Next Day Flyers is a leading online printing company offering customized printing services of all things related to marketing including business cards, brochures, booklets, flyers and more.

Design today, get your printed design tomorrow

The main strength of Next Day Flyers is their fast next day printing service delivering quality custom printed materials. They can even print in the same day which is great when you’re really in a hurry, trying to meet that important deadline.

Based out of Los Angeles for the past 13 years, they just opened a second printing facility in New Jersey. This new location greatly reduces shipping times and expense for those customers based in the Eastern portion of the United States.

The new printing facility is equipped with state of the art high speed printing presses to ensure the same high quality you’ve come to expect from Next Day Flyers.

Next Day Flyers also runs a blog, where you can find interesting articles on printing, typography and photography so you should definitely pay a visit.

Green printing

Two awesome things that I like from Next Day Flyers are the facts that they care about the environment, printing on PEFC certified recycled  paper, and that their new facility is solar powered!  That’s simply great, good for your business and good for the environment.

The giveaway

Now onto the contest! As part of their grand opening celebration, Next Day Flyers will be giving away 2 sets of 500 full color business cards.  The business cards will be printed on 14 PT card stock and have the option of a free UV or Matte coating.  Shipping within the U.S. will be included.

All you have to do to enter is one of the following:

1) leave a comment at the end of this post and mention why you need new business cards.

or

2) tweet this post quoting me, so I can know you tweeted it

or

3) share on Facebook and post the link in the comments

The winners will be chosen on Monday 13 and notified in this same page.

Good luck to everyone!

• Winners of Pixmac stock photo accounts loaded with US$ 99!
• Web app to create background patterns
• Web Design Resources – November 2011
• Color theme for Aptana 3
• Enter to win 50GB Dropbox Pro for life

Chosen allows you to enhance HTML <select> elements using JavaScript to add multiple select, autocomplete and more.

Chosen is available as a plugin for jQuery, Prototype and there’s a fork for MooTools.

• Slide upwards in jQuery using slideDown()
• Web Design Resources – November 2011
• Best web design resources of August 2011
• Saving custom fields in quick or bulk edit mode in WordPress
• Masonry CSS3: dynamic grid layout

We’re kicking off the year with a sweet giveaway brought to you by Pixmac, one of the leading contenders in the stock photo arena, who is giving you the opportunity to win one of three accounts loaded with US$99 in credits!

Pixmac Stock Photos

Pixmac is one of the fastest, most usable and reliable microstock agency out there offering millions of images at budget prices. They offer photos from $1 with the ability to source, download and buy an image in less than 3 minutes, with no registration process.

Pixmac offers a fast, time-saving site with great customer service – they care about your deadlines empowering you with useful tools like the power search, and displaying images similar to the one you picked or even related images by tags.

Pixmac also has a free images section with more than 60,000 images for you to download.

Enter the Pixmac Contest

You can do one of the following to enter the contest:

1. Leave a comment below stating where you think you could use the Pixmac images
2. Tweet this post using this link mentioning me (just to alert me of your tweet)

Contest will run until next Monday 23. Good luck everyone!

UPDATE: The Winners!

The winners of the giveaway are

Commenters:

• sminkkel
• Ido Schacham

On Twitter:

• rappelsnut

They will be contacted later by a Pixmac representative.

Thanks everyone for entering the giveaway!

• Next Day Flyers giveaway: win 2 sets of 500 full color business cards
• Web Design Resources – November 2011
• Enter to win 50GB Dropbox Pro for life
• Design & illustration by Bonnie Clas
• The artwork of Adolfo Correa

BgPatterns is a background pattern creator with tools to set color, base pattern, rotation of motif and more.

• Best web design resources of July 2011
• 10 resources for a better interface design
• 16 solutions for designers to sell digital goods
• Domai.nr
• Seven online color tools for design

The latest WordPress 3.3 Release Candidate 3 has been released and is available for testing now.

• Web Design Resources – November 2011
• 10 e-commerce plugins and themes to start your online store with WordPress
• Skeleton: responsive WordPress theme
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Firefox Aurora, the Firefox releases channel with the newest innovations now includes the new development tools so developers can inspect and tweak a web page’s HTML and CSS, accessing console, logs and even a nice feature called Scratchpad, to write JavaScript on the fly and execute it.

For a long time most developers relied on Firebug as their main development tool to edit web pages on Firefox. But the reality is that Firebug, understandably, is not being as actively developed as Chrome’s developer tools and they are starting to fall behind.

While I’ve moved from Firefox to Chrome as soon as it was released, I still used Firefox for a long time as my main development tool primarily due to Firebug. Since June this year, Chrome developer tools were dramatically improved, mainly in the user interaction of HTML and CSS editing. On top of that, it has (it always had) a much better design of the log of network transactions and resources than Firebug’s so it was a natural choice to completely shift to Chrome for all development.

