare them with a slice of today’s print advertising market to see how far we’ve come. So we set out across the vast sea of cyberspace to fish out a few examples from the vault of yesteryear, and to track down a couple of newer examples to showcase along side them.

Roundup - 5 Unique and Unusual Twitter Tools - Since the launch of Twitter, the app-happy webs have flooded with thousands of tools to accompany this social media mogul dedicated to one singular purpose. Serve the Twitter. More specifically to selectively serve up the twitterverse’s offerings in so many different ways and through so many different interfaces. Of the applications available, some are extremely useful, some are purely crap, and some are just strange and fun. For this post, we will be focusing on the latter.

Handy Tips for Creating a Print CSS Stylesheet - Print stylesheets often come as a secondary thought on many websites, after all, who prints a webpage anyway?! Despite their slightly infrequent use, a print stylesheet can really help polish the printed document for when it is used. It doesn’t take too long to create, so let’s take a look at some handy tips that you can put into practice on your own site.

Review: Tweetdeck Refresh plus new iPhone App - Just a little bit ago tweetdeck released its refreshed desktop client and iPhone app. I was pretty stoked to find them showing a new site design as well. There is a video review of the Tweetdeck interface and as well as RAM usage.

Tips For Creating High Selling Templates - Creating templates that will sell extremely well is something we all want to do, but it takes time and skill. Luckily, there are some tips we can take from the masters and apply to our own work. Here are some great ways to improve your templates and increase your sales.

10 Rules of Front End Coding - What follows here is a series of 10 things to remember and practice on each web development project. I have listed them here in order of importance as many of the steps build on each other.

A Detailed Look at the Z-Index CSS Property - I would venture to guess that z-index is probably the CSS property that is more speedily abandoned than any other. Hopefully this article will clear up some misunderstandings regarding z-index.

Random Gradients vol. 1 - There are 100 gradients included and they’re free to download for personal and commercial uses. I’ve created random solid colors (no particular style or whatsoever).

MOO! Font - Free for Download - Ideal for Logo Designs and Posters - MOO! is a free font, a ultra-fat, electro-style, geometric typeface. It was designed focusing on logotypes, titles and display letterforms, with cut-out diacritics.

Free Texture Tuesday: Extreme Grunge - This week I went out of my way to make the dirtiest, most grunge-y textures I could conjure up.

Free Vectors - 15 Paint Brushstroke Illustrator Brushes - A pack of 15 high-quality paint brushstroke Illustrator Brushes. I think they came out really cool, and could be used subtly, and for details, as well as full blown paint brush strokes.

Finger Paints Brush set - 20 brushes free for commercial and non-commercial use.

10 Colorful Motion Blur Textures - The majority of the time motion blur is looked down upon in the photography world. Sure, it can come in handy at times when used properly, but it’s more often a nuisance caused by low-light rather than a deliberate creative element. Hopefully you can find some cool uses for motion blur in texture form though.

Free Theme: WP Typo - WP Typo is a beautiful theme that is 100% typographic, there are no images used at all. You can do whatever the heck you want with it. No attribution required.

10 High-Quality Free Brown Paper Textures - In this set, you’ll find 10 free and high-resolution brown paper textures which can be used in a wide range of ways. They have a very liberal Creative Commons license so you can use them in any manner you choose, whether it’s personal or commercial.

Interview with Ee Venn Soh - Ee Venn Soh has one of the most unique design styles I have ever seen, and it all roots from his passion and devotion to art. He designs in the purest form and you can see he has a genuine love for creating illustrations by having a conversation with him. In this interview, we discuss his style, one of his best illustrations “Silver Maiden,” and a lot more.

Interview With Darren Hoyt On WPTopics.com - Darren Hoyt who we know from creating the Mimbo Pro theme has launched a new site called WPTopics.com which tries to present WordPress information from only established sites. I was lucky enough to talk to Darren for an hour the other day to find out a little more about this particular website.

