Due to its popularity in current webdesign I put together a collection of 31 impressive ‘hand drawn’ fonts.

Whilst the all-time favorite Helvetica font provides a clean and sharp look, ‘hand drawn’ fonts give your website a more personal and sometimes more interesting touch. They can be used for various elements in web as well as print design.

Most of the fonts are available under a Creative Commons License. But please make sure to check the details before using the fonts for commercial projects.

Sketch Block

Mia’s Scribblings

Rock Show Whiplash

Peixe Frito

3Dumb & 2Dumb

Bearpaw

FFF Tusj

Against Myself

The Quiet Scream

WC Roughtrad Bold

Pointy

Pee Pants Script

Karabine

Sketch Rockwell

Waste of Time

Tire Shop

scrubble

Estrya’s Handwriting

Fail

HandVetica

Grutch Shaded

Clementine Sketch

Fh Scribble

My Turtle

Jump Start

MyCoy – Hello Lori

Oh Ashy

Love Ya Like A Sister

Aguzlo

Barnes ERC

JamaiStevie

These days every blog has something to share or bookmark and the best way to get attention is with remarkable icons. But you don’t have to spend a lot of money to find the right icons – the best creations are free!

Here is a collection of my favorite social bookmarking icons.

Set of Social Icons

Set of Social Icons No. 2

Hand-drawn Social Media Icons

3D Social Bookmarking Icons

Web 2.0 Origami

Cheers: a set of 12 “social” glasses

Handycons + Handycons 2: hand drawn social media icon sets

Rivet Social: 14 riveted brushed steel icons

Social Media Icons Pack

Function: Unique Set of Social Media Icons

Heart: A free social icon set

Socialize Icons

Social Icons Made of Wood

Social Media Icons Pack

19 Social Icons by webtoolkit4.me

Leaves Fall: A Social Icon Set For Bloggers

6 Free New Social Icons – Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon…

Social Icons hand drawned

Social Bookmark Iconset Part 1 and 2

30 Social Icons

34 Gradient Social Media Buttons

Circle Social Bookmark Icons

Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set For Bloggers

More and more people like and user Twitter and therefore many siteowners want to place a follow-link on their website. But as simple text links are too uninteresting, we have collected the best icons and graphics on the internet. 

Twitter icon by fast icon

Twitter icon set by smashing magazine

Twitter social icon by design reviver

31 twitter icons by vincentabry

A little bird told me by mattknow

Twitter icons by flockey

Twitter icon by phiredesign

Cute twitter bird icon by wefunction

Free twitter graphics by randa clay design

Twitter birdy icon by Loondesign

Twitter icons by icontexto

It’s twitter time! by productivedreams

Twitter icons with attitude by monkeyworks

Pratika twitter icon by smashing magazine

(MAX)Icone blog by webfruits

Web 2Origami by Iampaddy

High resolution twitter bird icons by the design superhero

Happy twitter birds by webdesign.fm

Cute tweeters icon set by smashing magazine

Glossy twitter icons by AODdesign

Sticky twitter icons by Kuerbisfeld

The leaves fall by smashing magazine

For all who want to make their own one:

Create a twitter style bird mascot by vectortuts

Adobe Illustrator has become one of the leading products for vector design, especially icon design. But when you start to create your first icon, you have to keep one thing in mind – bitmap or vector? (As the guys of firewheeldesign point out, vector icons are less work than those made with Photoshop. On the other hand, scaled vector graphics don’t look very nice in comparison to icons created with Photoshop) All in all it’s a decison between saving time and getting the best possible quality.

To understand the basics of icon design, read the following articles:

7 Principles of Effective Icon Design by PSDTUTS

10 Mistakes in Icon Design by Turbomilk

Now that you are a bit familar with Icon design – try these tutorials:

Vectortuts.com

Create a Detailed Camera with Photo Icon

Create a Vector Film Slate Icon

Make a Handy 3D Vector Calendar Icon

How to Create a Vector Light Bulb Icon with Inkscape

How to Turn Glasses into a Great Geek Icon

Illustrate a Fun Magnify Zoom Icon

SpoonGraphics

Create a Vector RSS Icon with Illustrator

Translucent IM Style Illustrator Icon Tutorial

How to Create a Vector iMac Graphic in Illustrator

N.Design Studio

iTune icon

Glassy Button

Other:

Complicate Orb Icon by Hatching Egg Story

Designing a Sleek Pencil Icon by Design Blurb

Creating A Folder Icon by MagnusFx

Create an envelpe icon with a satin feel by aiVault

Design Float Circle Icon by Qbrushes

Sponsored By: Ludgermany individual bathrooms by tile painting

You waste your server resources for web applications? Why don’t accept the help of Google. Just a few days ago Google launched its Google App Engine. Being still in beta it allows you to upload your web application on the Google network and use their computational power. With a free account you are already able to use 500MB space, a CPU usage of 200,000,000 megacycles and a maximum of 10GB bandwidth per day. Also you get several other features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Great – Where do I have to sign in?

Google App Engine is still in beta. There were 10,000 beta accounts available but after ca. 3 hours they were all gone. Google already announced that more accounts will follow in the near future. So don’t hesitate to subscribe to the waitlist.

At first what does Ajax mean?

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. Ajax is asynchronous, in so far as extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality and usability. Ajax function calls are usually made in Javascript using the XMLHttpRequest object. The asynchronous content doesn’t need to be formatted in XML.

