The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter. Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics:

Webdesign, CSS, HTML, jQuery, etc.

Web Design: Reboot, or Just Upgrade Instead? – Change is always hard, and knowing when to upgrade or redesign is among the most critical events in a site’s history. A successful transition from old to new will revitalise a community, give renewed interest in your content or perhaps better portray your services.

A Complete Guide to Progressive Enhancement - For years, web designers have been using graceful degradation principles to make sure visitors in older browsers can at least see the content on their websites, even if they don’t see it exactly how the designer intended.

Craftsmanship in Designing Websites - With high pressure from clients and crazy development schedules for web designers, it is easy to forget to spend the proper amount of time crafting a design. In the interest of speeding things up, it’s tempting to skip over small details. This is an easy pitfall to which to succumb, but in the end, it can hurt your overall career.

How to Use Illustrations to Spice Up Your Web Design Work – Graphic illustrations have become commonplace in today’s web design. They can add a unique branding element into an otherwise bland world of templates and corporate logos. Although just 5 years ago you would be hard-pressed to find many websites looking for illustrators, times have changed, …

My Favorite Web Applications for Designers – As we all know, there are many web tools available to designers online, so instead of listing ALL of them, I’ve decided to share my favorites that I use on an everyday basis.  FYI, this doesn’t include mac apps or programs, just online web tools and a couple of firefox plug-ins.

5 Killer Ways to Streamline your Coding Efficiency – I recently read a forum thread about designers and developers, and the hourly rates they charge. One commenter made a great point, saying that you can start to charge more per hour, if you are more efficient, and faster at producing quality work, as long as quality is not compromised for speed.

Performance Optimization: How to Load your javascript faster! – Javascript is now extremely important. Some sites use javascript for a tiny enchantments, many of today’s webapps are depending on it, some of them are even totally written in js. In this article I’ll point out some important rules, how to use your javascript, which tools to use and what benefits you’ll gain from it.

Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness - Want to increase your website’s conversion rate? Want more subscribers, opt-ins, members, customers? How about doing less work while you’re at it? Too good to be true? Nope. It’s possible if you apply the 80-20 rule: focus on the 20% that will bring you 80% of the results.

Ultimate List Of Web Design Checklists: Get Work Done! – When building a website, there are so many things and aspects to keep in mind. It often happens that in that mess we forget about some basic things like favicon or maybe about dummy content removal from test site. It’s much easier to go trough all those things when you have all of them written down.

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, etc.

Alternatives to Common Fonts – Overused typefaces can lose their impact, especially in branding, advertising, and package design where originality is important. Here we recommend fonts that are less common but just as serviceable as old standbys like Helvetica, Futura and even Comic Sans.

29 principles for making great font combinations - When it comes to making font combinations, there are principles and methods, but no absolutes. You can’t apply all the principles or ideas listed here at the same time. Just peruse this list of ideas and see what strikes you as interesting, and then pursue creating your own interesting typeface pairs!

Font naming conventions – A typeface is the design. A font is the variant of that design contained in a file. Font names can seem somewhat inconsistent with many interchangeable terms. This is an attempt to break down and catalogue the descriptive characteristics and terms commonly used for font names.

40 Adobe Illustrator Text Effect Tutorials – Which one is better for manipulating text, Photoshop or Illustrator? There is no clear and defined answer. What is clear is that Illustrator, being mainly used used for creating seamless vector images, allows the user a greater degree of accuracy, control, and precision. Of course this depends on the hand controlling the mouse.

Grid Systems – A NEW method developed by Marcus Gärde to produce gridsystems based on old books and scrolls. During his research when writing his first book, The Way of Typography, Garde found out that old bibles and scrolls where not designed in the same manner as todays books – they where actually more complex!

FAQs of Logo Designing – a Designer’s Perspective – The importance of a logo for branding and brand communication is unanimous. People are exposed to way too many concepts and ideas on a daily basis to remember them all. However, only the most attractive of elements stay in our minds and a good logo can be one of these attractive elements

An Analysis of Typography on the Web – Typography is one of the most—if not the most—important aspects of web design. Some would argue that it takes up to 95% of web design, so why do we often neglect its importance? The readers who come to your site will often decide whether or not to stay according to your typographic choices. After all, they came here to read in the first place. Think about it for a second: if content really is king, logically typography should be treated as the queen.

Blogging, Social Media, Wordpress etc.

Social media and its effects on the intellect – The advance of social media discourse could be harshly described as a continual distraction, containing noisy encumbrances of rapidly-sampled psychotic diatribes from multiple silos. This, it is said, is one of the profound questions about the narcissism of the modern psyche.

Twitter 101, Tips to Get You Started – I have a confession to make: I was not an early adopter of Twitter. To be honest, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the language. It seemed like a string of links to even more things I had no time to read. It felt overwhelming. LinkedIn and Facebook made sense as a perfect extension of networking I was already doing, but the charm of Twitter eluded me.

Post-Install Plugins to Enhance & Protect WordPress – WordPress is a fantastic, easy to install application that’s packed full of useful features. It’s all ready to rock straight out of the box, but there’s a few easy customisations you can make with a cocktail of plugins that will enhance the functionality as well as offer crucial protection.

How to Grow Traffic to Your Blog – Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation.

Tips to improve your Design blog – Blogging has become the most important and widely used tool of new media technology. The concept has, once again, enabled the Internet to become a two way communicating medium. Since the advent of blogging, people from all walks of life have started pouring into this and have initiated blog sites of their particular expertise.

In-Depth Review of Tumblr’s Custom Theming Ability - Tumblr. If you’re a savvy tech maven, you may have heard of, or had the chance to use, this powerful microblogging platform. No wonder; millions of people have chosen Tumblr as their blogging service, and the average Tumblr user creates 14 original posts every month.

7 reasons for malfunctioning plugins (and their fixes) – It happens to every plugin author: you receive emails from people that your plugin isn’t working. There are about 7 reasons that – for me – seem to be the root cause of up to 95% of these emails, and I thought I’d write them down and show you how I try to handle them.

SEO, Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, etc.

4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts - In addition to writing for their human readers, web writers and bloggers have to consider the digital web crawlers employed by search engines like Google. Your business can’t skip the task. Since most would-be readers use search engines to find blog posts, you need to make sure that Google ranks your site highly when those readers search for terms related ..

Don’t Let Good Content Die – 4 Ways to Keep It Alive – Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don’t, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products ..

Google Gives SEO Link Building Advice – The way the search engines operate is almost always changing. Sometimes the changes happen while we sleep and sometimes we are given a heads up way in advance so that we can prepare for the blow. Regardless building links is always going to be an integral part of building up a business online.

Tutorials

Design and code an elegant social media menu for your portfolio site – Today, I would like to offer a tutorial on building an elegant jQuery social media menu for your portfolio site.

50 Refreshing CSS Tutorials, Techniques and Resources – In this CSS (2 & 3) round-up article we have focused on highlighting as many varied techniques covering as many aspects of web, mobile and application development as possible. And believe me, it wasn’t easy! Due to CSS3s current popularity, the volume of new tutorials and fresh ideas has jumped skywards.

Creating an Animated 404 Page – It is bound to happen. Sooner or later, somebody is going to type in a wrong URL or follow a broken link to your site. This is when the notorious 404 page is displayed. To make the experience less frustrating, you can take the time and design a friendly error page, which will encourage your user to stay at your web site.