Interview - Florian Nicolle - Florian Nicolle is a young designer located in France. I have came across some of his works in DeviantArt and found his illustrations do have an unique style of his own.

Interview With Josh Tilton From Grip Creative - Today I have interview an amazing web designer called Josh Tilton. Josh owns his own web design company called Grip Creative. Some of his work is outstanding, and his weblog design is on many different web galleries across the internet.

Tutorial: Create a Very Informative Archives Page

How to Create a Stinking Zombie Flesh Eater in Illustrator - In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a cartoon zombie in Illustrator. Starting by creating a fresh corpse, we will then ‘yuck’ it up using a number of techniques. Let’s ‘rip’ this one apart!

Create dropdown menus with CSS only - I rarely see drop down menus that behave like drop down lists, but I really like them. I noticed, however, that people often use JavaScript to achieve this effect. Actually, there is a simple way to do it only with CSS.

2 Ways To Create Realistic “Depth of Field” - In this tutorial we are going to learn how to create realistic “Depth of Field” in Photoshop. We are going to look at two different ways of doing it depending on what kind of picture

Create an Abstract Underwater Scene - Create an awesome abstract underwater scene using photo manipulation techniques. Learn how to create a complex abstract composition.

How To Create Your Own Stats Program (JavaScript, AJAX, PHP)

Create a Clean and Colorful Web Layout in Photoshop - In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a clean corporate layout in Photoshop.

Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator - Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.

Twitter Study Group - TSG is a service for anyone. It is starting for those in the design/programming community since that is where my interests lie, and I figured it would be best to work out the kinks on projects I actually took part in. The basic idea is like a study group – you have a group of people who all want to learn the same thing, so you support each other, and work on the project at the same time so you have others to go to with questions, show your progress and compare notes.

theWPresser - A new blog for Wordpress News, Reviews, A Gallery, Coding, and Tutorials.

Fuel your Photography - Ah, so you know your way around a dark room, eh? Maybe you’ve graduated from the old point and shoot to a camera that makes REAL magic. Nice to meet ya! We like people like you, after all, seeing the world through your lenses reminds us what a crazy world it really is. It’s because we like you that we’ve dedicated a website-Fuel Your Photography- to inspiring you.

Mariusz Ciesla - A new design blog featuring articles on design and inspiration, tutorials on working with designs in Photoshop, Pixelmator and GIMP, news and rumors.

Digging Into Wordpress - the blog home for the upcoming book of the same name by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. Books and blogs are the perfect compliment to each other when it comes to learning web technologies. The blog is there for searchability, quick tips, and copy and pasteable code. The book is there for offline reference and that essential full-attention first read through when your brain is ready to soak in a ton of new information. Digging Into WordPress brings you the best of both worlds.

Vlad Georgescu - A new web designer site launch

CSS Websites - A new CSS gallery with some beautiful sites already showcased

Improve Your Typography On Web Design – Tutorials And Resources Roundup

10 astonishing CSS hacks and techniques

16 Best Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Web Designs

25 Excellent Typography Tools for the Serious Designer

40 Top-Notch Print Based Tutorials

200+ Drupal Tutorials - Basics To Advance!

43 Must Read PHP Articles and Resources

Jermaine Rogers

Jermaine Rogers is easily one of our collective favorites here at Arbenting as far as graphic artists go. One of our favorite things about his work, is that he has a studio here in the same small town we are in, so we can see the work live. Okay, so it is really more of a perk than something we admire about his work, but that was actually how we were turned on him. We walked passed the studio one day and were immediately drawn in by his hauntingly original illustrations. His work tends to be dark, some times disturbingly so, but it is always an inspiration for us to peruse. We hope you find it to be that way as well. Enjoy a sample from Jermaine Rogers.