Firefox will now try to regain web developers with the new built in tools, that look very interesting, specially the breadcrumb at the bottom with the ability to quickly select sibling elements.

You can install Firefox Aurora, the Firefox channel with the newest additions, enhancements and overall innovations, and try them today.

• Automatic browser refresh for Chrome & Safari
• Enter to win 50GB Dropbox Pro for life
• Free PHP IDE with WordPress support
• WordPress code templates for Aptana
• Color theme for Aptana 3

It’s been a little quiet here lately, but here’s our monthly digest of web design tools, resources, articles and inspiration for November 2011.

Kern Type

http://type.method.ac/

Learn the basics of kerning with this simple online game.

Free font from FontShop for iOS

http://www.fontshop.com/freefonts

FontShop started offering fonts that are specifically hinted and optimized for iOS devices. They’re offering one weight of Basic Gothic Mobile typeface for free.

iOS 5 on iPhone 4S GUI PSD

http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/ios-5-gui-psd-iphone-4s/

Teehan+Lax have updated their popular iPhone GUI PSD to match the new iOS5 running in the iPhone 4S.

Solo: project management

http://thrivesolo.com/

Solo is an online project management suite. The design has been carefully crafted, is very clean, comfortable and includes cool tricks like SVG rollovers.

Docpool: share documentation

http://www.docpool.co/

An online repository of documents related to web design and development with items such as contract templates, invoices, project quoting and others.

HTML 5 for web designers

http://html5forwebdesigners.com/

The popular book about HTML 5 published by A List Apart and written by Jeremy Keith, now has an online counterpart where you can read it all for free.

HTML 5 Audio Player

http://codecanyon.net/item/simple-html5-audio-player-v1/495024

This is a sleek and lightweight audio player built in HTML 5 that supports OGG and MP3 audio formats. It provides a fallback for older browsers and you can include multiple instances of the player in your page.

CSS Animation

http://daneden.me/animate/

Animate is a CSS library with several cross-browser animations to use in your projects. The animations are supported by Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Animate is distributed under the MIT license so you can use it in your commercial projects.

Dart: structured web apps

http://www.dartlang.org/

The new language to build structured web applications created by Google, Dart, was finally released and although it’s an early release, it looks really promising.

Responsive carousel for jQuery

http://tympanus.net/Development/Elastislide/

Elastislide is a lightweight and easy to implement responsive slider built as a plugin for jQuery. It implements the Touchwipe Plugin that allows to swipe the images in the slider whenever you’re visiting the site in an iOS or Android device.

WordPress

Balita: free E-Commerce theme

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/19/free-e-commerce-wordpress-theme-balita/

Smashing Magazine released a neat e-commerce theme for WordPress packed with features such as

• jQuery Product Slider
• Custom Shopping Cart
• Ads Banner
• Search Products
• Blog Integration
• Related Products

and much more. E-commerce done well is probably the next step for WordPress community. Jane Wells pointed some time ago that none of the currently options were genuinely “great”.

How to create tabs in the settings page of your WordPress theme

http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/20/create-tabs-wordpress-settings-pages/

My first article for Smashing Magazine was published and it goes through the basics of implementing tabs in the settings page of your WordPress theme.

Inspiration

Boris Pelcer: lettering, illustration and design

http://www.borispelcer.com/index.php

Jordan Metcalf: design and art

http://www.jordan-metcalf.com/

Articles

Responsive Web Design Demystified

http://www.elated.com/articles/responsive-web-design-demystified/
Matt Doyle goes through all the aspects involved in creating responsive sites, from beginning to end.

Centering in the Unknown

Chris Coyier explains how to center an element when you don’t know any dimension of the surrounding elements.
http://css-tricks.com/14745-centering-in-the-unknown/

• Best web design resources of August 2011
• 10 Free fonts for web and graphic design
• 33 free typefaces for graphic and web design
• Free fonts for design
• Free fonts for graphic design: Kilogram & Alt Matey

Pablo Impallari is best known for his Lobster font, one of the first typefaces freely available when Google Web Fonts launched. He is now seeking funds in Kickstarter for a new typeface project.

Pablo submitted a project to Kickstarter to design and implement Fast Brush Script as a full web font that will be available to use on your websites using the Google Web Fonts service.

Here’s what Pablo has to say about the font:

By avoiding typographical perfection, it stays more natural. The angles of the vertical strokes vary a little, and the positioning along the baseline jumps around, giving it a more rustic and natural feeling.

Most script fonts have long ascenders and descenders, and this means they look too small when used at normal sizes on the web. I will optimize this font in the technical details to be very readable as a web font, even when used as small as at 16 pixels.

The font will be hand-hinted by Google type experts so expect a high quality and beautiful script font to use on your sites.