70 Tutorials For Learning And Mastering Light Effects In Photoshop – A collection of a range of different tutorials for learning how to master various types of lighting effects using Photoshop. There are a range of tutorials featured within the compilation which the end result can be achieved by a novice to Photoshop or even teach a guru of Photoshop a few new tips.

9 Useful PHP Functions and Features You Need to Know – Even after using PHP for years, we stumble upon functions and features that we did not know about. Some of these can be very useful, yet underused. Not all of us have read the manual and the function reference from cover to cover!

Create a Color Picker Icon In Illustrator – In this tutorial I will show you how to create a color picker icon from some blends, gradients, and simple shapes. This icon works great for web design project and in user interface design. Moreover, you can use the techniques in this tutorial in other icon, web, and print projects.

Just F***ing Brilliant & A Great Read!

Getting to grips with content – Now is the opportune time for us to start taking our content seriously. Over the past few years, there has been a surge in web devices that focus on portability and readability over processing power. With a changing attitude amongst key media players, content must no longer be ignored as a truly marketable asset.

Little Tricks to Get More Customers Smiling – It always surprises me to hear about how few business-people implement strategies of doing what they can to make their customers feel good. I know that trying to keep customers happy is a generally unspoken rule when you’re in business, because satisfied clients are usually always the goal.

Lessons Learned after 5 Years of Blogging – This Fall, I celebrate five years of blogging. I have written tons of web development stuff at Perishable Press, lots of helpful WordPress stuff at Digging into WordPress, some philosophical stuff at mindfeed.org, creative/artistic stuff at Dead Letter Art, jQuery stuff at jQuery Mix, and some business-related web-design stuff at Monzilla Media.

Is 2011 The Year of the Social Media Bubble – Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future by any means, but it sure seems more probable than not.

On the Concept of Process – I’m going to start this discussion of by revealing a secret about my own design work: I don’t have a process. At least, I don’t have a rock solid, time tested step by step formula that I follow for all my projects. That’s not to say that I shoot from the hip or fly by the seat of my pants, to use a couple of cliched old sayings.

I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know  ..

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @gonzodesign_This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

First of all I’d like to thank DepositPhotos.com for making this giveaway possible and allowing the readers of the gonzoblog.nl a chance to win one of two $40 dollar stock photo accounts.

Their library of over 1,5 million images coupled with a wide variety of flexible purchase options makes Deposit Photos the most convenient and profitable tool for designers, artists and photographers. With over 1.5 million photos already present and thousands getting uploaded daily Deposit Photos has become a excellent resource for designers, .. the place to go to!

More about DepositPhotos.com

DepositPhotos.com is the fastest growing photo stock site on the Internet. Customers by the thousands are flocking to buy subscriptions because they know the industry’s best and most popular photographers and artists sell their finest work at DepositPhotos.com. Their library of royalty-free stock images boasts some of the highest quality photographs and vector renderings anywhere, all available at some of the lowest prices ever – and low prices are only the beginning.

DepositPhotos.com’s subscription plans are some of the most flexible and affordable plans on the market. In addition to subscriptions, you can buy one image at a time using site credits or purchase images and bulk using nothing more than a simple text message. SMS Images are a DepositPhotos.com exclusive feature, and it’s just one of the many unique innovations this company has introduced to the industry. They’ve also restructured the way photographers and artists are paid for their work, making them extremely popular with the industry professionals. Their huge database of royalty-free stock photos is growing exponentially every day, and they’re all available for purchase under a variety of licenses stringent enough to protect your project while remaining flexible enough to meet your every need.

See for yourself why DepositPhotos.com has become the fastest growing stock agency on the Internet. Prepare to be impressed not only by their incredible selection of merchandise but also by the entire experience of shopping at DepositPhotos.com. From top to bottom and inside out, these guys have bent over backwards to make sure you get what you need at the prices you want.

So, if you really want to know more about their Pay-As-You-Go option, Flexible Subscription Plans, Free Trials or Special Offers (2 images for the price of 1), please visit the website: DepositPhotos.com

Rules to enter the Giveaway

Participating in the giveaway is very easy you just need to follow these steps to take part:

1. Retweet this post by clicking on the TweetMeMe button below (in the Share This – section)
2. Leave us a comment telling us why you want to win this contest (please, only comment once) – Don’t forget to provide a valid email address so that we can contact you if case you might win!

You don’t have to follow me on Twitter, .. or subscribe to my RSS Feed, but I would appreciate it very much if you did ;-P

Deadline of the Giveaway is 15th of september. The winners will be chosen randomly and announced here and by email on the 16th of september.

If you have any thing extra to say relating to your experiences of using stock photos please do share them with us.This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter. Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics:

Webdesign, CSS, HTML, jQuery, etc.

Minimalism in Web Design: A Guide – Minimalism is a word that gets tossed around in a lot of different contexts. Whether it be a lifestyle or an art form, saying something is “minimalistic” can take on a variety of meanings. In the web design field, minimalism is carving out an ever-increasing niche among designers that are looking to convey important content in a new way.

A Design Is Only As Deep As It Is Usable – There are well-known proverbs that imply (or state outright) that beauty is superficial and limited in what it can accomplish. “It’s what’s inside that counts” and “Beauty is only skin deep” are a few simple examples. Because the Web design industry is now flooded with a lot of raw talent, and because virtually anyone can create …

Proper Standards-Compliant Color Use in Web Design – As designers who’d like to turn our creations into works of art, we want to design towards our heart’s content — letting our eyes be the final judge of our masterpieces. But as we all know, creating a web page is different from creating a painting — with a painting, we can freely express ourselves on the canvas.

50 Awesome New jQuery Plugins – The jQuery community never ever fails to let you down. Its constantly evolving, constantly improving and, thankfully, constantly releasing a tidal wave of fresh and powerful freely available plugins for every possible requirement.

11 Principles of Interaction Design explained – This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

Issues with modal overlays on the web – Seems as if modal overlays are quite popular on the Web lately. A large number of easy to use plugins such as Lightbox, contributed to the expansion of overlays on the Web. Two years ago lightbox was named a dialog design technique of the year. Since then, overlays became a common way to show forms, feedback and other content.

Empathy and web design – Although different people assume different things when it comes to design, the fact is that good design is often thought to be decorative and aesthetic. This applies to design in general so web design is no different. We admire beautiful design solutions that are mostly nothing more than eye-candy.

UX won’t save you – I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case.

How to Design a Web Banner That Stands Out – In today’s world, the need of advertising is growing directly in proportion with the growing economy. Advertising has become an inevitable element of businesses. Every company is adopting the concept of advertising and is constantly striving to use new mediums of advertisement by which people can be attracted.

Create Smooth Rotatable Images with CSS3 and jQuery – With the advent of CSS3 transforms, we can do some nice tricks with elements in a web page, including rotation, scaling, and skewing. Once we start throwing jQuery into the mix too, we can start doing some really nice tricks!

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, etc.

40 New And Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – The Internet is bursting with knowledge. Whatever you want is available at your fingertips, and learning new techniques is so easy with the load of useful tutorials that guide you step by step. Adobe Illustrator is powerful indeed, but when used right, it can perform feats that humans will marvel at!

Guidelines for Designing Tables – Although no one single visual display is most effective for presenting quantitative data, tables are often an ideal choice when you need to present specific values. Information placed within a grid framework and aesthetically designed for ease of use provides an efficient way for people to look up and compare data.