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The design community is an active, vibrant collective that utilizes many tools to make sure they stay on top and ahead of the game. They keep a deep and varied assemblage of tools to make the most of their designs, and to make the most for their designs. Now what I mean by for their designs is this, designers understand the importance of having a presence on the interwebs to help in catapulting and growing the exposure for their work, and for obtaining new contacts for future work. So it is with this in mind, that we present a look at this fantastic tool of the design trade, the design blog!

The Tool

Since its online inception, blogging has become a powerful mechanism for not only improving one’s reach into the community in which they are active, but for bringing others in and exposing them to what it is you have to showcase. For designers, this interactive and openly personal tool became a unifying and driving force for the overall design community. It is no wonder the online design collective is one of the largest most active groups on the web, and by and large, blogging seems to be the designer’s go to weapon of choice. It is certainly the interactive element of the blogs that attracts more people to them, than say, an online portfolio. Please do not think that we are saying a portfolio is not a valuable tool in and of itself, for it most definitely is. But with the frequency of updates and the personal insight gained from the user’s experience, there is simply more draw to a blog for most web surfers.

The Uses

Designers are drawn to this tool for its numerous benefits and its open ended usefulness. The blog can be as large or as little a tool as you want it to be (as for that, so can you as you are using this tool, so lets hope you air on the side of little tool or none at all. Remember, Sam Jackson said it best, ‘…Personality goes a long way’. Don’t let yours take you a long way in the wrong direction.) To clarify the point, you can decide how much you wish to put into the blog, which effectively feeds the community, and that will determine how much you can get from it. Its versatility of use is as varied as its versatility of execution, which aids the designers in personalizing this platform they can build upon. Designer’s love to have their signature style, and one of the ways they have effectively used blogging is to help establish that signature.

Blogs have also become a major source for learning opportunities, as the community has captured the creative spirit and become determined to share it with others. So many great tutorials and other valuable information being passed back and forth among the members of the online design collective, that it is simply strengthening the community as a whole. Shared experiences and words of caution fill the cyber-aether giving others the benefit of those experiences who have not had the opportunity to explore it for themselves. Skill development and professional training can be quite expensive, but with skilled professionals taking time to help teach and enrich the community through free tutorials and the like, they have made the world of design a friendlier more approachable landscape that will help so many flourish and grow!

To Sum Up

In short, or perhaps I should say in medium, the design blog is more than a valuable tool, it’s an awesomely multi-functional, educational, inspirational, muppetational online extravaganza of usability! Sorry, I got all excited for a second, but that is easy to do over this topic. In fact, we have below a collection of ten design blogs we feel use this tool so effectively, it’s an artform. That could explain the overwhelming excitement I felt…

Ten Top Design Blogs…in our humble opinions

Here they are in no particular order, whatsoever. Please note that we do understand that there are blogs like Smashing Magazine that are valuable and amazing sites. However, chances are you already know about those, as you will undoubtedly know about a couple of these. But we also wanted to feature some sites that may have gotten in under your radar.

The Fuel Brand Network

How could we not include this entire network of amazing and finely focused sites on the list? Some of you might answer, “Because not all of the sites are specifically about design.”. To you we say, don’t be so literal. We know they may not all be focused specifically on design but the entire network is about feeding creativity and fueling different aspects that all feed into design. Now, we have been a fan of Fuel Your Creativity for a while. Alone it is a wonderful source of inspiration and resources for designers. Lately the Fuel Brand Group has been growing by leaps and bounds, providing niche blogs geared toward pretty much anything creatives could want.

• Fuel Your Creativity
• Fuel Your Apps
• Fuel Your Coding
• Fuel Your Writing
• Fuel Your Photography
• Fuel Your Branding - Launching July 15th
• Also coming soon is Fuel Your Illustration and Fuel Your Interface.

