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How to find DNS IP address from Your PC

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:35:00 +0000

DNS is key to many network services. Internet browsing, mail server, web server etc all depends upon DNS server. Most ISP (Internet service provider) have their own caching dns server to reduce network load. But how do you find out DNS server IP address? How do you find out current DNS server IP address? Under Linux, FreeBSD and all UNIX like oses you have file called /etc/resolv.conf file. It is often know as resolver configuration file. If you are using MS-Windows version Vista / 7 / NT / 2000 / XP /98 etc then see below for how to find out DNS server address under MS-Windows operating systems.

Linux / UNIX / Apple OS X Find Out Dns Server Addresses

The resolver is a set of routines in the C library that provide access to the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). The resolver configuration file contains information that is read by the resolver routines the first time they are invoked by a process.

Commend to find out your dns servers ip address under Linux/BSD/Unixish system

To see your DNS server address type following command as shell prompt:
$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
OR
$ less /etc/resolv.conf

nameserver 203.54.1.20
nameserver 203.54.1.21

Where,

nameserver 203.54.1.20 : It is Name server IP address (in dot notation) of a name server that the resolver should query. All your application will use this IP address for DNS purpose.

Find Out DNS Server IP Address Under MS-Windows Version 7/Vista/XP/NT/2003

Click on Start button > Run > and Type command cmd > Press [enter] key

At DOS prompt type the command:
C:\>ipconfig /all
You should DNS server IP address, and other information related to Windows networking:

Fig.01: Windows Operating Systems Find DNS Server Addresses

(click to enlarge)
OR

You can Click on Start button > Settings > Network connections
Double click on Local Area Connection
Click on Properties button
Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
Click on Properties button and Look for Preferred DNS Server:

Fig.02: Windows XP TCP/IP Properties - DNS Settings And IP Address

You Can Use The Public DNS Servers

You can use the following Google public DNS (IP Addresses) servers for XBOX 360 / Sony PS3 & PS2 / Nintendo Wii game consoles or any other purpose:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

They are free to all, pretty fast too and works with all sort of computers and game consoles.

Ambigram Designs Collection You will never seen before this

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:57:00 +0000

There are many types of ambigrams such as rotational ambigrams, reflective types, 3-dimensional, etc. but the most basic and popular ones are the flipscript or rotational ambigram in which word or words when flipped both horizontal or vertical way, still spells the same word as before. Today, ambigrams are used in graphic design, commercial logos, book covers, tattoo artworks and music albums. These typographical artworks are used by graphic designers because of their symmetry and the optical illusions it present. Ambigrams became much more popular when it was prominently featured in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, Angels & Demons. With patience and creativity, you can turn any word into an ambigram.

Below are my collection of 40 really cool and creatively designed ambigrams. Without further ado, let start twisting our neck and try to view them in upside down :)

“Illuminati” Edited from the original version by John Langdon.

“The Stone Rose” via mirving123

“Steampunk” Rotational ambigram version 2 by NastyBasty

“Labyrinth” Created for the Nagfa Ambigams Challenge. By Krzychu

“Marley” via mirving123

“One Blood One Love” or "One Love One Blood" the other way. By revcruz

“Azathoth” By NastyBasty

“Love/Hate” via nichck

“Shark Attack” By wowtattoos

“Baltimore” Via mirving123

“Right/Wrong” Amibigram with some graffiti element. By NastyBasty

“Lawrence” Created by revcruz for The 50 Ambigram Project.

“Samantha/Marcianne” Created to be inked as a tattoo by wowtattoos.

“Dirty/Clean”Via npgraphicdesign

“Harry Potter” An entry for the Flickr Ambigram Challenge by NastyBasty

“Charlie Chang” 180° rotational ambigram of the name CHARLIE CHANG by Burn

“Shub-Niggurath” via unterart

“Phat Beats” By Burn

“Pepsi” via mirving123

“KRANE” Created for Crane DPC by PAC1972.

“Anj” Another ambigram created by revcruz for The 50 Ambigram Project.

“Child’s Play” via Imriaylde

“Manila” via ambigram.com

“City of Brotherly Love” Created by John Langdon.

“San Francisco” via ambigram.com

“Woodstock” Another ‘quick & dirty’ lunchtime ambigram via unterart

“Cafe” via unterart

“Nyarlathotep” via unterart

“1984″ via unterart

“Sins” Created by only-adrian

“Ambigram” Created by arpad

“Air” Robert Langdons ambigram Air, from the book Angels and Deamons

“Reverse engineering” By Scott Kim

“A love of love” Created by Johan Skylling.

“Peta” Rotationally symmetrical ambigram of Peta’s name.

“Paris” via npgraphicdesign

“Ektopia” Papper & Penna’s Ekoptia Rotational Ambigram

“Chopin” Created by Daniel Dostal

Brands we are familiar with..

“Sun Microsystem”

“Hyundai Motor”

This is "Origami Paper Art"

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:49:00 +0000

Origami from ori meaning "folding", and kami meaning "paper") is the traditional Japanese folk art of paper folding, which started in the 17th century AD and was popularized in the mid-1900s. It has since then evolved into a modern art form. The goal of this art is to transform a flat sheet of material into a finished sculpture through folding and sculpting techniques, and as such the use of cuts or glue are not considered to be origami.

The number of basic origami folds is small, but they can be combined in a variety of ways to make intricate designs. The most well known origami model is probably the Japanese paper crane. In general, these designs begin with a square sheet of paper whose sides may be different colors or prints. Traditional Japanese origami, which has been practiced since the Edo era (1603–1867), has often been less strict about these conventions, sometimes cutting the paper or using nonsquare shapes to start with.

Origami originates from Japan, and in Japanese, Ori means paper, and kami(gami) means folding. There are various types of Origami, respectively action, modular, wet-folding and pureland. Today, we are going to show you some of the best examples of these paper made wonders.

Here’s a showcase of 70 beautiful and creative origami created by fans all over the world. Full list after jump.

Grulla. Designed by Roman Diaz and Daniel Naranjo. Folded from 37*37cm MC treated tissue. (via Kekremsi)

Origami Jedi. Folded by Phillip West from a single uncut square. Modified from Satoshi Kamiya’s Wizard. (via PhillipWest)

Origami Tarantula. A really impressive model designed by Robert Lang, folded from a square of a tissue-foil paper. (via Rodrigo Zen)

Divine Dragon. Masterpieces of origami dragons, famous Bahamut – Divine Dragon by Satoshi Kamiya. Folded by Brian Chan. (via Chosetec)

Yoda Origami. Designed by Fumiaki Kawahata. Folded by Phillip West from Lokta sandpaper paper back coated to tissue paper. (via PhillipWest)

Ancient Dragon. Designed by Satoshi Kamiya. Wet folded from mulberry tissue 136×136cm. (via Mabona Origami)

Life Size Onitsuka Tiger. Created for Asics lounge in Berlin. This huge origami sculpture dimensions are: 270×110x60cm. (via Mabona Origami)

Praying Mantis (female). Designed and folded by Sipho Mabona. Wet folded form one uncut square of shikibu kizukishki kozo (handmade) colored with calligraphic ink. (via Mabona Origami)

Gryphon. Interesting and complex example of gryphon origami. Folded from two types of paper, which makes this a very furnace origami. (via Guspath)

Werewolf. Another great example of origami by Guspath. Folded from 50cm square golden foil paper. (via Guspath)

Little Bird. Sweet yellow bird. Designed by Kamiya Satoshi, folded by Sin cynic. (via Sin cynic)

Dedalus. Red statue of Daedalus. Designed and folded by Origamirizzo. (via Origamirizzo)

Mammoth. This model was folded from diagrams. Designed by Satoshi Kamiya. (via Finwych)

Ringed Tailed Lemur. Folded from MC treated black tissue. Designed and folded by Origami Roman. (via Origami Roman)

Vampire Bat. Vampire bat by Dao Cuong Quyet. Folded from 60cm square paper. (via Baldorigami)

Phoenix. Phoenix origami at the exhibition in Toronto Airport. Created by Chow Hin Chung, folded by Alex Yue (via Sftrajan)

Fox . Folded from CP in tanteidan magazine 119. (via KingOri)

Chimpance. Designed and folded by Tanaka Masashi, folded from CP. (via Alexori)

Water Buffalo. Designed by Nguyen Hung Cuong, folded by Sin cynic. (via Sin cynic)

Minotaur. Designed by Satoshi Kamiya, folded by Imperfekshun from 64×64 cm tissue foil. (via Imperfekshun)

Whale. Designed by Satoshi Kamiya, folded by Eric Madrigal from brown 40×40 cm paper with acrylic paints. (via Eric Madrigal)

Hermit Crab Origami. Folded by Brian Chan from a square of laminated Japanese mulberry paper. (via Chosetec)

Owl. Designed by Katsuta Kyohei. Origami size is 50×50 cm. (via Vetal Origami)

Reindeer. Designed by Katsuta Kyohei. Folded from brown paper. (via Vetal Origami)

Pig Nose. WilChua was refolding his pig and got a great result. (via WilChua)

Dollar Toilet Bowl. Folded from one 1 dollar bill. (via Orudorumagi11)

Iron Man. Designed by Brian Chan. Folded from an uncut square.

Angel fish. Few small angel fish origami folded from colored paper. (via Claudia M&M)

Origami Yoda. Yoda stands at 11.5cm tall and was folded from an A3 square- approximately 30×30cm. Designed and folded by Antzpantz. (via Antzpantz)

Bull. From Mythological Creatures and the Chinese Zodiac in Origami. (via Himanshu)

Origami Roses. Gorgeous very realistic, colored origami flower bouquet. (via Amandakay82)

Elephant . Origami Elephant folded from brown paper. Designed by Himanshu. (via Himanshu)

Origami highback chairs. Some of the elements for your work place – origami highback chairs. (via Jonmatthew Photography)

Origami Car. Small cute origami car folded from colored paper. Designed and folded by Midoriissa. (via Midoriissa)

Rat. Small rat origami folded from newspaper. Designed and folded by Eric Joisel. (via JuLi-Design)

Seated Cat. Seated Cat folded from brown paper. Designed and folded by David Brill. (via Himanshu)

Origami horse. Horse origami from the Origami Now exhibition at the Peabody/Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. (via Philocrites)

Rose and leaf folded. Kawasaki Rose and leaf folded by J.V. Page of Origami Mitra. (via Bkwebb)

Origami Lion. Origami Lion from Satoshi Kamiya’s exhibition at the 40th British Origami Society Convention. Folded by Satoshi Kamiya. (via Gaharoni)

High-Heel Shoes. Red stylish high-heel shoes. Designed and folded by Anthony. (via Antzpantz)

Frog. Origami Frog designed by Michael LaFosse. Folded from from cotton rags by Himanshu. (via Himanshu)

Penguins. All origami penguins are folded from one A4 paper. (via bh3o81)

Bottlenose Dolphin. Origami Bottlenose Dolphin designed by Syahmir from uncut square paper. (via Syahmir)

Squirrel. Origami in the Origami Exhibition in Mumbai, India. Folded by Himanshu. (via Himanshu)

Anciente Dragon. Designed by Kamiya Satoshi, folded by Hugoakitaya from papel manteiga. (via Hugoakitaya)

Banana. Designed and folded by Andrew Hudson from yellow paper. (via Origami Weekly)

Honeycomb. Created by John McKeever, folded from a hexagon of elephant hide. (via Melisande)

Peacock. Created by Jun Maekawa, folded from 15cm tissue foil. (via Origami_8)

Jucumari. Origami folded from a square of Lamali/Banana paper. Folded by Origoku. (via Origoku)

Phoenix . Origami folded from a 16″ piece of tissue foil. (via J0nB0n)

Origami Swan . Designed by Toshikazu Kawasaki. Folded by Himanshu. (via Himanshu)

The Dance . Designed and folded by H.T.Quyet from 1 uncut right triangle – half of a square size 34×34 cm. (via ORI_Q)

Shumakov Origami Kitten . Kitten origami design is created by Katrin and Yuri Shumakov. Origami size approximately 5 cm. (via Himanshu)

Shin Tanaka. Origami designed and folded by Usagirondo. (via Usagirondo)

Shrimp . Designed and folded by Yagorigamania from 60 x 60 cm tissue paper. (via Yagorigamania)

Shachihoko . Designed by Fumiaki Kawahata, folded from tissue foil made with white glue. (via Kekremsi)

Phalacrognathus muelleri. Designed and folded by Sipho Mabona. Wet folded form one uncut square of origamido paper. (via Mabona Origami)

Oriland Kitten. Cute kitten origami original design by Oriland. (via Mammaoca2008)