Scripts for your Website

As quite every modern website makes use of at least a bit of Ajax you may want to have a few of those cool effects for your page. So I collected the best scripts for you. All of them are free to use and easy to install.

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.

Thickbox 3.1 – ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal.

Glider – This script makes it easy to create a sliding carousel component like the one seen at www.panic.com/coda.

TableOrganize – This script basically allows you to re-organize the rows or columns and browse the table using the up/down arrows.

Clickheat – ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones.

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

AjaxIM – ajax im (”asynchronous javascript and xml instant messenger”) is a browser-based instant messaging client. It uses AJAX to create a near real-time IM environment that can be used in conjunction with community, intranet, and social websites.

Relay – An Ajax directory manager that works and looks like the familiar one of windows and mac systems.

SWFUpload – is a small JavaScript/Flash library to get the best of both worlds. It features the great upload capabilities of Flash and the accessibility and ease of HTML/CSS.

NicEdit -NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, Inline Content Editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser.

Vuzit – Vuzit is a web based document viewer you can embed in any web page. It’s fast and it’s free!

flot – Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming.

Control.Tabs – creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute.

IE7 – is a JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Resources for more scripts

Scripteka an extensive library of Prototype and Script.aculo.us based extensions/plugins.

At AjaxDaddy you can see Ajax examples, javascript scripts and web 2.0 demos in action.

MiniAjax, a showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts.

And have a look at more than 1000 Ajax examples at AjaxRain.com

Do you want a special RSS icon for your website? Actually most blogs and newssites have RSS feeds. But many have just a standard button. You might want to show that your are more creative then they are. Use one of these free and fresh RSS icons so that you are in contrast of the masses.

RSS icon pack vol.2

RSS feed by Aaron Ovadia

MycirclesRSS

RSS icon by carlnewton

Feedicons²

Acid RSS by cavin

RSS Owl by balpert

RSS icon by datamouse

RSS icon set from smashingmagazine

3D RSS feeds icon

Circle feeds icons

Free RSS feed icons

Alternative RSS icon by mouserunner

RSS reader icon by twinware

NewsFire by barrymieny

Christmas RSS icons

RSS icons from simdes

Vektor RSS buttons

And for everyone how searches for a standard RSS icon:

Feedicons

Talking from web2.0, you think of fade effects, live form validation and other nice and often practical effects. But how are these things realized? Is it something that only professional programmer can assemble?

The only thing that would be helpful is a general understanding of Javascript and HTML. Many of the effects you may have in mind are realized by using open-source libraries or other freely available code snippets. You just have to integrate a few Javascripts and call a few functions to have a beautiful web2.0-ish effect for your website.

In my view the best library is script.aculo.us in connection with prototype.js. They are easy to understand, have a large documentation and a good community. Other libraries worth mentioning are jQuery, Dojo, MochiKit, mootools and YUI. After installing the libraries, it’s so easy to create. Make a few Ajax calls, fall back on entire functions, get some groove effects – and your code is much lighter than before! So why not try to use one of these libraries, after a bit practice you will thank yourself for taking this step.

But even if a library can’t provide you the effect you need, there always is a better way than writing everything on your own. Use some ready-made code snippets. You find them everywhere on the Internet. Snippets for some common problems are Lightbox and ThickBox, which make it possible to overlay an image or other content on the current page. Sometimes the snippets make use of a specific Javascript library. But be careful that not all libraries work well together.

To sum up, I can say that both JS libraries and code-snippets will save you a lot of time (and maybe money). So have a look at them and don’t let the complexity awe you.

Yesterday WordPress 2.5 has been released with a couple of new features. Those who want to upgrade WordPress now, can do it here.

The popular blogging platform needed six months for this major upgrade. But what changes with the new version? The most important update regards the all-new dashboard. It isn’t a static site anymore but consists of several customizable widgets and only provides you with the most important links. Therefore it is very easy to fit the dashboard according to your needs.

The developers of Wordpress spend this version a completely new and fresh color scheme, changed the menu order and recoded the media gallery. Now it is possible to easily upload and manage images as well as videos and other files. Further remarkable new features are editing protection for multi-admin blogs and an built-in plugin update function. The whole list of changes can be read at the WordPress Blog. All in all WordPress 2.5 is a recommendable update, I am sure everyone will love.

Sponsored By: Ludgermany individual bathrooms by tile painting

Cool Wallpaper for your Mac, made by Ben Adamson. Available in 1024×640 and 1920×1200.

Conquer the Universe Background. A galaxy wallpaper with Apple logo to honor the great birth of Leopard. Offered in 1920×1200, with and without the Apple logo.

Stylish Simpsons Wallpaper with a hungry Homer and a sweet Apple.

Free and Customizable Leopard Wallpapers. The wallpapers currently come in the following dimensions: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960 and 1600×1200. Each of them suits a different mood.

Leopard (Red) and Leopard Server (Blue) Aurora Wallpaper. Both come in 1024×640 and 2560×1600.

30 Apple related wallpapers (Apple logo, MacOS, iPod) that are definitely worth a look.

Retro Apple logo but with a glassy modern look. The Wallpaper comes in 3 big sizes (1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200, 2560 x 1600) from which you can create all other common resolutions.

Sponsored By: Ludgermany individual bathrooms by tile painting