The Design O’Blog

The two main things that make The Design O’Blog stand out for us are the Question of the Week and the Quick Tips. The Question of the Week is a post wherein Niki gets the community talking by posting a question for discussion on a particular topic, which are always worthwhile to check out. Quick Tips are posts that Niki uses to teach you quick and easy solutions in a fraction of the time most screencasts take. Community involvement is at the heart of keeping any group active, and Niki certainly takes and keeps the conversation going to new places and heights with her wonderful weekly contributions.

PSD Fan

PSD Fan is a great Photoshop blog whose offerings range from high quality tutorials to fanstastic freebies for, what else, Photoshop. Photoshop, the feature of a future installment of Designer’s Tools, is hugely popular and there are a number of sites dedicated to this designer delight, but PSD Fan, is by far, one of our favorites. The tutorials are always top notch and a valuable contribution to the community. Now would also be a good time to mention that he also does some really quality interviewing over there now and again, such as his interview with our own Angie Bowen of Arbent Creative Designs.

Vandelay Design

Vandelay Design is another Arbenting favorite, which offers a wide array of inspirational posts for designers that always leave us in an amazingly creative headspace. Inspiring others to feed the creative process is no small feat, and Vandelay always has a way to do it with class and style. Beyond inspiration, the site has a well rounded collection of marvelous, in-depth resource lists and web design how-tos. Author Steven Snell has a very personable and approachable presence, which always makes interacting with him a pleasure.

The Design Cubicle

The Design Cubicle,which is run by Brian Hoff, is a fantastic site filled with quality content ranging across a number of areas of the design spectrum. And as far as personality goes, this site has it in spades. As we mentioned in the intro, personality can be key to the success of your blog, so when we discussed blogs that are run by folks with a great personality which shines through in the site, the Design Cubicle was the first to come to Angie’s mind. Brian really makes his blog stand out with the personal way he interacts with his readers, so he was a must have for this list.

Think Design

Think Design is a fabulous blog to subscribe to if you are looking for design freebies or resources of any kind. Giving back to the online community in the form of freebies may draw criticism from some, but here at Arbenting we are fans of the freeb! Though if you have followed us for any amount of time at all, you have probably already realized that. So it is no wonder that we take a fancy to the few that dedicate their sites to this mission. Think Design, is one of our favorites of these ranks. Textures, vectors, brushes, and themes, whatever you need, chances are, they probably have it.

Creative Fluff

Creative Fluff is written by an eclectic group of designers from all walks of life. This makes the site very broad, offering up a little something for everyone. For this reason, and others, Creative Fluff has a go-to ranking in our reader, and we do daily checks for new installments to their content stream. With so many contributors coming together to offer multiple perspectives on the design field, they are an intense driving force that makes the site a blog to be reckoned with. If they are not already in your reader, you may want to make that adjustment today.

Little Box of Ideas

Little Box of Ideas is a wonderful blog that utilizes this tool to deliver some extremely original, high quality freebies to the online design collective. Though do not think for a second that they stop there, because they most certainly do not. The site also hits two other grand slams in the arenas of inspiration, by delivering some truly awesome inspirational posts, and when it comes to interviews, never falling short always providing insightful and fun designer discussions.

My Ink Blog

My Ink Blog offers pages of quality tutorials, which alone makes it worth subscribing to, however, one of the things we love so much about this site is that it regularly has great articles to offer on design. Don’t get us wrong, there are lots of great articles out there in the blogosphere, but there are only a humble few that frequently delve as deeply into the discussions of their topics as Andrew will often do. For that, we love seeing new items pop up in our reader from MIB.

Graphic Identity

Graphic Identity is one of those great sites that cover such a wide variety of design topics it would be hard to list them all here. It would also be hard to make a list of ten top design blogs and not include this gem of a site among them. Make no mistakes about it coming in last on the list, friends, this blog is a find for anyone interested in the art of design blogging. Given the length of this post we should be calling it quits, but we could easily fill another few paragraphs full of praise for this sensational site alone. We will simply say this is a true design blog for design bloggers.