Origami Gundam . Complex creative Gundam origami, designed and folded by origami RXMAN. (via Origami RXMAN)

Miss Souris . Cute creative origami mouse, folded from bright colored paper. (via 5500km)

Lion . Designed and folded by H.T.Quyet, folded from 1 uncut square of double crumpled paper. (via ORI_Q)

Kabuto Mushi Origami . Folded by Brian Chan from an uncut square of origamido paper. (via Chosetec)

House. Prototype for a comisson by a advertising company. (via Mabona Origami)

Football . Created from a 19.5 inch square of chestnut lokta backed with rayon paper. (via Oriholic Jared)

Flying Katydid . Origami is designed and folded by Sipho Mabona, folded from aprox. 16 inch of shikibu gampi-shi then wet shaped with water. (via Mabona Origami)

Scorpion. Designed and folded by Nicolas Gajardo Henriquez for latinamerican origami congress in Bogota. (via [~Nic))

Donkey . Cute donkey origami folded from black paper. (via 5.i.u)

Bull Moose. Origami is designed by Robert Lang and folded by Phillip West. (via PhillipWest)

Lamb . Folded from hand-decorated elephant hide paper. (via Joseph Wu Origami)

St George and the Dragon . Origami scene designed and folded by Dave Brill. (via Happyfolding)

Llopio’s Moment of Truth . Origami scene – Llopio’s Moment of Truth. Designed and folded by Neal Elias. (via Happyfolding)

Web applications:Joomla And WordPress

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:27:00 +0000

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
WordPress is the most popular web blogging software because it provides:
- Ease of use. WordPress is suitable for just about anybody - from the absolute novice to the advanced programmer.
- Feature-rich interface. WordPress has a rich text editor with advanced multimedia support;
- Expandable. WordPress's community distributes a large number of modules for almost any popular website feature;
- It is Open Source. This means it is free to install, use and distribute Wordpress on your site.
If you are still confused and don't know where to begin, we recommend the best WordPress hosting where you will get started in no time.

Background Thoughts

WordPress and Joomla are two of the most popular open-source CMS’ around. They offer large and active developer communities and excellent documentation.

WordPress is the first choice among the designer community mostly because of its well-designed back end and wide availability of excellent themes.

Joomla, meanwhile, suffers from Mambo’s legacy, which was notorious for low performance and semantically incorrect output (such as nested tables for layout). But since the release of version 1.5, Joomla has a completely rewritten core, with improved extensibility and better HTML output.

One difference between WordPress and Joomla is their theming model. A website developer migrating from Joomla to WordPress might feel that the latter requires too much theme coding, while a developer moving the other way might feel that Joomla is less flexible and customizable. The reason for this is the different models on which the themes of these CMS’ are based.

WordPress’ Theming Model

WordPress’ theming model is based on a per-view structure. This means that in each theme, you could have individual view files for the post list, the single post and the archive pages. These files are independent of each other, allowing the developer to customize each view but requiring them to duplicate many parts of the code. The only common parts in a theme are the header and footer, which can be coded directly in the individual view anyway.

The main drawback of this model is that different views will not always require a different presentation (for example, the archive, category list and tag list are just lists). To overcome this problem, a theme is organized in a hierarchical structure, in which more generic views are used as fallbacks for specific ones. The common fallback for a WordPress theme is the index.php file, which is actually the only required file (along with a style sheet) in a theme. A complete reference and visual diagram of the hierarchical structure of a WordPress theme are available here.

The Loop and Template Tags

To better understand how a WordPress theme works, we need to look more closely at the “loop” and template tags.

All data for a post or a list of posts is extracted through a loop. A loop is basically a while construct that begins with this declaration:

1if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> 
2
3// post output here 
4
5endif; endwhile; ?>

The most important part of this code is the_post(), which initializes a global $post PHP object containing all of the page data. The loop construct is also required for single post view, because all functions for presentation of data rely on the presence of the $post object. These functions are called template tags, and their main purpose is to output formatted data. Usually, they do not output HTML tags so that they can be used in different scenarios.

A complete guide to theme development is available here.

Joomla’s Content-Based Model

Joomla has a completely different theming approach. Joomla’s templates are built on a common structure defined in an index.php file.

This file contains both static content (i.e. content that is common throughout the website) and template tags, which serve as content place-holders and are replaced by HTML output during the page-rendering phase.

A common form for a template tag is:

`1`	`include` `type="modules"` `name="right"` `style="xhtml"` `/>`

Template tags differ in the type of content they provide: component, message, module, head.

This structural backbone implies that each view in the CMS outputs not a complete page but just what’s needed to present content. At first glance, a developer used to the theming model of WordPress might think that there’s no way to customize this content block. In fact, Joomla relies on the MVC architectural pattern, meaning that data extraction and presentation are separated, the latter being rendered by the view part of the application.

Template Customization

To customize the default view, Joomla has a pattern called template override, through which the system scans the template folder for a custom view file to use in place of the default one. The image below shows the folder structure and naming convention of a default view and its override.

An example of the folder and file structure of a Joomla template override (from the “ja_purity” template).

Joomla overrides are an excellent way to customize a website template without hacks. Still, they are often overlooked, and Joomla’s support of legacy extensions make this pattern unusable, even for popular packages such as Virtuemart (which uses its built-in template system).

A complete reference for Joomla’s template system is available here.

Beyond Core

(Image by jared)

In the last few years, plug-ins have made a big difference in the software industry, one of the most notable examples being Mozilla Firefox.

As we noted, modern CMS’ are developed to be extensible, allowing us to use the core as a backbone and build specialized parts on top of it. This resulting modular design is an effective development model for many reasons:

Better maintainability
Developers don’t need to modify the core in order to add or customize functionality.
Lightweight and safer
Only features that are needed are included, resulting in less memory consumption, a smaller code base and fewer vulnerabilities.
Separate development cycles for core and features
By offering an extensions API, third-party developers can add new features while the core team focuses on the reliability and performance of the system.

With open-source projects, this last point is both a blessing and a curse. It benefits from shared development effort but leads to unverified work and a less organized workflow.

Joomla and WordPress have tried to overcome this curse by providing coding guidelines. Still, little effort is spent documenting the back-end and front-end UI design.

Aside from their different naming conventions, the extensions models of WordPress and Joomla differ in how third-party code interacts with the core by mean of the extensions API.

The key point to understand is that while Joomla is based on MVC pattern, WordPress relies on an event-like system to which extensions can be hooked. Let’s look at some details.

WordPress’ Hook Method

WordPress’ extensions model is based on the execution of a set of functions attached to the system flow by mean of “hooks.”

Hooks contain a list of functions that are triggered at various points as WordPress is running. They manipulate (in the case of filter hooks) and output (in the case of action hooks) database data and can be accessed from within the theme itself and from a specialized plug-in package.

WordPress lacks comprehensive documentation for hooks, but a list of hooks is available here.

To understand the mental model behind WordPress’ hook system, we can compare it to the sequence of actions in baking a cake. In the beginning, we have an idea of what kind of cake we want to bake, so we get our ingredients. We cannot just throw everything together and bake it. So, we execute an ordered list of actions, such as “filtering” egg shells and mixing the eggs in with flour and sugar. As we’re doing that, we might want to customize the recipe. So, we “plug in” some chocolate and perhaps reduce the quantity of another ingredient by half. The result is a proper cake, created from discrete ingredients and a touch of creativity.

WordPress bakes its pages the same way.

Sidebars and Widgets

While plug-ins are broadly related to hooks, a widget is a special type of plug-in. It provides a means of showing information in a theme’s sidebar. The main advantage of widgets is that they are configurable in the back-end interface, allowing quick customization even for novice users.

All available widgets are listed in an administration panel.

In terms of theme development, the sidebar is similar in its mental model to Joomla’s template tags. It is a placeholder for something. The misleading bit is that a sidebar doesn’t have to be placed in the actual sidebar of a layout. It could go in the footer, navigation, header or elsewhere.

To learn more about the new API for widget development, have a look at the official documentation.

Adding Functionality

Until now, the problem with WordPress’ extension API was that it gave you no simple way to add complex functionality, such as e-commerce carts and event listings. Most developers excused this shortcoming by pointing out that WordPress is a blog engine. This will hopefully be resolved with the release of WordPress 3.0 and its system for “post types,” which makes it possible to use the “post” and “page” interfaces for different types of content.

As for other popular CMS’ (such as Drupal), post types function as a kind of “Content Construction Kit,” giving you the ability to smartly add, manage and present specialized content. If you’re interested in trying this new feature, here is a good tutorial.

Other than post types (and until major plug-ins update support for this feature), the only feasible way to add complex functionality is to use already existing pages as containers, placing in the body a place-holder (called a “shortcode“) that is replaced with HTML output by specific filter hooks.

This approach is used by plug-ins such as Buddypress and WP e-Commerce, which extend the blog engine with social network and shopping-cart capabilities.

Another great example of shortcode implementation is Contact Form 7, a fully featured contact-form management plug-in.

Extending Joomla

An often overlooked aspect of Joomla is that it is built on the solid MVC framework. So, extending its core is really much like working with products such as Zend Framework and CodeIgniter, which give you an already designed back-end interface upon which to integrate your own extensions. This approach also gives designers the ability to use template overrides, even for third-party extensions.

A diagram depicting Joomla’s Model View Controller system flow.

To better understand MVC and how it works in Joomla, here is a complete reference.

Joomla’s Extension Types

Joomla’s extension model comes in three flavors, each with different tasks: components, modules and plug-ins.

Components extend the core by adding specific functionality, such as e-commerce carts, event listings and forums. From the user’s point of view, we can think of components as discrete sections of a website, not connected to other content. A popular example is JEvents, an events calendar.

In the theme system, a component’s output replaces the component placeholder in the template’s index.php file:

Modules are like widgets in WordPress: they show a component’s information, which is extracted from the database. They are “attachable” to module positions and can be put on every page of a website.

Modules are primarily intended to be teaser blocks, but they can incorporate full text and image galleries, which makes them handy for static parts of a layout, such as footer notes. They are also useful for showing related content on a page. For example, you could highlight interesting products for Web developers as they’re browsing a list of barcamp events.

The template tag, which serves as module place-holder, looks like this:

Plug-ins work similar to WordPress’ hook system, because they bind to specific system events to format, manipulate and replace HTML output. Possible fields of action range from content for articles (such as video embedding tools—AllVideos is a popular one) to HTML filtering and user-profile extension. Commonly used Joomla plug-ins include URL rewriting filters, which come bundled with administrative components such as Sh404SEF.

60 Brilliant Collection of Trees and Plants in Logo Design

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 09:44:00 +0000

Check this logos that is very good and effective use in logo design.

Easter And Food Icons Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 09:13:00 +0000

Easter And Food Icons

Free Easter Icons
Easter being so close, I thought you might want a couple of free icons to decorate your website: a cute Easter bunny and an Easter egg. In the ZIP file for the Bunny and Egg Easter Pack. you’ll find transparent PNGs for an Easter rabbit, a rabbit holding an RSS icon, a rabbit holding an Easter egg and a rabbit holding an RSS icon and an egg. You will also get the Easter egg in the same size as the icon of the rabbit displayed above.

Happy Easter Icon Set
Four icons in resolutions ranging from 16×16 to 512×512 pixels.

Easter Bunny Icons
44 cute Easter icons that you can use for web and print design. Icons include: bunnies, birdies, Easter eggs, and candy bars. You can use them to spirit up your blog themes or to design your Easter postcards and invitations. The icons are available in vector PDF format, meaning you can resize them to any size to fit your design.

No Ordinary Easter Eggs Icon Set
Six transparent icons in the resolution 512×512 pixels.

Yummy: Icon Eden
Yummy is a set of delicious, tasty and beautiful free icons. It has 20 icons in various sizes, from 48×48 to 128×128 pixels. Also included are scalable and editable vector icons.

Apple Mug Icons and Extras

Valentine’s Day Icons

Donut Box
Nothing is tastier than fresh donuts, as any law enforcement official would tell you.

Fruits Illustrated
Fourteen colorful fruits. This icon set includes strawberry, banana, blackberry, peach, apple, watermelon, grapes, kiwi, coconut, orange, lemon, lime, cherries and a special orange.

Useful Icon Sets

ComFi Telecom Icons
ComFi created a specific telecom icon set in 32×32 pixels. Some icons could have a more general application, such as the ones for receptionist, feedback, guarantee, help. Others not so much: Wi-Fi, VoIP, VPN, Bluetooth.