Why Good Brands Fail – You wake up with a brilliant idea, a new concept no one has thought of before. You develop a flawless marketing plan over morning coffee, word gets out and by noon, the best teams of specialists all call you. All these world-class designers, marketing consultants, media planners, and brand management professionals offer you their services free, just to be ..

The Art and Tradition of Typography – For over 25 years Microsoft has been very focused on the development of type and type technologies. In order to fully understand the technical foundations of typography in Windows, a brief overview of some of the highlights of “typographic engineering” from the past 500 years can add some useful insight.

Font Smoothing – Webkit, the engine under the Safari and Chrome browsers, adds an interesting property to CSS called “font-smoothing”. You can probably guess what it does by its name. There are three different values you can use for it ..

Design101: Utilizing Strong Alignments – Today we’re going to examine one of the most basic principles in design: alignment. This deceptively simple topic is actually quite complex and is among the most notably lacking proficiencies in designers today.

Blogging, Social Media, Wordpress etc.

Take Advantage of the free space available at Twitter! – Twitter is one of the best social networks available today. It is not just a social network but it has become a part of life for millions of people around the world. Recently twitter reached 20 billion tweets mark and having more than 100 million registered users.

10 Ways to Speed Up Your Blog – How much time do you expect it to take for a blog to load? Many users start to get impatient after waiting for five seconds. Others are more generous, allowing for ten seconds to reach that great content. There are many factors which affect loading time like pictures, your hosting services and your database.

20 Very Useful Comment Page Hacks for WordPess Users – As defined, WordPress is an open source Content Management system, often used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL. Most computer bloggers uses WordPress because it is much easier, and it is growing in popularity in blog software application.

The 12 Best Ways To Customize Your Facebook Pages – When a service such as Facebook limits users’ creative freedom, it is inevitable that other add-on services will overcome this limitation. This is why then, we see more and more Facebook tab apps that give us more control and freedom when it comes to customizing a fan page or a personal profile.

Pimp your wp-config.php – Easily, the most important file in your WordPress installation is the wp-config.php file. It serves as your site’s base configuration file, controlling key aspects of WordPress’ functionality and enabling WordPress to do mission-critical stuff like connect to the database. Without wp-config.php, WordPress simply won’t work.

10 Ways To Dramatically Increase Your RSS Feed Subscribers – Every blogger would like to have more RSS Feed subscribers, wouldn’t you agree? If you are unfamiliar with what an RSS feed is, I’ll give you a quick description of what it is and how to get started.

SEO, Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, etc.

Steps to Build Your SEO – Search engine optimization is one of those things that require certain steps in a specific order to really work well. I often times see many people putting the buggy before the horse really just wasting time, energy and money by not putting the puzzle together in the right sequence.

Don’t make me wait - Page speed and load times are the foundation for a positive user experience on the web. Let’s face it, if your page fails to load in time, all the effort put towards information architecture, content strategy and interaction design will be for naught. During my formative front-end coding days, I did a fair bit of ..

How to Ensure Your Website Gets Some Action – When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it’s your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town.

10 Deadly SEO Sins – SEO still seems like a very foggy effort to many website owners. I still see people in the forums and blogs that seem to be stuck in search engine optimization circa 2001 by looking for directory submission services and articles “blasts” which do nothing but flood the web pages with junk.

Tutorials

How to easily create charts using jQuery and HTML5 – For years, Flash was the only solution to display a dynamic chart on a website. But thanks to modern techniques, the dying Flash isn’t needed anymore. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how easy it is to transform a basic HTML table into a profesionnal looking chart using visualize.js, a very useful jQuery plugin.

How to Create a Three-dimensional Airplane with Adobe Illustrator – In this tutorial you will learn how to create a detailed three-dimensional image of an Airplane based on two two-dimensional plans. The knowledge acquired will help you to simulate a three-dimensional image of many different complex objects.

45+ Incredible Vector Tutorials for Graphic Designers – Vector graphics playing major role in design work, specially in Print Media where we can draw characters, shapes and other illustrations. Vector applications can be used to create things such as logos, characters, and icons.

Just F***ing Brilliant & A Great Read!

Abandon The Flock – Around half a year ago I made a decision that proved to be a correct one. I decided to go freelance, to leave the hive, abandon the flock. I can’t say it was the easiest choice in the world and the only thing I was sure of at the time was that I was taking a risk. Turns out it was a risk worth taking.

How Limitations Improve Design - We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers. From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.

The Art of interviewing a Client – For designers, it’s never enough to merely follow the design brief a client gives you. In identity design, we view our projects as opportunities to dig deep, mining the best parts of an organization to get at the heart of what makes each client unique. It’s these nuggets that are essential when attempting to distill a company’s essence into a logo.

Can You as a Freelance Designer Compete with Bigger Companies? – We’ve talked about freelancing, – what to do and how to do it. In this article we’re gonna have a look at some of your stronger and weaker sides compared to bigger Design Companies. By reading this you’ll get an idea of how you can compete even better and which things to focus on when selling your designs and services to new clients.

Everything You Know About Content Strategy is Wrong – Concepts travel absurdly fast when it comes to the web. This is not surprising as those working with the medium are clearly of the “early adopter” group and are significantly more likely to talk and be vocal about their interests, passions and projects. This has always been an asset to the web, helping the medium grow and evolve.

10 Reasons Freelance Designers Get Screwed - Designers know what we SHOULD be paid. We know what our time is worth. Then why is it that we have to jump through so many hoops just to be paid? Why is it that we are always getting screwed? It’s not really a secret that oftentimes designers have trouble collecting payment upon completion of a job.

4 Reasons to Track Time on Projects - I haven’t punched a clock in more than 10 years. And even when I did, I never cared much for the idea. I guess I didn’t like the message it sent out: that I was being paid for my time — not for my ideas, creativity, excellent customer service and added revenue for my employer.

10 Questions to Be in Sync with Your Clients – We’ve all been there. We put in our best effort on a project and we race to the finish line with excellent work. Mission accomplished! But then we find out we missed a very key piece of data or failed to pick up on some subtle cues. The final deliverable is off target

5 Good Ways to Close a Client Deal – Do you have trouble closing client deals? Do you find yourself really close to getting a new client, only to find that the deal (and the new client) never materializes? It’s happened to me in my freelancing business, and it’s probably also happened to you. It’s really frustrating, I know.

UX won’t Save you – I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case.

I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know  ..

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @gonzodesign_This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

Brochures almost always act as the face of a company to express their services and ideas, future projects or to showcase a product-launch. Brochures are also often being used by the non-profit organizations to collect funds.

Flyers, on the other hand, are commonly used for announcing upcoming sales and events: a new film, a music-festival, opening of a disco, etc. When designing a flyer you need to make it appealing for the main target group or audiance to come to the event.

So, you will understand it’s quite crucial to concentrate on the quality of the design and also the quality of printing. In this following article I hope to share some basics tips for designing brochures/flyers that could be helpful:

Preparation

As with all projects that succeed, preparation is the key here. The first steps for designing a brochure should be these 3 questions (What is/are):

• Desired Audience/Target Group
• Reasons for the Brochure/Flyer
• Desired Outcome

Before you think about taking your ideas to the printers make sure you also have the knowledge of what information/content you are going to express in it.