That’s all folks

Seriously, that’s it. What more do you want us to say? Now it’s your turn. What are your must reads that you would have added to the list?

Article - 10 Free Apps to Fuel your Productivity - As a freelancer, good productivity is a really big deal to me. I’m constantly on the lookout for apps that will add a little fuel to my productivity fire. This is the list of 10 productivity boosting apps that I simply could not live without.

Tutorial - How to Create Your Own Photoshop Brushes - A lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to create your own photoshop brushes. If you find yourself drawing the same elements over and over you can save a lot of time by creating a brush of that particular element.

Tutorial - Introduction to the Twirl Tool - After the success of our last freebie, we thought we would teach folks the simple process for making their own swirl vectors. So we decided to move forward with a basic introduction to the Twirl Tool, which makes those grunge swirls possible.

Article - The Design Community Bids Farewell to Design Float? - The site has been riddled with spam for the past few months and has been hacked numerous times. The latest hack infected the site with malware posing a threat to anyone who visits. The Design Float website has been infected for around 3 weeks now with no word from the owner about when or if it will be fixed.

Article - 10 Steps for Turning Gmail into a Productivity Center - Gmail is by far the best mail client available, online or off, and it’s level of customization just makes it that much better. In this guide, I’ll be showing you how to do some things that will allow you to turn Gmail into the ultimate productivity tool.

How AJAX Works: 10 Practical Uses For AJAX - AJAX has gotten more and more popular over the years, and has allowed web applications to act more and more like desktop applications. AJAX can provide a lot of additional functionality that could not be accomplished any other way.

Hit a Plateau? 4 Ways to Improve Your Skills - Today I want to look at plateaus in terms of ability, and four tried and tested methods to help you get through them. The journey of mastery is an on-going process, but there are lots of ways to improve our talents along the way.

16 Free Phenomenal Plugins That Will Enhance Your Comment Area and Start More Conversations - The comment area on a blog is a very important place on a blog, and I feel like many bloggers under-utilize it. Sometimes, to get a good conversation started on a blog, there’s more to be added than just a comments form and the threaded enhancement.

15 Effective Tips and Tricks from the Masters of CSS - Tips and tricks from coders well-known for their mastery of CSS and all that goes along with it. Read on for their tips and tricks with regards to everything from avoiding hacks to understanding the box model.

Why Designers Should Learn How to Code - The hard truth is that the buck of development should stop with designers. For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, I’d like to share with you some reasons why designers should learn how to code.

20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Developer Easier - Developing a well-rounded aesthetically pleasing website can be a daunting task even for the most seasoned web developer. You must identify current trends and standards and determine ways to incorporate them into your designs. Luckily, there are many free tools which are available that can help you speed up your efforts and work in a more efficient manner. Below are 20 tools which are sure to benefit all developers.

Building Your Portfolio With Zero Clients & No Spec Work - So how do you build your portfolio with zero clients and zero spec work? In this article I hope to show you some clear cut, easy methods to building an awesome portfolio that will attract your perfect clients and also showcase your best work — all without doing spec work and without having any clients.

30 More Essential PDF Documents every Designer Should Download - The original was the most popular article I have ever posted on this blog receiving well over 500,000 unique views – fueled by twitter referrals and stumble upon. I believe that this collection is even better than the first so please enjoy these links from some of the web’s most well respected authors.

CSS Beginners Do’s and Dont’s Part 2 - In part one, I went over general tips and reminders, in this article I would like to go over more of the technical aspects of CSS.

Taking typography seriously - Whether you’re a print designer or web designer or both - please never overlook the importance of typography. Imagery, colour, composition, copy, layout, usability, accessibility and cross-browser compatibility are all essential building blocks of the design process but typography should never by any means be considered the quiet kid in the corner, it should never be overlooked.

16 Free Hand Dyed Paper Textures - I have a pretty epic set of textures for you guys today. I spent a lot of time, dirtied a lot of dishes, and went through about 40 tea bags for these hand-dyed paper textures.