Icons

Design Cartons Free Icon Set for Designers
Here are five high-quality icons of boxes and cartons that you can use to announce the launch of a new application or on your portfolio website. There is plenty of space to add your own flavor to the graphics, like your name, an important date, a blog name or app name. These icons are free for personal and commercial use. They come in two sizes, 512×512 and 256×256 pixels, and are in PNG format.

Notes Icons
Pack of icons, PNG, ICO and ICNS, including notebooks of various size.

User Center Calendar

Pixel Perfect
55 free user icons. Generate a template (between 400 and 700 pixels in width) that matches your blog’s color and width.

Once
A set of general-purpose icons in PNG format (48×48 pixels).

Help
A set of icons inspired by a help icon that belonged to the artist Everaldo.

nixus
60 icons in resolutions of 32×32, 48×48 and 64×64 pixels.

Colorful Panel Icons
Simple colored icons.

32px Mantra
This 32 pixel icon pack consists of approximately 50 icons.

This Is Art Icons
Icons optimized for v5.0 of Officinadigitale.co.cc (coming soon).

Cartoon Icons
The package includes icons in resolutions of 256×256 and 512×512 pixels and in the formats of .ico (256 pixel only), ICNS, PNG and iContainer.

Breathe
Breathe is a replacement icon set for the Android OS, inspired by the iPhone’s rounded icons.

Project Icons
A pack of 17 icons, 32 pixels only. Available in PNG, ICO, ICNS and as pasted icons.

Areskub
By Stephane Reverdy

Alias Badges
“Tag” style alias icons, inspired by Georg Rebensteiner’s alias replacement icons. It has just a small rectangle with a single letter on it, instead of the whole word “Alias.”

Free Weather Icons
16 icons in a resolution of 24×24 pixels. Available in PNG, ICO, TIF, GIF and BMP formats. Freely available for commercial and non-commercial projects.

Iconlicious
Royalty-free toolbar icons.

Detailed 3-D Icon Set

Oxe Icons Set
18 PNG icons.

Mac Application Icons and Extras
Five icons in resolutions ranging from 64×64 to 512×512 pixels, in PNG and ICNS formats.

Mobile Icons

Free Mobile Berries (registration required)
This set consists of 80 64×64 pixel icons for websites GUIs, mobile applications and presentations.

New HTC Sense UI 2.1 Icons
Official icons from the newest HTC Sense UI Android 2.1. 20 PNG icons in 48×48 pixel resolution, plus five icons in PNG format at 128×128 pixel resolution. Use BetterCut to apply them.

Android Icon Set
Android application icons, Part 2. 34 PNGs at 600×600 pixels.

User Interface Icons

Gesturecons Multi-Touch Icons
These vector-based icons aid in the design, development, implementation and promotion of multi-touch interfaces, as well as in the creation of wireframes, digital help files and printed documentation. You could also use Gesturecons in applications to demonstrate how to complete tasks or to prompt users to interact with the application as they approach it. Swap symbols to create your own icons. Because these are scalable vector shapes, you can scale them to any size and alter them any way you wish. Use your favorite vector graphics application to edit.

User Interface Icon Sets
Gesturecons is a unique icon set featuring hands that perform 35 different multi-touch actions. This set will be useful for those creating iPhone and Google Android apps. The icons are in vector format, so they can be resized easily and used in tutorials and help guides for multi-touch devices.

E-Commerce and Payment Options Icons

Pos Machine Icons

Exclusive Payment Method Icon Set
This set contains six icons and includes a choice of eight different sizes: 12×12, 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 64×64, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 pixels. The icons are entirely free for personal or commercial use.

Payment Icons
Free collection of popular credit card, debit card and payment icons in PNG format. The icons come in three different sizes, with both curved-edge and straight-edge versions that would look great on any website!

Pictograms

8 Free Pictogram Icon Libraries and Collections
Here is a collection of 50 professionally designed common signs. The icons are free and available in OpenType font format, allowing you to easily add symbols to your sign and way-finding designs. The pictograms are all commonly used signs for public services such as restrooms, telephones, first aid, elevators, information, restaurants, coffee shops, no smoking, baby, recycling, shower, reception desk and much more.

DOT Pictograms
68 free pictograms icons in PNG, ICO and ICNS.

Beautiful General Icon Sets

MODEEEERN Icon Set
“The concept for this icon set popped into my head in Art History class, studying the modern art movement, Bauhaus, post-modern art, etc. I was impressed by them, so, I decided to create a super-unique icon set. These icons may look like some vibrant color patched together, but they were actually designed. For example, the Photo icon is a round shape within another round shape that refers to a camera’s aperture.

El Bandito
Because you know you’re a bandit on the inside. The bandit icon comes in eight of your favorite delicious colors, complete with 16×16, 32×32, 64×64, 128×128, and 256×256 pixel versions, optimized for each size.

Fungiiiiiii Iconset
Designed to look futuristic retro (with red-cream and black), these icons turned out to be creepy in the end. That’s a good thing.

Icons: Porn Needs You
An assortment of icons from past work. 180 icons in total, 70 general icons, 60 folders and 50 vertical folders. Currently only in 256×256 pixel PNG format. Some are easier to use than others.

Wordpress Plugins Collection For AutoBlogging

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 09:10:00 +0000

Definitely a blogger wants to post articles in his blog then and now as a reader needs daily consumption. But the ground reality is that it is quite hard to blog daily and post articles in the site. It is a common known fact that, it is hard to earn from a single blog. Obviously this situation pushes a blogger to run multiple blogs but maintain them is the biggest task in front. Hiring a worker is too costly but on the other hand there is plugin which can do this job for a blogger. It is nothing but auto blogging plugin which can do the job easily for a blogger. Though there are many plugins available online, following can give you an idea about the best and top 5 auto blogging wordpress plugins that can make a blogger’s life easy.

But before going in to the analysis it is better to know an overview of this kind of plugins. These plugins post articles based on the keyword and niche the blogger configures. It also increases the traffic indirectly there by increasing the revenue.

WPRobot

This is one of the best autoblogging plugin available. You can add fresh content daily based on the topic and keyword that you give as input. WPRobot plugin posts contents to blog at regular intervals of time. There is an added feature in the plugin which converts an article into different languages before posting it. This gives you a 100% unique article which Google’s search engine loves.

You can also add affiliates like amazon, ebay, clickbank ads, and yahoo answers and much more in your post. All these happen with your full control.

AutoBlogged

Autoblogged is the next best plugin for sites using wordpress. It is the best tool to build your automated blog network and make money from those in no time. All that you need to do is to type keyword and resource in the admin panel after which you get your blog in minutes. Source here means Google blog search, Yahoo, MSN and much more from which articles will be extracted.

AutoBlogged provides support for image and video. You can even build a video blog using this plugin. it is worth spending few dollars to make this plugin yours which can earn you hundred times more than its price.

ZipPoster

ZipPoster helps to avoid duplicate contents which a blogger and Google hates. You can rewrite PLR contents and publish them in the blog by setting up a timestamp. You can schedule the post even for a year.

One best thing about this ZipPoster is that, you can use this plugin for multiple blogs but pay only once.

PLR to Wordpress

This is one of the best autoblogging plugin which can help you to import your PLR articles into wordpress and publish the same. This is a plug-in which suits a blogger who really doesn’t care of the uniqueness of the article. If you are one among them then this is the best plugin for you.

Datafeedr

Datafeedr is a simple plug-in which doesn’t need any coding knowledge or a programmer to configure it. You can easily do it by yourself. This is a best plug-in to create an affiliate shop in the wordpress. It embeds an affiliate shop which helps you to get more traffic flow.

Datafeedr is the best companion for all kind of people who really want to shine up in affiliate marketing. You need not touch any datafeed files like other plugins to setup the store. A beginner can even make up a blog by which he/she can improve the revenue.

There is no doubt that this plugin can save your TIME a lot while providing increase in traffic and revenue.

Worpress Pluings Tips and Tricks

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:43:00 +0000

To grow your blog, you need to know something about who’s visiting, why they’re at your site, where they came from, and where they’re going. This list mixes info for your eyes only with a few you can share with visitors and potential advertisers.

AWStats Xtended Info – Requires AWStats and adds things such as screen size, Flash, PDF, and Java support.

Backlinks inbound links counter – Uses MSN to track all your incoming links to your site, not just from blogs.

Bluetrait Event Viewer (BTEV) – Good stats package for security as it tracks your logins, deleted users, last passwords, invalid user names and more. Good way to keep an eye on what’s happening in a multi-user blog.

Bsuite – Tracks page loads, search terms used on incoming links, shows top performing posts, lists related posts at the bottom of each entry and more.

CountPosts – Shows you how many times each post gets visited, ignores visits from you as long as you are logged in as admin.

DownloadCounter – WordPress allows you to attach downloads to posts, but gives you no way to count the downloads. This plugin will let you know in your admin panel.

Dschini Bot Checker – Lets you know which pages are being checked by which search bots and how often.

Feed Statistics – Monitors your feeds and tells you which readers are being used, the links the readers click on, and which stories they are reading.

FeedBurner SiteStats Enabler – Helps you install the FeedBurner script in your site, instructions in both Italian and English.

FeedBurner StandardStats – Helps simplify the process of installing the FeedBurner script so you can monitor your RSS feed statistics.

FeedStats – Statistical tool for counting your feeds, measuring length of stay on your site and more. Stats appear in the dashboard.

FirStats – Full-featured, Ajax powered stats for your admin area, smooth movement between pages with no need to reload whole page.

GoStats web counter – Lets you install the GoStats counter in your blog, easily installed in a text widget.

Lightstats – Plugin generates bar and pie graphs for statistics about posts, comments, and categories.

Live – Lets you watch the activity on your blog in real time. See things like posts visited, comments left and feeds grabbed.

Open Web Analytics – Track page views, visits, unique visitors, clicks, referring websites, plot visitor geography on Google Earth, and much more.

Posts/Comments Time – Ever wondered when you should aim to make your posts? This plugin shows you the number of posts and comments for the hours of each day so you can better plan your posting times to be before your high comment periods.

Search Phrases – Straightforward plugin that just displays what search terms brought the visitors to your site.

Social Traffic Monitor – Monitors the social sites Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine, Fark, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon when someone comes from one of those, it begins keeping records and displays the data to you in a bar graph.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Adds the Google Analytics script to your site as well as counts downloads and outbound links for you.

Word Count – Sometimes you need to know the number of words in your post for blogging challenges, setting goals for yourself and more; this plugin will do it for you.

WordPress.com Stats – Uses your WordPress API key to pull stats and puts them all in a centralized page in your admin area.

WP OnlineCounter – This plugin counts the number of currently online, highest number of visitors at the same time, and the total count of visitors. Can also configure what is displayed to the visitors.

WP-SlimStat – Tracks all of the standard stats you’ve come to expect from a stats package, but in a very compressed database for less load on your server.

WP-Stats – Very general statistics package focusing on your number of posts, comments and so on.

STATS TO SHARE WITH VISITORS

Akismet Spam Count – Show off your Akismet spam power and let spammers know you’re protected from their attempts.

Alexa Rank – Allows you to display your Alexa rank for the world to see.

GeneralStats – Displays your choice of number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.

Google PageRank – Display your Google page rank on your front page, useful when trying to attract some advertisers.

Impress – Display number of users, posts, pages, comments, categories, words, and more on your blog for visitors to see.

Jon’s Showoff Rankings Widget – Displays your Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, and Technorati Rank all in one handy plugin. (Ed note: this plugin is no longer supported, and the developer recommends using the widget version instead.)

50+ Useful Widgets For Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:37:00 +0000

Widgets are a handy, easy and simple way to add some flare to your blog. Whether you’d like to display the number of currently online visitors to your site or simply the weather report for Los Angeles, you can do it with widgets. We’ve assembled a list of 50 useful or simply cool widgets for your pleasure. And remember, the first rule of widgetizing your blog is – don’t overdo it!

MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers – this widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.

Mashable (Mashable) – get the latest social networking news from this very site.

Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge – display images from your Flickr (Flickr) profile with a handy Flash photo stream.

Preview Anywhere – see a live preview of outgoing links in a small popup which activates on mouseover. Some find this annoying, while others might find it useful.

Twitter Badge – if your life is so interesting that everyone must know what you’re up to all the time, then a Twitter (Twitter) badge is the ideal counterpart to your blog. It’ll proudly displays your recent tweets.

Digg News – display the latest Digg (Digg) links on your blog. Themeable and fully customizable.

FEEDJIT – real time traffic data directly in your blog’s sidebar.

LineBuzz – inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.

Flixn – display a stream directly from your webcam, so your blog visitors can always see what you’re up to.

3Jam – lets your visitors send messages to your mobile phone, without them knowing your phone number.

Jaxtr – with Jaxtr, your visitors can actually call you to your mobile phone; again, your number stays private.