Pablo Impallari can be reached at http://www.impallari.com or by following @pabloimpallari on Twitter.

• Web Design Resources – November 2011
• Google Web Fonts out of Beta
• 10 Free fonts for web and graphic design
• 33 free typefaces for graphic and web design
• Free fonts for design

Truth be told, the current web is strongly focused in social with sharing and collaboration as one of the most sought-after values in a web application. If you like the idea of sharing stuff with friends and co-workers but need just a little more privacy than the offered by apps like Twitter, Facebook and Google what-was-that-name-oh-yeah-plus, read on to discover 5 private social networks that might have gone under your radar.

Although some of the solutions featured here might be deemed as project or task management tools, they are not esentially playing in that field since they don’t focus on things like time management, milestones, wikis, CRM and so on.

GroupMe

http://groupme.com/

The first one is a network based completely around mobile apps with very few tools: group messaging, photo sharing and conference call. But although simple, these tools are enough to start a task, schedule a meeting at a physical location or even start a meeting online. There’s also an Ask a Question feature that can be posted to larger, public networks like Twitter. The app is available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, WP7 and even feature phones through SMS.

Minigroup

https://minigroup.com/

Minigroup is a larger web app with several features that put the Pro version close to project management tools. You can create unlimited groups, create events, share any file (with lightbox visualization for images), comment on posts and more. They even have a handy bookmarklet to share any web page on your group. minigroup is a nice alternative to share and collaborate without having to resort to more powerful but complex apps.

Blogtronix

http://www.blogtronix.com/

With a name more on the likes of a lightcycle, Blogtronix aims to be a social platform for enterprise. They have Twitter-like microblogging features, Facebook-like real time activity feed where you can post video, images and tag or categorize them. Users can manage documents and share them on specific groups.

Yammer

https://www.yammer.com/

This is another social network aimed at corporate use and it includes from microblogging, file upload and sharing to individuals and groups, connection networks, content tagging and further organization and more. They have a slick desktop app and even mobile apps to connect with your peers on the go.

Nextdoor

http://nextdoor.com/

Nextdoor takes your real neighborhood into the clouds by getting you in touch with people who lives next door, or next street if it’s in the same neighborhood. You can post recommendations for people or places, create or see events in your neighborhood and there’s a feature that seems to be a virtual yard sale. Everything keeps private since you have to certify that you actually live in the neighborhood.

One thing that these apps share, with the exception of GroupMe and Nextdoor, is the Facebook interface. It’s not it is bad, but it’s dissapointing to see that nobody really took the time to improve it. Anyway, even Google+ is using a somehow similar interface so what can you expect?

• Dropr: Portfolio Collective
• Best web design resources of July 2011
• 20 single page websites for products
• 20 Apps for Project Management
• Using WordPress to build iPhone and Facebook apps

For web development, few IDEs are both free and as powerful as Aptana. The new Aptana 3.0.5 Beta is now a mature product (early Aptana 3 was very buggy) and good enough to switch to. Here you will find a syntax colouring theme for the new Aptana 3, compatible with TextMate and e Text Editor theme systems.

Aptana Studio 3 has been around for a while now but most developers (myself included) sticked to old Aptana 2.0.5 due to its stability, compatibility and familiarity with features, although it was dissapointingly slow when dealing with huge PHP files.

While looking for a replacement IDE, I stumbled upon an awesome alternative: PHPStorm, which, besides the fact that changing the colour scheme is harder than connecting it to Github, is excellent in every other aspect. However, after checking the alternatives I decided to try to Aptana 3.0.5 and yeah! it’s blazing fast, has neat things like native Git versioning and the only thing missing is PHPDoc auto-generation from Aptana 2.

Theme preview

Anyway, this is not a review of Aptana 3 and you came here looking for the syntax highlighting theme so this is how the color scheme looks like in Aptana with a PHP file from WordPress:

I used as a base a theme named “choco” bundled with Aptana but only for its definitions, because its colors are pretty dull. As mentioned before this theme is compatible with TextMate for Mac and E Text Editor (a good alternative to TextMate, even if its name is so insipid). The theme system is really good and you can fine tune every type of syntax element.

Load the theme into Aptana 3

Now, let’s load this theme into Aptana:

1. Download Chocolate theme and unzip it.
2. In Aptana, Go to Window\Preferences.
3. In the Preferences dialog type Themes to filter it or go to Aptana Studio\Themes.
4. Load the theme using Import.

Old Aptana 2 required one for each file and recreating the colors was a hassle so it’s a welcome addition that you can customize the syntax colouring in Aptana 3 with a single file now. One syntax coloring file to rule them all!

• Appcelerator acquires Aptana
• WordPress code templates for Aptana
• Huge collection of Aptana 3 themes
• Best web design resources of June 2011
• Best Web Design Resources of May 2011