Exclusive Freebie: Vectorlab Vector Pack - This sample comes after a lot of new additions to the VectorLab site (some really awesome engravings, BTW), as well as a new blog.

Days Typeface - Free for Download - Ideal for Logo Designs - Days is another neat and free typeface, again found on Behance, a real treasure trove of delights. This is so clean, modern and stylish. Love the curves, the rounded edges, the compact ’squared’ feel. I can see this being perfect for certain styles of logo designs.

Free Textures - 24 High-Res Grunge Texture Pics - I’ve put together this pack of 24 super-high-resolution Grunge Texture Pictures. They were fun to shoot, despite the Texas heat

Watercolor Free Icon Pack - Each icon is in .png format sized at 256×256px with transparent backgrounds. The 36 different icons have varying opaquness that allow the background and texture seep through the icons like watercolor on canvas. This is a freebie you can’t pass up!

Free Vector Wings - Vector wing illustration from Golden Black by Pale Horse. HQ detailed hand-drawn wings in black and white variations.

An Interview with Alice Savoie - Alice Savoie started out with a foundation course in Applied Arts and then studied graphic design and typography for four years in Paris. She then set sail for the UK to follow the MA in Typeface Design at Reading University. Upon graduating in 2007 she relocated to London to work as a graphic designer. In March 2008 Alice joined Monotype Imaging as a full-time type designer.

Interview - Elena Savitskaya - I believe many of us have seen before the beautiful works of Elena Savitskaya over Flickr, blogs, design magazines and etc. Today we are very proud to have an interview with Elena here. Check out how this Marketing Manager turned into a Professional Graphic Designer!

Interview with Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks - Chris Coyier, the man behind css-tricks.com, are my sites up and script & style, is a well known web developer. He lives in Portland and as he said himself; soon to be Chicago. With his creativity, Chris has given us tons of great tutorials and creates beautiful websites. We were very honored to be able to interview him.

Interview with Nathan Jurevicius, Touch My Pixel and Renmotion - Best known for creating the quirky world of Scarygirl, Nathan Jurevicius is one of the industry’s hardest working illustrators. Not only is he the creative force behind a swag of collectible figures, various mini comics, solo exhibitions in both Australia and overseas, a graphic novel (due to be released October ‘09) and a proposed feature film.

Meet Master Illustrator And Prolific Doodler Von Glitschka -
- There are so many illustrators out there, but what sets Von apart is his incredibly delightful sense of humor, his boundless energy, his ability to connect with people and his generosity in sharing his knowledge.

Building a Forum From Scratch with Ruby on Rails - Today, we will be building a simple forum using Ruby on Rails, and we will be working up from the basics covering things like authentication and more advanced database techniques.

WordPress hack: Adding a bio block to a post - This article will tell you how to hack your own bio box into WordPress without using a single plugin! A great way to start developing in WordPress.

Two simple ways to create text embossing effect - Embossing is very popular trend in web design (the actual term for this effect is “inset”, although many people call it embossing). In the same time it is very simple to create. This short tutorial will show you how to create this effect usng pure CSS and using Artweaver.

Design a Cool Outlaw Flyer with InDesign Tutorial - InDesign is a beast of a program to get in to; mostly because it’s so complex. This tutorial should scratch the surface a little bit of what it’s capable of, and introduce you to many of the fun tools.

How to Create a Dark and Sleek Web Design from Photoshop - In this web development tutorial, you will learn, step-by-step, how to create a beautiful dark and sleek web layout using standards-based HTML and CSS. Along the way, you will witness how to use CSS Sprites and CSS Text Image Replacement.

Post Pic
Creating user-defined RSS feeds in WordPress - RSS feeds are very useful, and indeed, very popular. WordPress creates RSS feeds by default, which is good in 99% of times. But how to create your own, custom RSS Feed? Just read this post to find out!