LinkedInABox – show off your LinkedIn (LinkedIn) profile. Perfect for personal blogs.

Box Widget – enable visitors to use box.net’s online storage directly on your web site.

Price of gas – displaying gas prices on your blog might seem unnecessary to some, but it’s cool if you have a traffic/travel related blog.

iBegin Weather Widget – Display weather information in your sidebar. Just like with Price of Gas, works great with travel-related blogs.

ClockLink – display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.

Film Loops – display the latest loops from your FilmLoops account.

Daily Painters – display paintings from famous painters on your blog.

WhoLinked – show your visitors which sites have recently linked to your web site. Works with all major blog platforms.

Criteo AutoRoll – displays links to blogs similar to your blog.

Bitty Browser – embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog.

Leafletter – create a mini website and embed it into your blog.

WikiSeek – search Wikipedia (Wikipedia) with this simple widget.

FeedCount – show off the number of visitors to your blog with this handy little button.

Technorati Link Count – display the number of links your website has from one of the biggest blog authorities – Technorati.

MyPageRank – another good way to show how “big” your blog is is to show off your Google PageRank.

CheckPageRank – in addition to showing your PageRank, this widget also shows your Alexa ranking.

BlinkxIt – embed a link to related videos directly into your website.

Skype button – display your Skype (Skype) online/offline status on your blog.

RockYou Horoscope – not something I would personally use, but some people are into horoscope. Hell, most people are into horoscope. Anyway, this widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.

del.icio.us Tagometer – display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.

del.icio.us Linkrolls – this badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.

Timelines – need to create a timeline? Seek no further. This widget makes it really easy.

PollDaddy – PollDaddy lets you create beautiful polls in no time, and display them at your blog.

Vizu – another poll-making widget, compatible with all major blog platforms.

AnswerTips – display definitions from Answers.com for various terms on your blog. The definitions are shown in bubbles which are activated on doubleclick.

AnswerBoxes – give your visitors a chance to enter a term themselves, and get a definition from Answers.com

Now Playing – if you got to share your current playlist contents with the world, Sigamp will do the trick. Works with most popular music players, including Foobar, Winamp, iTunes and others.

BuzzBoost – display headlines from your RSS feed on any website.

LibraryThing (LibraryThing) – show off the latest books you’ve been reading.

Plaxo Address Book – let your most faithful visitors access their address books direclty from your site.

AuctionAds – a widget that displays auctioned items on eBay, and gives you a percentage of the price paid when sometimes buys an item.

aStore – similar to AuctionAds, only for Amazon. Create a mini-store on your site and receive profit when someone buys an item through your store.

Plazes – show your current location on a Plazes map.

Stockalicious – track your portfolio with this widget, and share it with others. Let everyone know how much money you’ve lost.

Giftspace – your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.

MixMap – see where are the visitors to your MySpace (MySpace) profile from on a map.

Google Map Widget – display a searchable Google Map on your website.

Google Video Search – add a video search form and selected videos to your web site.

Odeo player – display an Odeo player for and podcast right there in your sidebar.

Attractive Wallpapers Of Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:35:00 +0000

Attractive wallpapers always give users a refreshing look, and enable them to display different natural scenes and other creative picture on their desktop. Here we have displayed some of the best Windows 7 wallpapers, Windows 7 logo is also the part of some wallpapers that are included in this list.

Microsoft’s Latest Operating System Windows 7 Test Drive Offers

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:30:00 +0000

Windows 7 test drive is a service that enables you to get an overview of doing development on Windows 7 platform. You do not even need to install the complete OS to explore the development environment of Microsoft’s latest operating system.

Windows 7 Test Drive offers you a virtual environment that enables you to explore the new environment in the shape of Windows 7, it helps you to get a perspective from a developer’s point of view.

Windows 7 Test Drive runs from Microsoft’s live servers, moreover it’s free and can be used within the browser itself. Windows Live ID is the only requirement to access this service. It offers short virtual labs and training videos that will definitely help you to get skilled on the development environment offered by Microsoft Windows 7.

Fore more details visit: Windows 7 Test Drive Site

Detail of Nokia Manufacturer

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:28:00 +0000

1) The world first commercial GSM call was made in 1991 in Helsinki, at the Nokia supplied network, by the Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri, using a mobile phone from Nokia.

2) Nokia is currently the largest manufacturer in the world of digital cameras, as sales of camera-equipped mobile phones have exceeded those of any conventional camera manufacturer.

3) The Special tone to users of Nokia phones to receive SMS (text messages) is actually Morse code for SMS . Moreover, the Ascending SMS tone is Morse code for Connecting People slogan of Nokia. The Standard SMS tone is Morse code for M () message.

4) The Nokia corporate font (family) is not AgfaMonotype Nokia, which was originally designed by Eric Spiekermann. Drivers using mobile phone of Nokia that use more Agfa ROTIS Sans.

5) In Asia, the digit 4 never appears in some models of handsets from Nokia, because 4 is considered unlucky in many parts of Southeast and East Asia.

6) that Nokia has 20 companies in the world’s best in Fortune-2006 (1. In network communications, 4th non-US companies).

7) Unlike other do modern mobile phones, Nokia phones do not automatically start the call timer when the call connects, but when you start the call begins.

8) Nokia is sometimes called (Aikon Nokia backwards) by non-users of Nokia mobile phones and mobile software developers, because aikon in various software SDK, including his use of Symbian S60 SDK.

9) The name of the town of Nokia in the river that flows through the city the day. The same river, Nokianvirta named after the ancient Finnish word referring to the origin of the name of Sable ferret. A kind of small predators of black fur was found once in the region, but is now extinct.

Nokia N73 Music Edition Price

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:26:00 +0000

Phone : Nokia N73 Music Edition Price

Manufacturer : Nokia

Price (Indian Rupees) : Current Market Price : Rs. 11500 ( Last Updated On:January 1 2010 )

Price (USD) : $236.63 approx

Complete Wireframing,Web Browser Templates,Web Form Elements,Mobile App Development Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:32:00 +0000

Complete Wireframing,Web Browser Templates,Web Form Elements,Mobile App Development Resources.This article focuses on actual wireframing tools and standalone applications, as well as resources that you’ll need to build your own wireframe: wireframing kits, browser windows, form elements, grids, Mac OS X elements, mobile elements, which you’ll use in any typical graphics editor such as Photoshop or Illustrator. …Or you could use pen and paper.

Complete Wireframing Toolkits

Quommunnication Stencil Kit
A PSD file with common design elements for sketching and wireframing: form elements, RSS feed icons, colors, Advertising units, browser windows and grids.

Mac OS X Interface Stencil Kit
Leopardy interface stencil kit. This one makes extensive use of tables, for maximum flexibility while maintaining pixel precision.

Facebook Applications Stencil Kit
A pretty sizable collection of Facebook related elements to use in creating wireframes for Facebook applications.

Flex Stencil Kit
Includes all Flex components from Flex 3 Style Guide: panels, data grid, buttons, fields, links, toggle, menu, scrolls, accordion, tabs, list, data picker, tool tip, errors.

Eclipse Stencil Kit
This stencil enables you to easily prototype Eclipse (wizard) dialogs with OmniGraffle(TM).

Massive Web UI & Button Set
This set contains UI elements in three distinct styles: glossy, satin/light gradient, and one-color. The satin/light gradient set is available in 7 different colors (which you’ll find all of in the PSD file). Available are control buttons including arrows and basic symbols, info and text boxes, breadcrubs, buttons, and other navigation elements, drop-down and collapsible box styles, speech bubbles, search forms and loading elements.

Yahoo! Design Stencils – Design Pattern Library
You would be hard pressed to find a better wireframing resource than this one. The Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit is available for almost every application: OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG) and Adobe Photoshop. This huge library covers the following elements (basically, everything): ad units, calendars, carousels, charts and tables, UI controls, form elements, grids, menus and buttons, mobile (general), mobile (iPhone), navigation and pagination, OS elements, placeholder text, screen resolutions, tabs, windows and containers.

Free Sketching & Wireframing Kit
The Sketching & Wireframing Kit is a free set of elements for sketching and wireframing. It consists of form elements, icons, indicators, feedback messages, tool tips, navigation elements, image placeholders, embedded videos, sliders and common ad banners. The Kit comes in two vector formats, one for Adobe Illustrator and the other in SVG, which can be easily modified. It can also be downloaded in PDF and EPS formats.

EightShapes Unify
EightShapes Unify is a collection of templates, libraries and other assets that enable user experience designers to create more consistent and effective deliverables faster. The system uses the Adobe Creative Suite of products; Adobe InDesign is the primary authoring tool.

Wireframe Symbols
This download contains a wireframe symbol library and a full Adobe Illustrator file with all of the elements spread out on a board. To install the library just drag and drop the file named Wireframe Symbols.ai into your Adobe Illustrator “Symbols” directory. Once you open Illustrator, go to your Symbols Palette and load the library.

OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils
This is a set of shapes for making wireframes in OmniGraffle version 5.x (Mac OS X).

OmniGraffle UX Template
This is an OmniGraffle Pro template for interface design that includes shared layers for basic UX document needs; e.g. title page, wireframes, storyboards.

Web Page Elements
Using the open-source “Bitstream Vera” font set and free icons from FamFamFam, you should have most of your common web page elements covered, including headings, form elements, content management function, image placeholders, etc.

Web Browser Templates

Photoshop Browser Templates – Web Designer Toolkit
These Photoshop browser templates come in 1024×768 and 800×600 pixel sizes and cover nearly all browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Camino, even Netscape). For both sizes, the safe viewing area is clearly marked in a separate layer.

Browser Templates for the Website
These Photoshop browser templates for Internet Explorer, Firefox for Mac and Firefox for Windows have been mocked up in the following sizes: 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024 pixels.

Photoshop Browser Templates
This layered PSD file contains three different browser resolutions; all with easily editable titles, address bars, scroll bars and favicons. Just open the PSD and place the layers on top of the design that you are working on, and voila!

Browser Screens and Website Elements
A useful set of vector website assets.

Web-Safe Area Templates for Photoshop

All of the Web-safe area browser PSD templates listed below can be individually downloaded by choosing from the following resolutions: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×960 and 1600×1200 pixels.

Windows Vista IE Web-Safe Area

Windows Vista Firefox Web-Safe Area

Windows XP IE Web-Safe Area

Mac OS X Safari Web-Safe Area

Mac OS X Firefox Web-Safe Area

Mac OS X Safari Web-Safe Area

Web Form Elements

Best Practice UX Forms Stencil
This is a comprehensive release of the stencil kit which follows best practices in UX form design. It provides three different ways of laying forms out, each with their own benefits. This version also provides different button layouts, a progress indicator, captcha code input field, labels and more.

Photoshop Form Element Templates
These Photoshop files include screenshots of all the common form elements as displayed in your selected operating system (Mac Classic, Mac OS X, Win XP and Win Classic). The form elements are separated into individual layers so that you can easily select, adjust or switch them as you please.

Browser Form Elements PSD
Included in this PSD file are form elements for Mac Firefox 3 and another for Vista IE7.

Web Form Elements Volume 1
Volume 1 contains a selection of Web user interace elements for forms in Photoshop format.

Web Form Elements Vol.2
This is Volume 2 of the Web Form UI Elements mentioned above and has been designed in a different style.

Photoshop Button Templates
These Photoshop button templates have been separated into individual layers to be easily selectable. You can choose from the following colors: dark blue, light blue, dark green, light green, yellow, orange, red and purple.

Web Browser Elements

You can select the element you need from whichever operating system and browser you use, and download them individually.

Windows Vista IE Form Elements

Windows Vista Firefox Form Elements

Windows XP IE Form Elements

Windows XP Firefox Form Elements

Mac OS X Firefox Form Elements

Mac OS X Safari Form Elements

Grid Templates

960px Photoshop Grid Template
This template has a guide for a three-column 20-pixel gutter design, with layers of washed-out colors to visualize both columns for the purpose of the rule of thirds. Additionally, it is broken down into six columns of 20-pixel gutters.

960 Grid Template for OmniGraffle

Illustrator Template for Blueprint CSS Comps
This Adobe Illustrator document features a 24-column grid for CSS frameworks such as Blueprint. It consists of guides that comply with Blueprint’s grid of 24 columns of 30 pixels, 10-pixel-wide gutters and a horizontal width of 950 pixels. Horizontal guides are provided at 18 pixels or a 1.5 em line-height for a 12-pixel base font.