High resolution images are crucial

If you are looking to design a professional looking brochure or flyer then you need to add some high-resolution images or graphics, do not suffocate your design with a lot of straight-forward boring bla-blah. Using high-resolution images (300+ dpi) won’t make them blurry or blocky, if it does then your brochure provides a very bad presentation and can hurt the image (.. nice figure of speech BTW ;-P) of your company or brand.

More information, tips and tricks about image resolution you can find in an earlier article in the gonzoblog.nl: Print Design: What is Resolution?

Simplicity is the key

‘Less Is More’ is the most important rule of design that will get your audience’s attention. The design and layout of any brochure/flyer are the only tools to attract that audience. Meaning, a neat and simple design that looks more elegant than other designs which are filled with images and text decoration. Using larger, not more, photos or graphics is better than dumping the whole candy store into one design and please, .. also leave plenty of white space^[1]!

Brochure and flyers should be brief and mention only the main points: Using fewer text and the greater will be the readers motivation to read it. Also keep adequate line-spacing to make your brochure attractive and especially legible.

Use captivating color

Color schemes in brochures should be according to the theme and also to the corporate identity guidelines of the company. Colors are the most expressive elements in any design, so use them wisely. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter how many or less colors you should use in the design, what matters is the way of presenting them. Dare to use striking colors in your brochure by using good color schemes.

On any office desk or coffee-table, your brochure or flyer is competing with all the other brochures and therefore should be noticed, with the right color scheme you can achieve that. For more information about colors and how to use them in graphic design, please read: Color Psychology and Graphic Design

Typography

As your brochure or flyer has to express an amount of information about your business or event, you should use readable typefaces. Do not use capitalization, underlining, boldface, second colors, or fancy fonts in the body copy of your design, not even for emphasis (Tip of the week: always use italic for emphasis!). They tend to make your copy more difficult to read, e.g. boldface type in body copy will make readers skip over everything to see what’s so important that it’s screaming out in bold letters.

Diversity is a good thing but not in this matter of selecting types. You should not use more than 2 or 3 typefaces in a brochure or flyer if you want to have the attention of the readers. Of course you can use for your headlines or subheads a different, but complimentary, typestyle to increases the viewer’s comprehension of your brochure.

Be consistent in your use of typeface and size for headlines, body text and captions, this will give an appealing appearance to your brochure. Just because you have access to 100 different typestyles and sizes doesn’t mean you have to use them all!

More information on how to set type, please read the following article: Style Considerations, Guidelines and Tips

Utilize a Proofreader

After you’ve worked your socks off in designing all the necessary things for your brochure, it would be a waste of time, effort and money if it has spelling mistakes, poor grammar, design flaws or incorrect information about the company. This could lead to reprinting the brochure or flyer and increasing your business fixed costs.

To avoid this situation you should use a proofreader, who should be professional and independent. Ask the proofreader to honestly comment what he/she thinks about the layout and the text provided in your brochure. You should pay attention to this feedback and correct any mistakes he/she points out. You can also ask three to five people for more feedback about the design and content of the brochure or flyer.

Digital File Submission Standards

A digital file must be “print ready” and sent in accordance with the digital file submission instructions of your printer, to ensure that problems will not be encountered during the manufacturing process. Don’t hesitate to ask for these instructions!

Use the proper software to design your brochure/flyer, you’ll find out that almost every printer can read designs made in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign. Please don’t come to your printer with an design made up in Mocrosoft Word, you’ll be the laugh of the week!

Deliver your digital files in an .eps-format, embed/outline all fonts and all font family members used (otherwise include the typefaces used in the design on the CD-Rom), all images or artwork must be submitted in CMYK format at a 300dpi resolution (include these in a directory on the CD-ROM, DVD or Zip Disk). All the specified colors in 2/C and 4/C digital files must be set to CMYK process colors.

More information about print-production and the most common mistakes you can read in an earlier article: The 7 Deadly Sins of Print Production and also in the rest of our Print Design – series (see the ‘More Posts about this Topic/Related Post’-section in this article)

Use a Professional Printer

Last step in designing a brochure is its printing, also a significant and crucial step in the design-process. You can contact professional brochure printers, I would recommend you to spend some extra money on this part, because if you have everything right but the printing sucks, then all of your spending would be a waste.

So get services from a professional printer which provides excellent results for a fair price, you need to do some research first to find the best printer for the specific task.

Ask for some examples as you visit some of the printers in your neighbourhood. By now I know what printer to use according to the size, amount, extra specifications (e.g. automatic folding machine for multi-paged brochures), etc. needed for the print production.

Conclusion

The layout for a brochure will be slightly more complex than flyers printing when having to take in to account the different folds available and the way the brochure will be bound. But the goals are the same: An unique and stimulating Design can attract the attention, express quality, distinguish and seduce to read or to buy.

Therefore aim for an original or unique style that is different to your competitors.

Footnotes:

[1] ~ This is just plain paper without any type, graphics, or anything else on it. Studies consistently show that designs with plenty of white space are more pleasant to read and get more attention.This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter. Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics:

Webdesign, CSS, HTML, jQuery, etc.

The Importance Of Simplicity In Website Design – Designing websites that are simple to use can be a difficult process. Whilst the end result may be a usable and effective site that appears very basic and minimal, a lot of thought has to go into the goals of the interaction experience and the way in which it is presented to the user.

Are We Taking CSS Too Far? – CSS is a remarkable technology, capable of doing things that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of when I was first introduced to it. And, with added support for rounded corners, box shadows, text shadows, rotation and a wide range of other possibilities, web designers and developers can accomplish all sorts of amazing things when it comes to applying a design to a website.

6 ways to make your design look more professional – I have chosen to highlight a number of things beginning (or advanced) designers can do in order to make their design LOOK more professional. These tips are all about aesthetics and the final overall feel of your design piece. They include simplicity, contrast, texture, depth, gradation, and consistency.

Getting Started: Learning to Code for the Web, Logically - Coding is a logical process. You want the site or program to do a particular thing. You enter in the commands needed to achieve that end. Learning to develop websites could be approached just as logically. Languages for the computer could be compared to math classes.

8 examples of stunning CSS3 text effects – Among many other things, CSS3 has lots of nice effects to enhance the typography of your website. In this article, I have compiled 8 extremely promising typography techniques done using CSS3.

20 HTML Best Practices You Should Follow – Most of the web pages you encounter is presented to you via HTML, the world wide web’s markup language. In this article, I will share with you 20 best practices that will lead to clean and correct markup. The doctype declaration should be the first thing in your HTML documents.

Things Designers Forget Before Starting Development, Part One – As designers, we know how the site should look. Exactly as it looks in the design. However, by learning more about development we can help streamline the coding process, possibly reducing the time to code the site and any complications that may occur.

Designing a successful one-page portfolio - There are countless approaches you can take when creating your own design portfolio. Every designer is unique and should, therefore, have a unique portfolio. But when it comes to designing a successful one-page portfolio, there are a few key ingredients you’ll want to be sure to include.

Mobile Web Design: Best Practices – The explosion in user adoption of mobile devices has revolutionized the web. Though designing for the Mobile Web follow similar principles to designing websites, we must consider some notable differences. For one, current mobile device networks don’t run in the same speed as broadband devices.