Announcing the Launch of 5 Niche Galleries - Vandelay Design announces the launch of five new Niche Galleries. Minimal Exhibit, CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Blog Design Heroes, and TypeInspire.

Fuel Your Apps - The newest Fuel Brand Network launch, Fuel your Apps will bring you all of the coolest news on the hottest apps. Not to mention how-tos on how to create them, reviews of the latest crazes, and a look inside the minds of the people who do them the best.

Texture Lovers - Texture lovers is a site that only collects free to use textures that can be used for commercial and personal use without permission. You’ll also find texture related inspiration and tutorials.

WordPress Guerrilla - As a sister-site to the ever growing Guerrilla Freelancing website, WP Guerrilla discusses all things wordpress related. Tips, tricks, resources, inspiration, ect.

CG Tuts+ - We’ll be publishing a combination of step-by-step written tutorials and screencasts, with preview images and videos so you can see the final result before you invest time in it. At Cgtuts+ we’ll be pioneering the concept of multi-day tutorials, allowing us to produce detailed and in-depth end results without over-complicating the process.

Inspiring Wallpapers for Designers

A beautiful and inspiring desktop is a must for designers. And your wallpaper plays a huge role in the aesthetics of your desktop so it’s not an element to be chosen lightly. A great wallpaper is beautiful, inspirational, and stays out of your way when and where you need it to. That is why we have featured them here today, to show you what we believe that means.

Click on any of the images below to download the wallpaper.

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Have something you would like to see showcased next week? Send it to us!

So this series has wound its way down to its final installment, bringing our look at both sides of the freelancing coin to an end. We are very pleased with the scope of the series, having grown into a six part post from its very humble beginnings. We hope that this in depth look at the freelancer’s life was both entertaining and a useful reminder as to why we do what we do. Most of us may not need the reminder, simply living the day to day life of a freelancer is reminder enough as we experience the benefits of choosing this path on a daily basis. But here is our final take on the topic at hand, as we present Freelancing Benefits Episode III : Revenge of the Myth!

The Bene’s Continue

It’s no question that working for yourself can have it’s downs, but the fact of the matter is, the ups far outweigh them. In the first two installments in the series, we talked about

• #1 - Bye Bye, Tie!
• #2 - Shotcaller!
• #3 - Workin’ 9 to, oh 9:30!
• #4 - The Learning Curve!
• #5 - The Lone Wolf Walks, Um…Alone!
• #6 - Attack of the Clones!

This time around we have three new topics to toss out there for thoughtful discussion, well discussion at least, can’t promise it’ll be thoughtful. They are

• A World Without Borders
• Drama, Interrupted…
• Revenge of the Myth

So we hope you will follow us as this look at why we freelance finishes up…

A World Without Borders

Jessie F. commented on Part Deux of the benefits series and gave us the idea for this first topic we wanted to discuss, and that is the freedom that freelancing provides us, especially in the digital age we are working in, to work in a world without borders. We have the ability to commute via the web to a virtual office environ with nearly anyone from across the globe. In fact, in most cases, the only limits we face are bandwidth limits, and those usually don’t even come into play here.

The world we live in has constantly been made smaller by technology, bringing everyone closer together in a sense, and as freelancers we ride this technological wave to the forefront of a worldwide business market looking for our talents and skillsets. From the comfort of our fuzzy slippers and favorite bathrobes, we can meet with clients and consult with colleagues in a virtual global landscape that never requires we venture beyond our front doors. Granting us opportunities that we may not have been able to pursue, were we tied down to a company. Given corporate restrictions that could be in place, for financial or whatever reasons, you may have had to pass on some of the work you could potentially get as a freelancer.