Photoshop Template for Blueprint CSS Comps
This Photoshop document features a 24-column grid for CSS frameworks such as Blueprint. It consists of guides that comply with Blueprint’s grid of 24 columns of 30 pixels, 10-pixel-wide gutters and a horizontal width of 950 pixels. Horizontal guides are provided at 18 pixels or a 1.5 em line-height for a 12-pixel base font.

Mobile App Development Resources

Ultimate iPhone Stencil – Graffletopia
This Omnigraffe iPhone stencil kit contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors and all other iPhone UI elements. It can be easily resized horizontally by ungrouping, resizing the middle element and then regrouping the elements back into a single button.

iPhone 3G Stencil
Includes standard interface components for the iPhone 3G: buttons, fields, map elements, keyboards, icons. All components are on a transparent background and should re-size nicely.

iPhone GUI PSD 3.0
With Apple’s official release of the new iPhone 3.0 came a number of new GUI elements. Some of the changes and additions have been include in this GUI: map and map elements including curl, copy and paste elements; timeline bar editor; and horizontal iPhone and horizontal panel bars and keyboards.

iPhone PSD Vector Kit
This iPhone starter kit comes with several button elements as well as six different iPhone interface options.

iPhone GUI Elements
Free iPhone elements available as layered Photoshop (PSD) files.

iPhone GUI as Rich Symbols for Fireworks
This iPhone kit has been designed using Adobe Fireworks. It has several combinations, buttons, backgrounds, etc. It also has some lines of code to transform the simple vector symbols into rich symbols, with some variables.

Google Android GUI Application Mockup PSD
This Photoshop file contains all of the basic elements of Android 1.5, Google’s mobile operating system.

Palm Pre GUI PSD
This Palm Pre GUI PSD has been built with vectors for easy editing and scaling, and it contains most of the Pre’s GUI elements.

RIM Blackberry PSD
This download package contains 135 detailed layers for Blackberry app development.

Optional Wireframe Extras

Interactive Sketch Notation
The general idea behind this notation is the desire to visualize user interface states as well as user actions in a clear and rapid manner.

Storyboard Characters (via Google Chrome)

Proofreading Marks

Standard Web Banners
You can download these standard Web banners or ads individually (468×60 pixels, 768×60, 125×125, etc.). There are also templates for common but non-standard banner sizes (120×30, 230×33, 728×210, etc.).

Wireframe Icons, Royalty-Free EPS and PNG
The icon set includes EPS and PNG versions of the original Konigi Wireframe Icon Set and are suitable for use in vector drawing applications such as Adobe Illustrator as well as in Microsoft Visio.

WEB UI Treasure Chest
This PSD layered file, most of whose files are fully editable, contains more than 100 elements for website design.

Webdesigner kit
This Photoshop download contains registration fields, menus, checkboxes, radio buttons and cursors.

Printable Sketching Paper

A4 and A3 Sketching Grid Paper
This downloadable and printable 960-pixel-wide grid makes it easy to create a three-column (320 pixel), four-column (240 pixel), five-0column (192 pixel) or six-column (160 pixel) grid on a single sheet of paper. You have two sizes to choose from, A4 and A3.

Print and Sketch Wireframe Template

iPhone Application Sketch Template
The grid squares for this sketching paper are equal to 10 pixels. The tick marks indicate the height of the status bar, nav bar, keyboard, tab bar and toolbar. For best results, print on A4 borderless paper.

iPhone Wireframe Templates for Sketching
Two layouts are available, both in PDF and Visio (VSD) formats for quick iPhone mockups.

iPhone App Wireframe Template
Two versions are available, one in landscape and the other in portrait. Each version includes three pages: page 1 has a vertical screen and notes column; page 2 has a horizontal screen and notes column; page 3 has a three-screen layout that is great for drafting designs.

Printable Wireframe and Notes

The below 8.5 x 11-inch graph paper is made for visual designers, interaction designers and information architects. You’ll find styles for wireframing user interfaces, storyboarding interaction and plotting values on a 2×2 grid. Plus, you’ll get a basic grid for drafting site maps or anything else that comes up. Choose from the following:

Wireframe with Notes
This wireframe grid is divided into 24 columns, with gutters between each column. The grid is especially useful for designers who work within a CSS framework such as Blueprint.

Wireframe (Landscape)

Wireframe (Portrait)

Storyboard
This is a storyboard with four cells. Each cell contains a simple grid.

Storyboard with Notes
This is a storyboard with four cells. Each cell contains a simple grid. The area beneath each cell is ruled for notes.

Basic Paper
This is a basic grid box. Use it for concept diagrams, site maps, spectrums, tables and whatever else you sketch.

Wireframe Magnets (DIY Kit)

These DIY magnet template are based on the Konigi wireframe stencils and includes three sheets of elements that would be useful for whiteboard prototyping. Simply download and print the PDFs onto magnet sheets, and cut them out.

Form Elements

Tabs, Buttons and Bars

Windows and Dialogs

Further Resources And Some Wireframing Inspiration

web.without.words
A visual playground where designers take popular sites and reconstruct them in a wireframe.

Graffletopia
Graffletopia is a huge resource of free stencils for OmniGraffle (Mac-only, sadly). With OmniGraffle, you can quickly create high-quality wireframes, flowcharts and other diagrams.

Mockups To Go
Mockups To Go is a user-contributed collection of ready-to-use UI components and design patterns that were built using Balsamiq Mockups. You can download all of the components and design patterns to use in your mockups.

Wireframes Magazine
Wireframes Magazine is dedicated to all things wireframing and prototyping. It has a huge library of downloadable templates, samples and UI tools, and even a section for inspiration.

I {heart} wireframes
I {heart} wireframes is a great source of wireframing inspiration and resources. And yes, we all love wireframes!

Concept Of Warrior and Battle Art

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:42:00 +0000

A warrior is a person experienced in or capable of engaging in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based society that recognizes a separate warrior class. According to the Random House Dictionary, the term warrior has two meanings. The first literal use refers to "a man engaged or experienced in warfare." The second figurative use refers to "a person who shows or has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness, as in politics or athletics.
a battle is a conceptual component in the hierarchy of combat in warfare between two or more armed forces, wherein each group will seek to defeat the others within the scope of a military campaign, and are well defined in duration, area and force commitment.
Wars and military campaigns are guided by strategy, whereas battles take place on a level of planning and execution known as operational

The soldier of desert

Examples of Battle Art

Wind Demon

The Last Battle

Decisive battle in Korea

Battle

Warhammer Online Concept Art

God of War 2 Marketing 01

Mech-Dragon Battle

Warhammer – Forge Of War 5A

Springs of Cresson

God of War III- Cover Artwork

Imp Warrior

Warhammer Concept Art

Nation of Sol – Urchin down

Battle Rage Prologue 3

The titan’s breakthrough

Creative Bundle of Logos

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:40:00 +0000

Logo is a term used to refer to a graphic symbol or emblem commonly employed by commercial enterprises, organisations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. In the days of hot metal typesetting a logotype was a uniquely set and arranged typeface or colophon. At the level of mass communication or simply in the high street a company's logo is today often synonymous with its trademark.

Among these different kinds of Green Logos, which was your favorite? Do you have any other recommendation of a cool Green Logo theme design? Feel free to add your feedbacks below.

Photoshop Brushes for Vintage Style Design

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Vintage style design is all about making things look old. This can be achieved by using using elements in your designs that appear to be from decades ago, and when done well can create a mood for your web design that will leave a lasting impressions on visitors. In this article, we’ve rounded up a bunch of Photoshop brushes that will be very useful to you when trying to achieve that vintage look.

Vintage Camera Brushes

Vintage Grunge

Vintage Anatomy Set 1

Old Brushes

Vintage Postcards Set 1

Old Brushes

Old Paper Brushes IV

vintage brushes

Vintage Script Brush Sampler

Vintage News Ad Brushes

Vintage Images + Ephmera

Steampunk PS Brushes

Old Ephemera

Postage label brush set

The Vintage Effect-brushes

Book Ornaments Brushes 3

Old Paper Brushes 2

vintage polaroid brushes

Clean and Clear Collection Of Wordpress Themes

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:23:00 +0000

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for basic content management. It has many features including a user-friendly workflow, a rich plugin architecture, and an advanced templating system.

Aparatus

Aparatus Download Page

Aparatus Theme Demo

GoodTheme

GoodTheme Download Page

GoodTheme Demo

Zexee

Zexee Download Page

Zexee Demo

The Structure Theme

The Structure Theme Download Page

Structure Theme Demo

Crispp

Crispp Download Page

Crispp Demo

Mayumi

Mayumi Download Page

Mayumi Demo

WpStream

WpStream Download Page

WpStream Demo

Newspress

Newspress Download Page

Newspress Demo

Hipsterist

Hipsterist Download Page

Hipterist Demo

DailyNote from DesignDisease

DailyNote from DesignDisease Download Page

Daily Note Demo

Bueno

Bueno Download Page

Bueno Demo

Unwakeable Theme

Unwakeable Theme Download Page

Unwakeable Theme Demo

Obscure

Obscure Download Page

Obscure Demo

Gadgetizer Theme

Gadgetizer Theme Download Page

Gadgetizer Theme Demo

Tanzaku

Tanzaku Download Page

Tanzaku Demo

MiniCard

MiniCard Download Page

MiniCard Demo

BlueBubble

BlueBubble Download Page

BlueBubble Demo

Satoshi

Satoshi Download Page

Satoshi Demo

Clear

Clear Download Page

Clear Demo

Fifty Fifth Street

Fifty Fifth Street Download Page

Fifty Fifth Street Demo

Neutra

Neutra Download Page

Neutra Demo

mnml galleria – siimple

mnml galleria – siimple Download Page

mnml galleria Demo

Purple Block

Purple Block Download Page

Purple Block Demo

Functionalism

Functionalism Download Page

Functionalism Demo

Ulap Theme

Ulap Theme Download Page

Ulap Theme Demo

Excellent Collection of jQuery Navigation Plugins and Tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:17:00 +0000

Mega Drop Down Menu w/ CSS & jQuery | Demo

According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, mega drop down menus tested to be more efficient for large-scale websites. In this tutorial, the author demonstrates his technique for creating a menu system that would be ideal for large or e-commerce web sites.

A Perfect Multi-Level Navigation Bar | Demo
In this tutorial, the author illustrates his method for implementing a perfect multi-level navigation bar using HTML, CSS and some lines of unobtrusive JavaScript code with jQuery to show and hide sub-sections.

Use Sprites to Create a Navigation Menu | Demo
CSS sprites can dramatically increase a website’s performance, and with jQuery, we can easily implement awesome transition effects.

Tab Navigation with Smooth Horizontal Sliding
In this tutorial you will create a navigation menu that slides horizontally. It begins with a set of “tabs” on the right side of a containing element. When clicked, a tab slides to the left to reveal a group of links. Click the tab again, and it slides back.

droppy – Nested drop down menus
This is not the most flexible of plugins, but if you’re looking for a basic menu, it’s perfect.

jQuery Listmenu | Demo
This jQuery plugin allows you to easily convert a long, hard-to-navigate list into a compact, easy-to-skim first-letter-based menu system, allowing quick and out-of the-way access to hundreds of items.

Kwicks for jQuery | Demo
Kwicks for jQuery started off as a port of the insatiably attractive Mootools effect (of the same name), but has evolved into a highly customizable and versatile widget.

Creating a Navigation Menu with CSS & jQuery
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to build a CSS navigation menu with a smooth scroll effect using jQuery and the scrollTo plugin.

Apple Style Menu | Demo
In this in-depth tutorial you’ll create an Apple-flavored Leopard-text-indented menu from scratch. First you’ll build the menu in Photoshop, then you’ll create the needed HTML and CSS, and finally improve it with jQuery.

Sexy Drop Down Menu w/ jQuery & CSS | Demo
Most drop-down menus may look aesthetically pleasing, but developing them to degrade gracefully is also essential. In this tutorial, the author shows you how to create a sexy drop-down menu that degrades gracefully.

Mega Drop-Down Menu with jQuery | Demo
The recommended hover time for a mega drop-down menu is 0.5 seconds, with a further 0.5 seconds delay when the user moves the mouse away. With these guidelines, the author demonstrates how to build a mega drop-down menu with usable time delays.

JQuery Pager | Demo
jQuery Pager is a simple JQuery plugin to provide paging functionality for data-driven web applications.

Simple jQuery Dropdowns | Demo
jQuery menus don’t have to be complicated; sometimes you may want to try something slightly different by making them as simple as possible. This menu plugin has stripped down code with minimal styling, yet still has all the functionality typically needed.

Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery | Demo
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to build a jQuery menu and animate it with some lovely and smooth effects, using the jQuery Easing plugin.