10 MooTools Image and Content Sliders – With CSS3 stealing all of the design headlines recently, and with jQuery as popular as it is, it is very easy to forget about any other image and content slider/gallery options you may have. And as such, in this post, we take a look at the best of what MooTools can offer. As you will see, the results are pretty impressive.

10 Underused Html Elements, and how you should be using them! – All the hype recently has been about Html5, and the new elements it brings to the table for us to use. However, the way I see it, we currently don’t even utilise all that the current version of html has to offer. There are several really useful elements available to use, that make our code more semantic, our website more usable, and in general, everything easier for both us, the coder, and the end-user of our site.

10 Great Tips for Writing Better And More Comprehensive CSS – There are many different coding styles, some do not like indentation, some like to capitalize certain things, others like to add more than one element on a line, the main train of thought is they are all after one common thing: organization and better code.

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, etc.

500+ Free Download High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers - Why redo what is from the web “free download” ? Plenty of web designers create and share with the community, plenty graphic files. Most often, they are free download and can mostly be used in business projects.

A Handy Guide to Image Resolutions in Print Design – Using an unsuitable image resolution is one of the most popular errors designers make when creating designs for print. The result is a fuzzy print quality, or having your file is rejected by your local printer. If you don’t keep an eye on your image resolution right from the start you may end up having to …

Ten Laws to Design By – As designers we have to be aware of the function of our work and design as much as we care about the aesthetics and visuals. There are a lot of terms for the design of how the site functions and works, from “usability design” to “user experience,” what remains constant is that if we want to become better designers we have to pair these two concepts together.

Photoshop Scripts: Hidden Magic - This one’s going to be short and sweet, unlike most of my posts. I just wanted to share a little something that I find myself using daily in Photoshop: Scripts. The ability to script Photoshop started all the way back in version 7, but still doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Most people don’t know it even exists, and fewer still realize it’s possible to write your own custom scripts to automate tedious tasks.

Adobe Illustrator Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet - Even if you use Adobe Illustrator all the time, it can be hard to remember the keyboard shortcuts that make the program so much faster to use. We’re here to help. Bigstock has created a handy quick-reference card you can print out, pin to your wall, and refer to for guidance when you’re working on a design.

Logo Design Mistakes Which You Should Never Make – 8 logo design mistakes which as a professional logo designer you should not be making as well, as a useful check list for aspects of which a good logo design should consist of.

Blogging, Social Media, Wordpress etc.

How To Add a Custom Facebook Like Box to Your Site – Facebook pages are becoming more and more popular with brands, bands, organisations and celebrities who want to boost their social exposure on the web. Facebook’s social plugins and widgets are a great way to link your Facebook page with your website.

12 Valuable WordPress Cheat Sheets You Must Know - Cheat Sheets are always a valuable and useful resource for every designer and developers , as they can be used as future reference and sheets to help in remember things quickly. WordPress cheat sheets always helpful for newbie designers and wordpress theme developers as this make their job easy when they get  best knowledge with the help of these cheat sheets.

Tips and Advice When Starting Your Own Design Blog – Starting a design related blog has to be one of my biggest accomplishments as a developer and it has also become a tool to help me learn more about web design and development (I even list nenuno on my CV!). What my ambitions were for nenuno at the beginning have totally been blown out of the water as to what you see today.

The ultimate StumbleUpon guide, all secrets revealed – As many of us know, since the arrival of the web 2.0 era, many websites that focus on creating communities and sharing contents were released, all this sites stood in front of improving the interaction between users and developers.

Why Blogging Makes Sense for Designers – In this in-depth article I lay out my argument for why I believe blogging and designing compliment each other perfectly. If you’re a designer who is not a blogger, I hope to convince you that blogging is well worth your while. If you are already a designer who blogs, I hope to give you some additional insights from my own personal blogging experience.

An Introduction to Split Testing in WordPress – Split testing is a way to experiment with a live site and find which headlines and text are the most effective. Amazon uses split testing to determine which versions of their site convert customers better. We’ll use WordPress and Google’s Website Optimizer to test two different headlines, and find which works best at capturing customer emails.

Just How Popular are List Posts? – Magazines have always known the power of a good list. Look at the covers on your local newsstand and you’ll see plenty of “5 tips to shed your winter pounds” or “10 ways to save on your home loan” type headlines. This style of content just works, and if you’re a blogger, you’d be wise to pay attention.

SEO, Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, etc.

If Social Media Was a Cake – Social media is sort of like a cake if you think about it. Every month you add new layers on top of new layers really strengthen your image and your brand. What kind of efforts do you like to include in your daily correspondence with your community?

When to Use Google Adwords – If you have an online marketing strategy, there’s a good chance that Google Adwords is an important part of it. And if you’re using an SEO software product for your internet marketing, you’re probably carefully monitoring—and hopefully optimizing—your Adwords’ performance.

Internal Link Building Tips to Remember – Linking building and site structure go hand in hand. You might be tempted to only spend your time on building your external link structure but it is also important to not forget about spending time doing something about your internal site structure as well.

Link Building Do’s and Don’ts – Link building is one of these areas of website marketing that has become mysterious to many but at the end of the day there are some very frowned upon approaches along with some link building techniques that are strongly encouraged. Below are some link building dos and don’ts to consider: Articles Marketing: Link Building

5 Common SEO Mistakes with Web Page Titles - Page titles are one of the most powerful on-site search engine ranking factors that you have control over but website owners often neglect them. Whether your intention is to improve your search engine visibility or make your website more meaningful and interoperable, you should avoid these five common pitfalls when coming up with page titles.

Tutorials

Getting to Know Clipping Masks and Layer Masks in Photoshop – Today, we are going to look at two of Photoshop’s primary masking techniques – layer masks and clipping masks. We’ll be comparing the two by looking at how they work on a practical level, the basic similarities and the much more significant differences.

10 tips to maximize efficiency in Photoshop – We all have to do a lot of things, so every split second you may save by not having to drag that mouse across the table, in fact, counts! Today Tom presents a few tips on how to make working in Photoshop more efficient. Read on and save time! I’m sure any of you who have used Photoshop have spent a lot of time working on individual designs or layouts etc.

Correcting Exposure with the Shadows & Highlights Tool - Today we’re going to take a look at an incredibly useful, amazing tool: the Shadow/Highlight adjustment. Often when taking pictures, it’s difficult, sometimes impossible, to get perfect exposure on everything within the frame. Especially shooting outdoors with a bright sun and shadows on the landscape you’re bound to over—or under-expose parts of your shot.

Mastering the 960 Grid System. A 960 Grid System Master - that’s what you’ll be after you’ve gone through this article. And, although we’re going to use the 24-column variant of 960gs, you’ll completely understand how the two older types (i.e., 12- and 16-columns) work too, by applying the same principles you’ll learn here.

Just F***ing Brilliant & A Great Read!

Be a Design Sherpa – The beauty of digital design is also its downfall: The pixel has no value. Think about that for a moment. The raw material we as designers use to build our creative masterpieces with is worth a big fat ZERO. If we were carpenters we would have to source wood, and specific types at that.

17 Tips for Effective Freelance Business Planning – Freelancing can be a tough business, regardless of in which field you are attempting to freelance. Like a regular business, there are a few dos and don’ts to keep in mind; some of these tips can make your business venture a smoother transition, and some will just make your life easier in the long run.

Apps vs. the Web – Pull the iPhone out of your pocket and look at the home screen. Likely, you’re seeing some well known brands on the web: Facebook, Flickr, and Google to name just a few. You’ll also see companies like Amazon, Target, and Walmart which sell a lot of products via the web.