Not to mention, this virtual work environment means that you will be judged on your work and your skills, not on your fuzzy slippers and favorite bathrobe. It’s not your fault that the business heads you are dealing with from overseas do not understand your creative comfort requirements that are met by said slippers and robe, but now they never need to. No need for your required uniform to get lost in the translation of this borderless world, you can take it with you wherever you ‘go’. It really is an amazing concept, that I think is catching on. In fact, I’ve heard it’s such a popular theory that doctors are thinking of getting in on this whole ‘no borders thing’. Though they really are doing it the hard way. Wi-fi, docs, come on. You all are supposed to be the learned ones.

Drama, Interrupted…

So did you hear what Jasmine did to Tara after Maggie told her about what Tara said about Jasmine’s boyfriend’s cousin last week after work? Chances are, if you are a freelancer, you haven’t! And isn’t a wonderful feeling to no longer have to be burdened by and have to bare all the drama that comes from working in an office? Working in a powder keg with multiple personality types (not to mention, personality disorders), exposes you to, and can make you the unwilling participant in the melodramatic misadventures of your co-workers.

It generally does not matter if you are the most gentle and reserved person in the office, you are eventually, through some sort of relationship you have developed with someone else there, going to become enveloped in someone else’s drama. Their lives or inner office antics or grudges will spill over into your office space regardless of your desire to have it laid in your lap. The freelancer can have a drama free work environment unless they so choose to invite the drama into their work space…which, why would you do that?

Even if gossip is kind of your thing, and you enjoy the teeniest tidbit of it to help you make your way through the day in the office, you should know that it usually will not end there. The gossip glide down into the dungeon of drama is an almost inevitable journey that you will voluntarily or involuntarily suffer once you take that first seemingly harmless step. Freelancers tread a bit safer ground. Ground that comes without eggshells to walk on when around certain co-workers, which if you’re vegan like us here at Arbenting, you always appreciate an egg free walkway. So if you prefer a little less uninvited drama in your life, and you could really care less what Tara said to Maggie about Jasmine’s boyfriend’s cousin and what Jasmine did to Tara as a result, then the freelancing path may be the one you want to walk.

Revenge of the Myth

The myths that surround the freelancer’s life are one of the best things about the gig, and the last benefit that we shall mention. People have such a warped perception of what all being a freelancer truly entails. They think we never work. That we sit at home and watch our stories all day while billing clients massive amounts of money for minutes worth of work. And on and on they go. But the reason the myths are so great, is because so many of them are true, and we get to rub that in the faces of the 9 to 5 working stiffs that envy us so much!

Now while not all of the myths going around about freelancers are true, enough of them are to make this enviable job such a pleasure, that the long hours we tend to put in to it are more than worth it, they are enjoyable. We do work hard, but the fact that we get to do so on our own terms and timetables makes freelancing the opportunity of a lifetime. The worries and unnecessary stresses bred from the office environ are left far behind, and the work space we inhabit is one of our own creating, to feed us energetically however we desire and design. And what could be better than living the dream, the myth made real, every single day… or not, it really is your choice if you are a freelancer?

It was in that spirit that this series was born, and we felt that the final discussion in it should be a celebration of that spirit itself. The freedom and overall satisfaction found within this job are at times, indescribable (though we hope that we made a fairly decent attempt to do just that through these posts), and so many people miss out on what an awesome career path this freelancing gig can prove to be. Many people doubt that it is even a legitimate career choice at all, so it is with great pride that we get to prove them wrong. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then this dish surely is one best to be shoved in the faces of the naysayers like an I told you so pie!

That’s a wrap

And that’s all we have to say about that…but that doesn’t mean that you can’t say more about it in the comments. Feel free to tell us what we missed, or where we missed out below, and as always, thanks stopping by.

The Complete Series

• What Does True Freelancing Cost? Pt. 1
• What Does True Freelancing Cost? Pt. 2
• Freelancing Costs Pt. 3 – Return of the Red-Eye!
• The True Benefits of Freelancing Pt.1
• The True Benefits of Freelancing Pt. Deux!