Stylish Navigation Menu With jQuery | Demo
In this menu tutorial there are three main classes that define the looks: normalMenu – for the normal state of the navigation links, hoverMenu – lighter link that slides down on hover, selectedMenu – the active (selected) state.

Easy to Style jQuery Drop Down Menu | Demo
This tutorial will show you how to create a simple and easily-styled menu with hover mouse event and the most basic jQuery animation using slideUp and slideDown.

A Different Top Navigation | Demo
If you’re trying to make your website stand out, you might consider thinking outside the “norm” when it comes to navigation. In this tutorial, you’ll be doing precisely that, by creating a different multi-layered horizontal navigation system that’s still intuitive enough for anyone to use for the first time.

Vimeo-Like Top Navigation | Demo
If you’ve ever visited the Vimeo home page you may have noticed the menu that drops down when you hover over the search box, offering you different search options to narrow your search. You’ll learn how to recreate this effect in this tutorial.

jQuery'd Bread Crumb – jBreadCrumb
This collapsible breadcrumb jQuery plugin has been developed to deal with deeply-nested, verbosely-named pages. Rather than limit the amount of elements shown on the sever side, the developers opted to go with a client side solution for usability and SEO. It also turned out to be nice to look at and fun to play with.

idTabs
The marvelously-versatile idTabs plugin makes adding tabs to a website very simple and opens the door to endless navigation possibilities. The homepage of this plugin shows you not only how easy idTabs is to use and style, but also demonstrates many of the navigation options you’ll have at your disposal.

Keypress Navigation | Demo
With jQuery, your website’s navigation doesn’t have to be limited to mouse-based activation. In this highly-original experimental tutorial you’re shown how to let the user navigate your site using their keyboard.

Sliding jQuery Menu | Demo
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a sliding menu button, similar to the effect you can see in action over on the PSDtuts+ homepage. When the button is clicked it rolls out a box full of links, when the button is clicked again the box rolls back in.

Dropdown, iPod Drilldown, and Flyout Styles
This iPod-style menu plugin provides easy navigation of complex nested structures with any number of levels. The entire menu sits within a fixed-size area, and when a node is selected, by default a “Back” link appears below the menu to allow navigation to previous (parent) menus.

Flickr Menu Design | Demo
This is a simple step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to implement a Flickr-style menu with cool sliding effects using jQuery and CSS.

Fixed Fade Out Menu | Demo
The aim of this tutorial is to build a fixed navigation that follows the user when they scroll up or down, and only subtly showing itself by fading out and becoming almost transparent. When the user hovers over it, the menu then becomes opaque again. The navigation includes some links, a search box, and top and bottom buttons that let the user navigate to the top or bottom of the page.

mb.menu | Demo
mb.menu is a powerful jQuery component that helps you build an intuitive multi-level tree menu or contextual (right click) menu. You can add as many submenus as you want; if your sub-menu or menu is not declared in the page, the component will get it via Ajax, calling the template page with the id of the menu you need (the value of the “menu” attribute).

mcDropdown
The mcDropdown plugin is a UI control that lets users select from a complex hierarchical tree of options that allows for both mouse and keyboard entry. The overall effect of this plugin is somewhat similar to the Microsoft Windows “Start > All Programs” menu.

Vertical or Sidebar Plugins and Tutorials

Simple JQuery Accordion Menu | Demo
This is a very simple accordion menu plugin built with jQuery. The links with sub-items under them will expand the sub-menu when clicked and items that don’t have sub-items are normal links. The menu will initialize with the first expanded sub-menu.

Tabbed Structure Menu | Demo
This tutorial will show you how to build your own space-saving, tabbed interface using jQuery with slideDown/slideUp effect.

Fresh Content Accordion | Demo
In this tutorial you’ll earn how to build a simple, yet eye-catching accordion with the help of CSS, jQuery and the easing plugin for fancy effect.

Horizontal Scroll Menu | Demo
This tutorial teaches you how to create a horizontal scrolling menu that scrolls automatically according to your mouse axis-Y movement and uses the jQuery.color plugin to animate the background-color changes.

Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery | Demo
In this tut you’ll learn how to build a simple little tabbed information box in HTML, then make it function using pure JavaScript, and finally you’ll learn a way to achieve the same effect using jQuery.

Slide Out and Drawer Effect | Demo
The Apple web site is a great demonstration of this effect in action where the mouse settles on the title of the ’section’ and the associated links are exposed. What makes this effect particularly cool is that the drawers maintain a fixed height and slide between a restricted area.

“Outside the Box” Navigation with jQuery | Demo
This tutorial offers three different ‘out-of-the-box’ OS X dock-style navigation options. There are the, as expected, horizontal and vertical examples, and finally the very cool OS X stack and drop stack.

Sproing! – Thumbnail Menu | Demo
Sproing! is a plugin that creates an elastic effect for your navigation that magnifies the menu items when they are hovered over.

Cool Animated Navigation | Demo
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to build a really cool animated navigation menu with background position animation using just CSS and jQuery.

jQuery File Tree | Demo
jQuery File Tree is a configurable, Ajax file browser plugin for jQuery. You can create a customized, fully-interactive file tree with as little as one line of JavaScript code. Currently, server-side connector scripts are available for PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, and Lasso. If you’re a developer, you can easily make your own connector to work with your language of choice.

Creating a Floating HTML Menu Using jQuery and CSS | Demo
For all of us who deal with long web pages and need to scroll to the top for the menu, this tutorial offers a nice alternative: floating menus that move as you scroll a page. This is built using HTML, CSS and jQuery, and it’s W3C-compliant.

BDC DrillDown Menu, an iPod-style menu | Demo
A drill-down menu takes up constant space like an accordion menu but offers the deep hierarchy of a fly-out menu at the same time. Because of this, it not only features a small footprint but is also easier to navigate than a fly-out menu, where more mouse movement and accuracy are required.

jQuery Context Menu Plugin | Demo
The goal of this plugin was to streamline the way actions bind to menu items and to use 100% CSS for styling. Keyboard shortcuts have been added for navigation once the menu is opened, and there are five methods that will allow you to control and clean-up your context menu on the fly.

A ‘Mootools Homepage’ Inspired Navigation | Demo
This tutorial takes you through the process of developing the menu that had previously been used on the homepage of MooTools, but with jQuery.

jQuery UI Selectmenu
The jQuery UI Selectmenu plugin has been designed to duplicate and extend the functionality of a native HTML select element, and lets you customize the look and feel, add icons, and create hierarchy within the options. Best of all, it’s built with progressive enhancement and accessibility in mind and allows all native mouse and keyboard controls.

Beautiful Slide Out Navigation | Demo
In this tutorial you are shown how to create an amazing slide-out menu or navigation. The navigation will be almost hidden — the items only slide out when the user hovers over the area next to them. This gives a beautiful effect and using this technique can spare you some space on your website.

Optional Horizontal or Vertical Navigation

Smooth Navigational Menu
This menu’s contents can either be reached from either direct markup on the page, or an external file and fetched via Ajax. And thanks to jQuery, a configurable, sleek “slide plus fade in” transition is applied during the unveiling of the sub menus. The menu supports both the horizontal and vertical (sidebar) orientation.

Superfish – Suckerfish on 'roids | Demo
Superfish is an enhanced Suckerfish-style menu jQuery plugin that takes an existing pure CSS drop-down menu (so it degrades gracefully without JavaScript) and adds the following enhancements: Timed delay on mouseout, animation of sub-menu reveal, keyboard accessibility, drop shadows for capable browsers and much, much more.

Awesome Collection Of Nature Photography

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:12:00 +0000

Nature photography refers to a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes (See Landscape Photography), wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. Nature photography tends to put a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic value of the photo than other photography genres, such as photojournalism and documentary photography.

Nature photographs are published in scientific, travel and cultural magazines such as National Geographic Magazine and Audubon Magazine or other more specific magazines such as Outdoor Photographer and Nature's Best Photography. Well known nature photographers include Frans Lanting, Galen Rowell, and Art Wolfe.

Nice,Beautiful and Yummy Icons Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:15:00 +0000

Today we are glad to release something extremely tasty — Yummy Icon Set, a set with 20 beautiful, original and sweet icons in resolutions 48×48px – 128×128px and formats .png, .ico, .incs and .tif. Also, the vector source (.eps) is available for free download as well. This set was designed by our friends Iconeden and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the icon set for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

download the set (incl. vector source) (.zip, 3.5 Mb)
IconEden’s release post

Technil @ Vast Collection of Creative Wallpapers

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Technical:Excellence Scripts for Images for Web Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:51:00 +0000

Technical:Excellence Scripts for Images for Web Developers

Ajax Image Galleries & Lightboxes

Minishowcase
Minishowcase is a small and simple php/javascript online photo gallery, powered by AJAX/JSON that lets you put easily your images in an online gallery, without having to configure databases or changing and customising code (though you may do it if you feel so) allowing to have an up-and-running gallery in a few minutes.
JonDesign’s SmoothGallery
Unlike other systems out there, JonDesign’s SmoothGallery is designed from the ground up to be standard compliant: You can feed it from any document, using custom css selectors. And even better, this solutions is very lightweight: The javascript file is only 16kb.
Ajax Photo Gallery
The AJAX version of AgileGallery is a free AJAX photo gallery that rips through the XML output from Picasa (a free download from google) and generates DHTML for the paging and thumbnails and displays the full sized photos along with any description entered in Picasa. Since this photo gallery uses AJAX technology, it eliminates the need for any page refresh as the user pages through the photos.
Pyxy-gallery
Pyxy-gallery is an AJAX image gallery in PHP and JavaScript, which optionally uses lightbox.js. It is designed to be an ultra-light-weight, “drop-in” image gallery.
zenphoto
Zenphoto is an answer to lots of calls for an online gallery solution that just makes sense. After years of bloated software that does everything and your dishes, zenphoto just shows your photos, simply. It’s got all the functionality and “features” you need, and nothing you don’t. Where the old guys put in a bunch of modules and junk, we put a lot of thought. We hope you agree with our philosopy: simpler is better.
Couloir.org: Resizing, Fading Slideshow Demo – AJAX Slideshow
This photo slideshow is a demonstration of Flash-like behavior implemented solely in Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The code is offered as-is — Couloir.org offers no technical support. However, you are permitted to use it on your own project so long as you do so according to the rules outlined in the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0′ License and the license terms contained in the associated, third-party APIs.
Grey Box
A pop-up window that doesn’t suck. GreyBox can be used to display websites, images and other content in a beautiful way.
Lightbox2
Lightbox JS 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.
Litebox
Litebox is a modified version of Lightbox v2.0 created with one thing in mind, size reduction. Litebox utilizes the 3kb javascript library moo.fx in association with prototype.lite, giving us the basic tools we need to make this work and you the ability to expand.
Multifaceted Lightbox
A script (JavaScript) that allows you to focus the users attention on a particular portion of the screen. It creates the equivalent of a modal dialog box – this means that while the user looks at this focused part of the screen, they can’t interact with the rest of the screen.
Slightly ThickerBox 1.7
Slightly ThickerBox is a modification of Cody Lindley’s Thickbox script. I modified it for use on my Jason’s Toolbox Redesign. The modifications allow the script to generate “Previous Image” and “Next Image” links. The result is that you can use Slightly ThickerBox to create image galleries. In addition, you can create groups of galleries by setting a “rel” attribute on the links. (I also moved the Caption and Close link to the top and made the script case insensitive.)
TripTracker
The TripTracker slideshow is a lightweight JavaScript image viewer with an animated slideshow feature.
Slimbox, the ultimate lightweight Lightbox clone
Slimbox is a 7kb visual clone of the popular Lightbox JS v2.0 by Lokesh Dhakar, written using the ultra compact mootools framework. It was designed to be small, efficient, more convenient and 100% compatible with the original Lightbox v2.
Suckerfish HoverLightbox
The Suckerfish HoverLightbox is a mashup of three very popular Web design techniques blended together to offer a new way of presenting your image galleries.
Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux
The Redux has a number of improvements, mostly visual, but some behavioral changes as well. Before going into detail, it’s important to give due credit to those who helped make the Suckerfish HoverLightbox a possibility.
ThickBox 2.1.1
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.