Giving Users Some Credit – Websites are designed to be used by people of varying backgrounds, educations and technical levels. One of the challenges we face when designing for the Web is finding a way to create sites and applications that can be accessed by a widely disparate audience while avoiding the pitfall of sacrificing the quality of our work to cater to the dreaded ‘lowest common denominator.’

Top Questions To Help Make Designs That Your Clients Will Love – When dealing with different types of clients you can in the worst case scenario sometimes end up with something that is “wrong”. As clients are very different you should make yourself a list of questions that you make sure to ask them, in order to get the best possible end result.

7 Tips for Giving Effective Design Project Quotes – It’s a familiar situation for any freelancer — you open your email inbox, scan through the day’s spam and auto-responder messages, and come across a request for proposal.

I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know  ..

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @gonzodesign_This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

This article is written because of the fact I finished last week the redesign of my corporate website; after hand-coding, designing, optimizing keywords and phrases and all the other stuff, the logical next step is to promote my website.

It’s no public secret that if you want to promote your website, you’ll need to work on your search engine listings and ranking. What is perhaps mentioned less, is that there are other ways and techniques of boosting traffic to your site that are sometimes missed by the newbies. Some of these can prove to be quite good at getting traffic to your site.

Note: – This article is about static, (X)HTML web sites, without any form of blog attached to it. This article isn’t about blog promotion too, we have written an earlier article about that: Free Blog Promotion to Boost Traffic.

Website promotion – Search Engine Optimalisation

The very first important thing for designing a (new) website is to code your web design according to the Google’s Webmasters Guidelines. Google is among the most popular search services of today, so it is wise to take its requirements into account. But there is more, loads more:

• First, try to make the design of your site as search engine friendly as possible (more information: SEO For Small & Medium Enterprises).
• Validate your website codes too, so your website is according the W3C webstandards (more information in: The Importance of Web Standards)
• Next, you’ll need to do some keyword optimization. This simply means how to choose the correct keywords for your pages. More about this topic you can read in this article from the gonzoblog: The Basics of Keyword Optimalization.
• Read the article about Meta Tags and Web Search and add them to all of your pages. The META keywords tag isn’t absolutely necessary, but the META description tag is very important (Change the description on each page to make it relate to that page’s content, because this is often what Google displays in its search result description).
• Learn what link-popularity is (also read an earlier article on the gonzoblog: Search Engine Optimization Tips & Tricks) and how search engines use it to rank your pages.
• Use all of this information to optimize your pages for the search engines.

As said, everything just doesn’t always work the way it should in the world of promotion, and I realize that the information given here is very brief, but there are more articles here on the gonzoblog.nl for specific more info on the mentioned topics.

Website promotion – Directories & SE’s

Start your website promotion efforts by listing your website at the most popular Internet directories (e.g. ODP, Yahoo, Lycos), this are human-compiled indexes of sites, which are categorised then. In fact your website has to get reviewed by an editor first, before even being listed the index. This means that getting submitted in a web directory can be quite difficult.

Consequently, having a listing in a directory will guarantee you a good amount of well-targeted visitors and will affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else. Submitting to directories is easy and doesn’t require much effort.

The Open Directory Project & Yahoo

As your site has to have good and unique content to be accepted to the Open Directory Project (ODP – www.dmoz.org), its editors usually review sites quickly and submitting to the ODP is free of charge, what makes it a perfect starting point.

The next smart thing to do is to submit your website to Yahoo, let them know your site is online and is worth to list in their directory. This might cost you some money if you are have a commercial site (Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299), but it’s usually worth it ..? Non-commercial sites can get listed for free, but might require several submissions and a lot of patience before they are accepted.

Search engines (SE’s)

Get to know search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, AltaVista, AllThe Web) and how to use them to bring even more people to your website. In order to gain good rankings, you’ll need to learn the basics of search engine algorithms (ranking systems) and adjust your pages to meet their criteria as well as possible. This will take some time and effort, but doing some work now will save you from a lot of trouble in the future. Fortunately, SE’s are quite good at finding your site on their own.

Note: including/submitting a sitemap.xls will help the SE’s to indexate your website much faster.

Website promotion – More techniques

After being submitted to the best web directories and having several pages of your site come up in the major search engines listings, the load of  hours you’ve been promoting your website have finally begun to pay off and your monthly visitor count is starting to look great. But there is still plenty you can do to help your site attract even more traffic.

Lets look at some different web site promotion methods that you could to try, methods that are quite effective:

• A site cannot become truly popular unless it also appeals to these new users so much that they decide to come back again and again. Getting people to come back is the secret to why some sites get amazingly many hits per day, increase your traffic with return visitors.
• Set up your own (Reciprocal) Links page where you can put links to other sites. Reciprocal links will also increase your link popularity and help your site rank higher in the search engines.
• Start using E-mail signatures in your standard email-program. They might not produce thousands of visitors, but are a great way to promote your site a bit without having to actually do anything, don’t forget to get your Twitter-link there too.
• Start a blogging site! If you write your own original articles, you can actually make those articles available to (many) readers. You can also post your articles on certain blog promotion sites and mailing lists to get your post to a much bigger audience. Don’t forget to put in a link to your static HTML-website!
• Evaluate whether your site could benefit from joining business listings sites (e.g. start pages, Yellow Pages, Freelance Designer Directories) . These lists have their good and bad sides, but might be at least worth a try. Make sure it’s always a relevant category where you subscribe your website.
• Winning website awards can occasionally be useful, especially if the awards are well-known (see gallery-list), if it’s a prominent link on a busy site, it’s worth something. If it’s a tiny link on a low-traffic site, it won’t do the winner much good.
• Use the Social Media wisely, with the right message or articles you can build a network of followers and create a form of authority in your industry.
• Free Software or E-Books; If you are adept at writing your own software, you might consider offering free versions on your site to attract visitors. Essentially, having an e-book that is freely available has good promotional potential.
• Don’t underestimate the value of an advertisement. If you sell something on your site, you might want to try banner campaign, revenue sharing programs or advertising programs (CPC – Cost Per Click is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website ~ resource: WikiPedia).

Conclusion:

While there is more to website promotion than what we have discussed here, you now know quite a lot about the subject. If you still want more information, don’t forget to come back to this site every now and then. And remember, if you have achieved good results, it’s not because people showed you how to do it – it’s because you did it. After all, the secret to having a successful site is working hard in both promoting and creating it.

If you want to tell us how website promotion works out for you, please feel free to comment .. I’lf love to hear your secrets ;-PThis Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

There’s nothing quite as powerful as putting your brand in the hands of your customers. Literally. Sometimes it means a close up of a company name while chewing on a pencil or and others it’s being reminded of a favorite restaurant each time you strike a match.

Those tangible little name drops can help keep your business in the forefront of  a potential customer’s mind.

Promo products are practically pre-requisite for conferences and trade shows, no one visits a booth that isn’t offering SOME kind of swag. But they are also useful for day-to-day business and giving people something to takeaway with them every time they visit you.  Regardless of how you choose to use your log products, there are a few important things to keep in mind in order to keep your message strong and clear.

Select the Best Product

While it goes without saying that certain things are just inappropriate as promo products for most businesses, e.g. Toilet paper or garbage bags. Choosing the right product isn’t just about avoiding blatantly classless or embarrassing choices, it’s about selecting the best possible framing your brand message. It’s easy to just pick from a variety of pens and pencils, writing utensils are some of the most popular choices for brand items because they are portable, functional and can be ordered on the cheap in mass quantities. So if you’re looking for a hand-out for hand-out’s sake there’s nothing wrong with sharpening up a branded #2 or an imprinting a Bic. But if you’re looking for a way to set yourself apart, think carefully about the product you select.

A company can use a product wisely to promote not only their name but their core message and even their corporate culture. Products like water bottles or stress balls can help promote an image of healthy living. Offering logo printed cloth shopping bags can be indicative of a “green” mentality.  But, while some kinds of products can be selected to help support a company message others, can miss the mark. For instance can coolers are probably inappropriate for a business dealing in children’s products or services or vice versa, mouse pads may not be the strongest choice for companies targeting a more senior demographic. This may seem obvious enough, but the important point is to really think about the intended use for your product and whether or not that, in some way, relates to your core brand message.

Send a Clear Message

Selecting the best product to represent your brand is the first step, making sure that message comes across clearly on the product is the second key to successfully using a logo product. A lot of times the train goes of the track here due to simple logistics. That’s why it’s important to really consider all of the possible issues that could arise to make sure your message doesn’t get lost in translation.

Not every logo that looks fantastic on a business card is going to be equally as impressive on a 3d surface. Consider how well the color, size or detailing in your business logo will transfer well onto the product you’ve chosen. An elaborate logo may need to be scaled back, colors may need to be reversed and even the cleverest of tag lines may need to get cut. While some compromises may need to be made, the last thing you want to sacrifice is the clarity of your brand.

Print quality should also be a consideration. If the print wears off a promotional glass after a few washes, your well-crafted promo item becomes just another glass in the cupboard. Ultimately, your name should be to the star of the product, and it should leave a lasting impression.

Give it Away, Give it Away, Give it Away Now.

Once you’ve developed a logo item that presents a clear, branded message about your business, go ahead and get rid of it. Having them sitting in boxes or cluttering up the office waiting for the perfect time to dispense them defeats the entire point of developing a great logo product to begin with. Definitely hand them out to existing customers and friends but go beyond that. Reach out to the community and get involved with at local events. Sponsor local charity events, find out about getting your products included in gift bags and prize packages.

If you’ve chosen a functional product, perhaps local businesses, schools or community groups could make use of these products. Be creative and bold in your approach to dispensing the items, try reaching out into new demographics, even if only to help increase your brand name recognition. But whatever you do, get them out there. Don’t wind up with a closet full of un-used light up key chains or some other bauble that has gathered more dust than new business.

Using logo products can be a fun, personable and highly effective method of branding and advertising. When done well, they can be an easy way to get into the homes and minds of a brand new base of potential customers.This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

A new Tweet-Parade; The best Tweets found on Twitter about new articles posted on the various blogs about webdesign, graphic design, typography and design in common.

The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter. Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics:

Webdesign, CSS, HTML, jQuery, etc.

Google Help : Cheat Sheet – Here’s a quick list of some of our most popular tools to help refine and improve your search. For additional help with Google Web Search or any other Google product, you can visit our main Google Help page.

25 Beautiful Image Styling Tutorials With CSS,jQuery – Recently I wrote article about post thumbnail and you saw some great examples of image styling. As I wrote there, neat styled images can attract more visitors and you will be more pleasant with them yourself too.

The Five W’s of UX – Who, What, Where, When, Why (and How – it ends with a “w” cut me some slack). In school we were taught that these fundamental questions must be addressed in the process of creating a strong argument and delivering a legitimate story.

What To Do When You Launch: Before, During, and After – A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the case of the time-management tool Chrometa and the startup’s self-described “failed” launch. In its blog, Chrometa explained some of the steps it took to keep pushing product and consumer development forward.

25 HTML5 Features, Tips, and Techniques you Must Know – This industry moves fast — really fast! If you’re not careful, you’ll be left in its dust. So, if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with the coming changes/updates in HTML5, use this as a primer of the things you must know.

jQuery for Complete Beginners: Part 4 – Welcome back to jQuery for Beginners. Just a quick recap first – in the first two weeks we covered the very basics of jQuery and interacting with elements. Last time round we made an accordion – something which taught us a few of the jQuery special animation functions that are built in to jQuery.

A 6-Step General Process for Producing a Website – When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are just getting started as a web designer. Good guidelines can help you work better by keeping forgetfulness to a minimum.

Futureproof your website – How do you keep your website up to date and relevant, without having to constantly overhaul the design, content and code? Craig Grannell quizzes industry talent about the best ways to ensure your website doesn’t expire through neglect

25 Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets for Developers – CSS is no doubt up there with the most important web languages that we use. While html provides the structure it can be inconsistent and unpredictable across different new and old browsers. Css is where the html is styled though, and where we get creative as well as addressing those inconsistencies.

Six Useful CSS3 Tools – CSS3 continues to gain popularity as we’re seeing it used in more and more websites. However, there are still those out there that are holding out on learning it and using it. This is probably due to the fact that it’s not fully supported yet in all browsers.

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, etc.

Ten Typefaces of the Decade – Now that a few years have passed since my list was first created, it seems time to update it and add the top ten typefaces of the decade from 2000 to 2010. As before, it is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another.

A Web Designer’s Guide to Linux Fonts – One area in which few Linux users see any representation is Web typography. In 2003, Linux user and software developer Jeremy Zawodny howled about the dearth of decent fonts for Linux.

Blogging, Social Media, Wordpress etc.

ROI of Social Media Marketing – Last month, Forrester Research’s Augie Ray published a report on The ROI of Social Media Marketing that I’ve recently had a chance to take a highlighter to: there are a lot of sensible nuggets in the document; it’s a must-read for any marketer.

Coding a Stylish Blog Design Layout in HTML & CSS – Last week we went through the process of designing a stylish blog layout in Photoshop. Now let’s take our visual concept and cut it into slices for use with neat HTML and CSS code. All our browser testing will be done on this coded concept before converting the design into a full WordPress theme.

WordPress: How to insert data programmatically - Recently, a client of mine asked me to write an article importer for his WordPress powered site, which was a very interesting project for me. In this article, I’ll show you how you can easily add data (posts, comments, categories, etc) to your WordPress blog, without any manual effort.

Social Media Marketing Tips – Social media marketing is a relatively new marketing concept that involves increased social interaction on websites and has gained enormous popularity over the last year or two. There are a number of different types of social media sites but all of these have in common that their users can participate on the website by sharing comments …

Great Apps to Customize Your Facebook Fan Page – With 500 million registered users, there’s never been an online platform with as much marketing potential as Facebook. Nowadays all the buzz around promoting your business or brand is focused towards Twitter, but Twitter is relatively small when it comes to audience size and isn’t a platform that offers much leeway to promote your brand.

6 Ways to Use Social Media Successfully as a Designer – If you’re a web designer and you’re NOT using social media to help you in your work, then all I can do is direct you to 2002, because that’s where your workflow lives. Your competitors, co-workers and clients are all using social media, which means if you’re not, you’re getting left behind.

How to Grow Your Social Community – Growing a social community online might sound easy but it does take some time to have a community that will consistently help spread your message and interact with you. You have to have a certain likability surrounding you and strong branding is really a must.