CSS-Based Image Galleries

A Photograph Gallery
Just a simple :hover over thumbnail images to give a full size view of each photograph. With all but Opera you can also click the thumbnails to retain the image on the screen. Text can be added at the bottom of each picture. Ideal for photograph albums.
A simple CSS photo-album
The text numbers and images are held in an unordered list without any extra markup (no ‘ems’ or ’spans’ etc). The CSS just styles the text numbers so that they appears in a box and the images so that they are hidden until your visitor clicks a number square.
Cross Browser Multi-Page Photograph Gallery
Based on Suckerfish HoverLightbox this one uses my multi-page layout system but includes images instead of text. Unlike the Suckerfish HoverLightbox this version is pure CSS.
CSS Image Gallery
This is a purely CSS based image gallery that displays larger versions of thumbnail images dynamically when the mouse hovers over them. A rich HTML caption can be added to the enlarged image, and every aspect of the Image Gallery exists as plain HTML on the page. The idea is to use CSS’s “:hover” pseudo class to cause an element to react onMouseover. When that happens, an absolutely positioned container holding the enlarged image, anchored on the page by another container with position set to relative, is shown. Furthermore, it’s possible to modify the behavior so the enlarged images are only shown onClick, though IE6 currently doesn’t support this behavior well. The gallery works in IE6+, Firefox, Opera 8+.
CSS: Photo Showcase
This experiment uses CSS and basic markup to create a simple way to display photo thumbnails on your site while offering convenient fast zoom viewing, even for dialup users.
Hoverbox Image Gallery
Basically, it’s a super light-weight (8kb) roll-over photo gallery that uses nothing but CSS.
Photo scroll gallery
A combination of several of my previous galleries to give a scrolling ‘thumbnail’ image, a medium size image on hover and a full size image on click. The thumbnail, medium size and full size images are all the same image just resized using CSS. The thumbnails are square to make the scrolling area simpler to work with. This does make these images a little distorted but not so much that they look wrong.
Sliding Photograph Galleries
It is just an unordered list of images that are normally compressed vertically (reduction 8:1). When you hover over one of these compressed images it expands to full size. It is based on my sliding menu system and adapted to use images. No thumbnails are required and all the images are ‘pre-loaded’.This method can be used either vertically, as shown, or horizontally.

JavaScript + CSS-based Galleries & DHTML-Galleries

xImgGallery – Javascript Image Gallery & Slideshow
This script implements a Javascript image gallery and slideshow – all in one file.
easyAlbum
A DOM photo Gallery solution that is browser friendly, keyboard friendly, bandwidth friendly and more.
ImageGal
imagegal is a simple PHP script that will automagically create a JS/CSS/DHTML powered image gallery for you when dropped into a directory containing images. This simple script was inspired by a Jeremy Keith’s article on aListApart.com.
Highslide JS
Highslide JS is a piece of JavaScript that streamlines the use of thumbnail images on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages: No plugins like Flash or Java required. Popup blockers are no problem. The images expand within the active browser window.
Satellite
Satellite is an all in one photo gallery website that takes advantage of Yahoo Flickr’s image hosting and management tools. You can upload and manage your images using Flickr and host your portfolio on your own server via Satellite.
Dhonishow
Showing Picture Online with Javascript.

10 Professional Tips for Design and Build Email Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:45:00 +0000

“We really love this new website you’ve built! Now we’d like to send out an email to all of our customers, friends and anyone, and it should look exactly like the website except with a spinning mailbox at the bottom, and have my photo, and my cat’s photo…” Ever had that conversation with a client? You’ve built plenty of websites in your time and could knock off a blog template in your sleep, but HTML email? Seriously? HTML email has the reputation (often well deserved) of being a horrible design medium.

The mere mention of it sends some designers into physical shock (try it if you ever get stuck in a tedious conversation about XHTML vs. HTML 5). The truth remains that businesses and individuals the world over send and receive email in HTML format by default every day, and many of them genuinely prefer it to plain text. So designers have a choice. We can stick our fingers in our ears, cover our eyes and hope it all goes away or we can learn to make the best of a challenging design medium and produce something that raises the quality level a bit.

This article gives you the information you need to plan, design and build an HTML newsletter that renders well and is actually useful to recipients. It’s a quick and dirty guide to effective email newsletters.

If you’d like to get started right now, here are the cheat notes to get you on the right track. Read on for more detail, examples and resources.

Respect your reader. Don’t waste their time or attention.
Ask nicely first.
Focus on relevance.
Design with a goal in mind, so that you’ll know if it worked.
Make unsubscribing easy.
Code like it’s 1999 (literally) and use inline CSS.
Always include a plain text version.
Don’t assume that images will be viewed.
Follow the law.
Test everything before sending, because you can’t take it back.

1. Respect Your Reader. Don’t Waste Their Time or Attention.

The email inbox is a noisy busy place for a newsletter to land. Hundreds of other emails are already on the pile, with folders, calendars and notes on all sides. The typical user is probably not waiting with bated breath for your email to arrive.

So when your email does arrive, make sure it doesn’t waste their time. Get to the point quickly, instead of burying the value under a mountain of greetings and headers and hilarious photos. Figure out why someone would want your email, and then tell them what that is right away.

One excellent example of getting to the point is the recent Haystack announcement. No need to guess what Haystack is for when you read the top of this email:

2. Ask Nicely First

When you are excited about something, you want to tell everyone. Clients often assume that everyone they have ever met, and many they have not, would love nothing more than to receive their latest news. Of course, this is not the case, and laws are in place to back them up.

If you are using an external email service, it will have its own policies on what permission you need in order to email people. Know which policies apply to you and your clients before you send. Explicit permission is best: ask people directly if they would like to receive emails about your topic. If you can show an example of what they’ll get and let them know how often they’ll get it, all the better.

People might forget actually asking to receive your email, particularly if they don’t send emails very often or signed up as a result of entering a competition. A short message at the top of your email will help people remember and make them more likely to read on. Here’s an example of a well-executed permission reminder:

In this case, the recipient gets an explicit reminder of the time and the place they gave their permission. Following up soon after the sign-up also ensures that the recipient doesn’t forget.

In 2006, Return Path conducted a survey that showed that “knowing and trusting the sender” was the biggest factor in whether recipients opened an email, so avoiding complaints of spam isn’t good enough.

3. Focus on Relevance

Even if you have met your legal obligations and have the explicit permission of your recipients, they don’t necessarily want to read your emails. Have you ever agreed to receive “special discounts” on an item, only to be bombarded by endless advertisements for different items from the same company? Sending valuable, relevant information to your subscribers is vital. You might not want to send information to everyone on your list just because you can. Consider carefully whether the information is useful to them and what they expect from you.

ISPs and email providers now consider relevance in their definition of spam, giving you even more incentive to focus on relevance.

4. Design With a Goal in Mind, So That You’ll Know If It Worked

Approach newsletter design as you would a website. Know why you’re sending the email and what result you want to achieve. We’ll cover this in more detail in the planning section below. The email below makes it very obvious what action its authors would like their subscribers to take:

Sit down with your client or boss and ask them plainly, “What is the one thing you want people to do when they get this email?” You might have to force them to pick only one to begin with! Designing to meet 10 different goals is hard, but you can design to support just 1 or 2. As we’ll discuss later, you can measure whether you’ve reached your goal in plenty of ways.

5. Make Unsubscribing Easy

We’re all tempted to hide the dull disclaimers and terms and conditions in Tiny Gray Font Land at the bottom of the page, but putting the “Unsubscribe” link there is a bad idea. There’s no point in emailing people who are not interested in your content any more. If your content is no longer relevant to them, let them unsubscribe easily. Making it hard will likely only lead to complaints of spam and leave people with a bad impression of your company.

Much better to make it clear and prominent; that way, if they decide in future that they would like to receive the information you’re offering, they will be confident in signing up.

It doesn’t have to be boring either. One of my favorites is, “You can unsubscribe instantly, but if you do we may scream, cry and then call you at 2:00 am begging you to come back. It’s your choice.” Not appropriate for every client, but you can have fun with more casual emails.

6. Code Like It’s 1999 (Literally) and Use Inline CSS

While most of us have put down our tools of trade from the browser wars, the fight goes on in the jungles of the email client, like those soldiers who don’t find out about the peace treaty until decades later.

Instead of a handful of browsers, we find more than a dozen major email clients, with HTML and CSS rendering ranging from great to appalling. So, to get decent results across a lot of clients, we’re back to using structural tables. Joy! Read on for tips and tricks to make coding the HTML and CSS in your design a not entirely frustrating experience.

Some email clients strip CSS out of the head but leave style blocks in the body (as invalid as this is). Gmail goes further and strips out all CSS from the head and body but leaves inline styling.

So, once you’ve completed your design, you will need to go through and add inline styles to your elements. Some email services help you with this; or you could use Premailer. You can also use some nifty tools for CSS inline styling, such as The Automatic CSS Inliner Tool or Inline Styler — the latter converts CSS rules into inline style attributes.

7. Always Include a Plain Text Version

Some people just don’t like HTML in their emails. They might be using older systems, or their system is locked down and they just can’t view HTML. Provide a plain text alternative to every email, so that the reader’s own email server or program can choose which version to display.

Again, your email service probably provides that capability. Plain text can be hard to read, so spend some time making it scannable and useful. Here is a recent example from Mark Hurst at Good Experience:

8. Don’t Assume That Images Will Be Viewed

If you have used Outlook or Gmail, you’ve seen that “Images in this email are not displayed” message many times. In many of the major email clients, your images will not be shown by default. Readers have to click a link or button to download and display them. Here is a recent email we saw. On the left is the intended design (well, the top half of it), and on the right is how it appears in Gmail by default. Not exactly clear!

You may be able to work around this with some types of embedded images, but they have their own issues, too. No matter how perfect your images are, they may have no impact, or even a negative impact, on the success of your email.

If your client insists on a pixel-perfect design, an all-image email may seem like a good option. But if images are not shown to the user, and they see no text, all they’ll get is a big fat annoying blank message. Always ensure that your email has HTML text as well as plain text. Many people might not realize they can choose to show images, and some just won’t bother. So you can’t assume that people will actually see your images at all. For a full rundown on what the default settings of each email client are, check out current conditions in image blocking.

How do you work around this? Here are a few ideas:

Avoid images for important content such as headlines, links and calls to action.
Add a prominent text-based link to a Web version of your newsletter.
Get recipients to add you to their address book or whitelist.
Use the alt attribute for all images to give Gmail users a better experience.
Specify height and width for images to ensure that the blank placeholders don’t throw your design off.
Test your design with images turned off before sending.

9. Follow the Law

Review any relevant commercial email regulations for your country. The best known of course are the US CAN-SPAM laws, but there are many others. For a great starting point, visit Email Marketing Reports.

You might need to include a physical building address in your email or include something like “[advertisement]” in your subject line. Many email marketing tools help you build templates with these required elements, to ensure your client does not send out emails without them.

Even though you may not be at risk for the largest CAN-SPAM fine ever, you could easily get into trouble with your email service if recipients complain and you have not adhered to the law. Legitimate providers have little tolerance for people who send emails that don’t meet legal requirements and could close your account or blacklist your server.

10. Test Everything Before Sending, Because You Can’t Take It Back

While reviewing current email client standards is a great start, nothing beats actually testing a newsletter in as many clients as possible. Several services help with design and spam testing, and the service you use may already have this built in. Make sure every link is working and that any personalization appears as expected. We always spot problems two seconds after hitting “Send,” so send some test emails to people who can give you feedback, and save yourself the despair of sender’s regret.

Tips, Tricks And Resources To Build Your Email

Though harder to find than general advice on Web design, plenty of help is available online for building a successful newsletter. Over at the excellent 24 Ways, Dave Greiner has a great list of technical tips and tricks that is worth reading in full (the comments, too). Here are a few of the best tips:

Use tables for structure, instead of CSS.
Nested tables are more reliable than padding and margins.
Avoid CSS shorthand. (Use full definitions.)
Don’t use PNG images because Lotus Notes 6 and 7 do not show them.
Explicitly set a margin for every paragraph, because the defaults vary a lot.

Read the “Rock Solid HTML Emails” article for all of the tips and follow-up comments. Your next step should be to bookmark the following links and save a bunch of time (and maybe your hairline, too).

HTML email templates and design galleries:

Free templates from Campaign Monitor
Themeforest templates
Free templates from MailChimp
Campaign Monitor gallery of great designs
SpamMeltdown email gallery (despite the awful name)
Beautiful Email Newsletters Gallery
Inspirational Newsletter Designs: Flickr Set
A collection of beautiful and creative layouts collected by Damian Madray.

Campaign Monitor’s research on HTML rendering in email clients:

Testing tools:

When you’re sick of dealing with problems…

Everything else…

42 HTML Email Design Resources
A summary of the best HTML email design resources, covering overviews, guidelines, standards, templates, checklists, design tools, galleries and more.

Planning for Email Newsletters

We’ve covered some of the big design and technical factors that make HTML email a unique challenge, and this might be all you need.

Designing is not about lumping together HTML, CSS and a few images, though. It’s about solving problems, and email newsletters require planning, just like websites. Building an email is technically tricky but not impossible.