The art of cross-promotion – Every blogger know it, promoting a blog or a website is not an easy task, especially when the blog is new. Though, if you already own one or more sites, you can use them to promote your new site.
This technique, called cross-promotion, is one of my favorite

30+ Awesome Wordpress Plugins for Creating Galleries and Slideshows – Wordpress  is by far the most popular blogging platform, WordPress offers fairly simple image uploading and the automatic creation of thumbnails, but there are a lot more you can do with your images with WordPress Plugins. Everyone love to see image on any website and if it is a slideshow people like to see it much.

SEO, Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, etc.

Create a Link Building Program Series – Businesses online are always trying to think of new ways they can generate good quality exposure and great links pointing to their site that could lift some newly found power over to their website and get it really moving around in the search engines.

It Isn’t “Old School SEO” If It’s Just Nonsense SEO – Remember the movie Old School with Vince Vaughn and Will Farrell? Yeah, me neither. That’s because, while I’m sure the movie has some funny scenes, it just didn’t have the staying power of, say… Tommy Boy.

Real Time and Image Search – An interesting thing that is occurring for Google real time search is the fact that images have seemed to make it into the mix. Real time search is something that has taken our industry by storm and is going to grow to be even more important in the future.

Tutorials

Noise and textures - Adding subtle noise or texture to UI elements can look great, but what’s the best way to do it?The goal is to find the best method that maintains quality when scaled, but is also easy to implement and edit. The full criteria:

Just Plain Brilliant & A Great Read!

An Effective Marketing Plan: Getting Started – A well-conceived and properly implemented marketing plan is the foundation for your business’ success. You might be the best at what you do, but if nobody knows about you and your offerings, and why they’re of value, then that shingle you hung up is going to come tumbling down.

The Art and Science of Article Marketing – I’ve noticed lately, a lot of writers (and I use that term loosely) are saying article marketing no longer works. They’re complaining, no one is reading their articles, and their pageviews are in the toilet. Well, maybe there’s a good reason for that. Maybe they aren’t giving readers what they want.

I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know  ..

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This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.

If you choose to develop your own site, or even if you are planning to hire a web designer, here is a web site design checklist you can use to evaluate your options. Consider this checklist as a jumping off point for creating your own customized list, based on your own needs.

Cross-Browser Compatibility & Validation

Not all HTML and CSS code is compatible with all browsers. You will want your website to load properly in all the main web browsers. What you need to do is to load the different browsers on your desktop and run them to see how your site displays. One other alternative is to use a couple of web sites that will take your URL and show you alternative views of your site inside the different browsers (e.g. browsershots.org).

If you use html validation tools, do not rely on them to verify your website’s appearance. You need to eyeball your site in each browser to see what the customers will see. More about this subject you can read in a former article: Cross browser CSS for your site.

Functionality Check

Test everything thoroughly. If you have a mailform, test it! Get others to test your website, and not just family and friends but the website’s target market. Sit back and watch how a user uses the website. It’s amazing what you’ll pick up on when others use your website differently than how you assume they’d use it. Common things to check for are contact forms, search functions, shopping baskets and log-in areas.

Javascript

Your website should work with JavaScript turned off. Users often have JavaScript turned off for security, so you should be prepared for this. You can easily turn off JavaScript in Firefox. Test your forms to make sure they still perform server-side validation checks

Screen Resolution

Ensure that your web site displays properly across any screen resolution so it will fit onto any monitor size. There is nothing quite so disturbing as a web site with a background that is choppy and text that is not aligned properly on a large monitor. You can check your website by changing the resolution of your monitor, using your desktop settings properties.

Font Styles

Since people have different fonts installed on their computer it is recommended that when you design your site you stick to universal fonts like Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman. If you specify a font style that the viewer does not have installed on their system, the viewer will see a “default” font that looks much like a typewriter font which could be courier or times.

You can read more about this in our article covering fontstacks: Why are Font-Stacks still so Important?

Web Colors

When building your website, be sure to use background and font colors selected from the browser safe palette. Web site design studies indicate that certain colors cause a strain on your retina and this produces what is called a rapid exit from your site (ie. people leave a web site faster). Be careful with your web colors. The easiest color combinations are black or dark text on a white or light background.

See our article on web safe colors

Copyright message

The text of the copyright not only puts the visitor on notice that your content is owned by you and unique but it is another chance to attract search engines by putting keyword rich terms into the copyright.

Conversion & Site Goals

When you embark on a web site design project you have to start with a few essential groundrules type of questions.

• What is the intent of the site.
• What do you and/or your clients expect to achieve by having a Web site on the Internet?
• Establish specific goals for the site.

Target Audience

Who is your intended audience? Try to isolate the target demographic as much as possible, so that you know what type of flavor of web site you will need to appeal to the most specific intended audience. If your web site designer does not have a lot of experience with marketing, conversion, usability and compatibility issues, then you run the risk of ending up with a website that looks great, at least to you, but doesn’t do much to help your bottom line. No one plans to build a new online business that fails, but if you don’t strategize properly and take into account many dynamic factors you could be facing an outcome you did not expect. Here’s what you need to know:

• Who are your potential customers
• Look at demographics and something called psychographics
• How you intend to reach them
• How you intend to lead visitors on the road to becoming buyers.
• Don’t forget that you want to also turn buyers into repeat buyers.
• Plus turn buyers into referring partners so they send other people to your site. This is called word of mouth endorsement

More about this in our article about setting goals for your (new) website

Competitive Analysis

Check out the competition. In order to know what to sell to your audience it helps to see how your competitors are positioning their web sites. First of all you get a sense of what the visitors expectations will be. Secondly, if you want your site to perform then you can learn from your competition what to do right and what to avoid. What does the competition have to offer? What are they doing wrong? How can your site do it better? In what ways will your site have be more competitive and give you an edge?

The Web vs. Traditional Media

The web is very different from television, radio, and print marketing. Understanding the types of marketing that only the Internet can offer will result in greater response and profit than using any one offline method alone. A few web marketers now get the idea that your web site layout and graphics can also affect your revenues and response rates.

Technical Considerations

What type of web site management platform are you running? Does it have web based adminstration so you can change your web page content easily? Does it have a mailing list database with a subscription based newsletter system with automatic unsubscribe functionality?

Analytics

Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how your website performs and how successful your conversion rates are. Track daily unique hits, monthly page views and browser statistics, all useful data to start tracking from day 1.

Google Analytics is a free favorite among website owners.

404-Page (Error-Page)

The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page. If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, your 404 page is displayed. This may happen for a variety of reasons, including another website linking to a page that doesn’t exist. Get your users back on track by providing a useful 404 page that directs them to the home page or suggests other pages they may be interested in.

Sitemap

Adding a sitemap.xml file to your root directory allows the major search engines to easily index your website. The file points crawlers to all the pages on your website. XML-Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for you. After creating the file, upload it to your root directory so that its location is www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.

A recap of Web Standards

1. Does the site use a correct Doctype?
2. Does the site use a Character set?
3. Does the site use Valid (X)HTML?
4. Does the site use Valid CSS?
5. Does the site use any CSS hacks?
6. Is the code well structured?
7. How does the site perform in terms of speed/page size?

If you have any questions or remarks, or think I forgot an essentual topic in this Checklist, please write them down in the comment-section.This Article is Published on the gonzoblog.nl, Your Daily Design Dosis.