Building a newsletter that actually achieves its purpose is a different thing entirely. Your client (or boss) is paying you not so much to “design” as to help them sell more products, get more donations or win back clients.

If you don’t understand what an email is for, you won’t be able to give it the best design, unless it’s by accident. Here are a few questions to ask your client before putting mouse to pixel.

Who are you sending these emails to?
What is your main reason for sending these emails? (To drive sales? Build a relationship with subscribers? Start conversations?)
What type of emails are you planning to send?
What type of content do you want to send?
How often do you want to send emails?
Would you like to match the emails to an existing visual design?
Do you have examples of other emails that you like?

With answers in hand, you can set some measurable goals. One measurable goal might be to “Get 10% of subscribers to click through to the sales page,” or “Get the email forwarded to at least 100 new people this month.”

Keeping these goals at the front of your mind as you layout the newsletter changes the way you design. Suddenly you have something to help prioritize the content and a standard for deciding what stays in and what’s left out.

The work really begins once you actually send the email and can start measuring results against previous efforts.

Measuring the Success of Your Newsletter

Once you’ve set one or more goals, you’ll need to set up tools and processes to determine whether those goals have been met.

These might include sales figures from a particular department, reports from your email service provider or analytics from the website. If you use a specialized email sending service (such as Campaign Monitor, which is the one I use), you’ll get plenty of information in your reports.

Some common metrics:

Open rates = How many of those who received your email actually read it.
Click rates = How many of those who opened the email clicked a link.
Forwards = If your software has a “Send to friend” function, you can see how many people used it.
Unsubscribes = How many people have unsubscribed from your newsletter.
Conversion rate = How many of those who clicked through to your website went on to buy your product, download a trial or perform some other trackable action. Software such as Google Analytics can be used to record such actions and connect them to their source, including if it was your email campaign.

Statistics from one campaign are hard to interpret. For example, what is a good click-through rate for your particular audience? That’s very hard to know. When you send your next newsletter out to that same audience, you’ll have something to compare it to, and you’ll know whether you’re getting better.

You can use those statistics and metrics to persuade your client to listen to your proposals. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a graph showing a solid climb in click-through rates is worth at least 3,000 words and a cup of coffee.

Make a change, test the result, make another change and then test again. If your software supports A/B testing, then you can easily compare two subject lines or pieces of content in a single campaign and save yourself a lot of time.

Learn More About Email Marketing

Once you have the newsletter down, you may be interested in learning more about how email marketing works. Adding email marketing as a service to your own Web design business or freelancing skill set could really pay off. Convincing clients to pay a fair rate for design can be tough, but email marketing is much more easily measurable. If you can show your client that they are making x amount of money from each email, charging them accordingly isn’t so hard.

Here are some of my favorite email marketing websites to get you started:

Instant Inspiration For Your Email Campaigns

Here are just a few top-class HTML email designs, selected from the Campaign Monitor customer gallery and other sources. Use these to spark your own ideas; but remember, they belong to the original designers and clients and so are not for copying. Click each image to view the gallery entry and full email. Please notice that some of the designs featured below were selected not by the authors of this article, but by the Smashing Editorial team.

Get Out There And Do It

The next time your client asks you to design an email newsletter, you’ll have all the tools required to do a great job. Even if you don’t personally like HTML email, you’ll be in a position to give every one of their subscribers a helpful and readable newsletter.

Either we step up and get it done or the marketing team, armed with a CD of 10,000 clip-art images, will do the job for us… and we all know how that ends up. If you have any questions or comments, leave a comment below; I’ll address as many as I can.

Excellent Tips and Tricks for Mastering Photoshop

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Wajid) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:36:00 +0000

Excellent Tips and Tricks for Mastering Photoshop,We all have shortcuts that are essential to our daily workflow. A majority of them are staples such as Copy (Command + C) and Paste (Command + V), but occasionally we stumble upon a shortcut we wish we’d learned years ago. Suddenly, this simple shortcut has streamlined our process and shaved quite a bit of time off our day. Collected here are some lesser known but extremely useful shortcuts. Many of these are not documented in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” menu, and some of them don’t even have equivalent menu options.

Please note that all of the shortcuts listed below assume that you are using Photoshop CS4 on OS X. They will work on the Windows platform by converting as follows: Command → Control and Option → Alt.

Layers

Selection

Sifting through nests of layer sets to find the layer you need quickly becomes tiresome. Luckily, there are a number of ways to select layers more intuitively. Using the Move tool (V), you can Command + click on the canvas to select the uppermost layer with pixel data located directly below the mouse. If your layers are grouped within layer sets, this action may have selected the entire folder. You can change this behavior to select the actual layer by using the Auto-select drop-down in the Move tool’s property bar.

Changing auto-select behavior.

There will be times when you want to select a layer that is located below a number of other layers. By right-clicking with the Move tool, you’ll bring up a contextual menu containing a list of all layers located below the cursor. If your layers are properly named, you should be able to quickly select the layer you need. By holding Shift while using either of the selection methods above, you can select multiple layers. After selecting multiple layers, you can link the layers together by right-clicking and selecting Link Layers.

Right-clicking to display all layers beneath the cursor.

The keyboard can also be used to select layers. Pressing Option + [ or Option + ] selects the layer below or above the current layer, respectively. Pressing Option + < selects the bottommost layer, and Option + > selects the uppermost. Option + Shift + < selects all layers between the current layer and the bottommost layer, and Option + Shift + > selects all layers between the current and uppermost.

Sorting

Sorting layers with the mouse can be clumsy and slow. A few shortcuts speeds up the organizing. Command + [ and Command + ] moves the selected layer up or down one position in the stack. If multiple layers are selected, they’ll move relative to the uppermost or bottommost layer. Pressing Command + Shift + [ or Command + Shift + ] brings the selected layer to the top or bottom of its current layer group. If the layer is already at the top or bottom of the layer group, it jumps to the top or bottom of the parent layer group.

Viewing

Option + clicking the eye icon of a layer is a commonly known way to hide or show all other layers. There is also a way to expand and collapse layer groups: by Command + clicking the arrow next to the layer group, you can close or expand all other layer groups; this does not work on nested layer groups. Alternatively, right-clicking the arrow gives you a menu to perform the same actions; but this will work on nested layer groups.

Duplicating

There are a number of ways to duplicate data from one layer to another. Duplicating an entire layer is as simple as pressing Command + J. If a selection is active, you can use the same shortcut (Command + J) to create a new layer based on the selected area of the original layer. Pressing Command + Shift + J with a selection creates a new layer while cutting the data from the original layer. Holding Option while pressing one of the arrow keys allows you to duplicate the current layer and nudge it by 1 pixel. Holding Shift and Option nudges the new layer by 10 pixels.

Duplicating data from multiple layers can also be done more quickly using some keyboard commands. Using Command + Shift + C with an active selection copies the data contained within it to the clipboard. You can then paste it to a new layer (Command + Option + Shift + N, Command + V). If you’d like to create a flattened copy of the entire document, use the shortcut Command + Option + Shift + E: a composite of all visible layers will be added as a new layer to the top of your layer stack.

Brushes

Shape and Size

Being able to quickly adjust the brush tool is crucial to getting a swift workflow. Many know about using [ and ] to decrease and increase the brush’s diameter, as well as Shift + [ and Shift + ] to decrease and increase the brush’s hardness. However, CS4 introduced an even more intuitive way to do this. By holding Control + Option and dragging on the canvas, you can change the brush’s diameter with a visual aid. Control + Command + Option and dragging gives you control of the brush’s hardness.

The on-canvas drag makes brush adjustments more intuitive.

If you would like to completely change the brush shape to a different preset, press < or > to cycle through them and Shift + < or Shift + > to select the first or last brush. Right-clicking inside the canvas also displays a condensed menu of brushes.

Opacity, Flow and Mode

The opacity of the brush tool can be quickly tweaked using the number keys: 3 = 30%; 3 + 5 = 35%; 0 + 3 = 3%; 0 = 100%. Holding Shift when inputting the numbers sets the flow of the tool. Note that if Airbrush mode is on, these two shortcuts swap (i.e. holding Shift controls opacity instead of flow). You can toggle Airbrush mode on and off using Option + Shift + P. The same numeric input method can be used to determine the opacity of a layer when the Move tool (V) is active; pressing Shift allows you to alter the Fill of the layer.

Quick Fill

Instead of selecting the Fill tool (G), you can quickly bring up the Fill menu using Shift + F5. Even better, bypass the menu entirely using Option + Backspace to fill with the foreground color or Command + Backspace to fill with the background color. These keyboard commands can also be used to quickly set the color of a type or shape layer. To preserve transparency when filling, you could first lock the transparency of the layer by pressing / and then fill, but there’s an easier way. Pressing Option + Shift + Backspace or Command + Shift + Backspace fills with the foreground or background color while preserving transparency.

Pressing Command + Shift + Backspace to preserve transparency while filling.

Blending Modes

You can cycle through blending modes or jump to a specific one by using just the keyboard. By pressing Option + Shift + (+) or Option + Shift + (-), you can cycle forward or backward through available modes. Alternatively, you can set a specific mode using the shortcuts below.

Typesetting

Setting type is a delicate and time-consuming process, but shortcuts speed it up. First off, hiding the inversed block that is created by selecting text is extremely beneficial. Command + H allows you to toggle the visibility of both the highlight and baseline stroke, making it easier to see the final result. When finished editing your text, you can commit changes by pressing Enter on the numeric keypad or Command + Return. Pressing Esc discards changes.

Variants

There are six shortcuts for changing the font variant, but they should be used with caution. If the appropriate variant or character does not exist within the currently selected font family, Photoshop creates a faux variant. These fake variants are frowned upon within the typosphere and are extremely easy to spot. So, if you use these shortcuts, make sure that Photoshop has selected an actual variant and not faked it. Now, onto the shortcuts:

Justification

To set the justification, use one of the commands below. Note that a selection must be made within the target paragraph for these to work.

Spacing and Sizing

Properly sizing and spacing type is a tedious task, but Photoshop does provide some handy—albeit broad—shortcuts. Unfortunately, there is no way to fine-tune the increments by which they adjust. Note that these shortcuts will work only if a text selection is made; selecting a type layer is not enough. To change the type size by increments of 2, press either Command + Shift + < or >. To bump the increment up to 10 points, use Command + Option + Shift + < or >. Leading can also be modified by 2 or 10 point increments using Option + Up or Down arrow or by Command + Option + Up or Down arrow.

The arrow keys can also be used to adjust kerning and tracking. Pressing Option + Left or Right either kerns or tracks 20 units depending on whether or not a type selection is active (i.e. if the cursor is between two characters, kerning is applied; if multiple characters are selected, then tracking is adjusted). The increment can also be changed to 100 units using Command + Option + Left or Right arrow. Finally, the baseline can be shifted by 2 or 10 points using Option + Shift + Up or Down arrow or Command + Option + Shift + Up or Down arrow, respectively.

Resets

Sometimes, we have to return to the defaults. Below are some shortcuts to get you back on track.

Menus

Hidden within many of Photoshop’s menus are a number of shortcuts that make adjustments faster and easier. Just about every menu—whether for Adjustment, Filter or anything else—allows you to revert to the original settings; by simply holding Option, the Cancel button will turn into a Reset button. Depending on the menu, holding Option might even change some of the other buttons (e.g. the Done button in the “Save for Web and Devices” menu will change to Remember). Certain menus, such as the Filter Gallery, also allow you to hold Command to turn the Cancel button into a Default button.

Using modifier keys to uncover in-menu options.

Spring-loaded Commands

By default, most menus transform the cursor into the Hand tool or Move tool. These tools can be used on the canvas while the menu is open to pan the document or to adjust settings, such as the Angle and Distance settings for a Drop Shadow. More tools, however, are available via spring-loaded shortcuts. The zoom tools can be accessed using either Command (to zoom in) and Option (to zoom out) or Command + Space (to zoom in) and Command + Option + Space (to zoom out). The hand tool can also be accessed by holding the space bar.

Holding Command + Spacebar to access the zoom tool within the Blending options.

Adjustment Menus and Layers

The Curves adjustment, like most other adjustments, contains some handy shortcuts. Similar to how you can cycle through the Channels in a document, you can cycle through the adjustment’s channels using Option + 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. You can also cycle through the points on the actual curves using - and =. With a point selected, you can nudge the points in increments of 2 in any direction using the arrow keys. Holding Shift in conjunction with the arrow keys moves the point by 16 units. When working with an adjustment menu, you can toggle the Preview option on and off by pressing P. Adjustment layers don’t have a Preview option, but you can temporarily disable it by pressing and holding \.