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30+ Awesome Free Fonts From DeviantArt

Hilde — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:06 +0000

Having access to a variety of fonts is a very important part of the designer toolbox. Not everyone have the time to develop their own fonts or typefaces. A lot of great places online have large numbers of free fonts that are of good quality. This time we’ve had a look over at deviantArt and found a collection of free fonts that we like. Some are free only for personal use while others are free also for commercial use. Make sure to read the comments provided by the artists to assure correct use.

Enjoy!

Origram

Kirkita

Evolution

Amputa Bangiz Standard

Digital Ninja

Sliced AB

Solgas

Estrya’s handwriting

Advent

Artree

Quarters

Tek

Modo

Joenine

Lein rounded

Gadolinium rounded

Crimson Vermillion

Epistolar

2006

Illegal curves

Simplistic

Alpha 1

Knarf art

Alpaca54

Amvar

Lastwaerk

Circled

Dennis

Projective

Spaceship

Shark handwritten

We hope you’ve found some fonts you enjoy! Stay tuned for more collections in the future

Best Rated CSS3 Techniques & Practices

GrindSmart Media — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:00:57 +0000

There are plethora of techniques for CSS3 and how one should go about laying the code out, what techniques to use for different browsers, and a whole set of others. Within this post we take a look at several specific CSS3 techniques and practices that you should adapt to, to improve your CSS3 coding style as well as coding technique that also affects cross compatibility.

Organizing Browser Specific Syntax

As all of us who dived into CSS3 know, there is a lot of syntax that relates to certain browsers or compilers such as the border radius element and the likes. In order to better organize and understand these elements it is best if they are stacked on top of each other sequentially as well as contain comments on top of them or to the right of them describing or listing what each element pertains to. For example, the -moz-border-radius should have a comment like so /* Mozilla / firefox */.

You should remember that these browser or compiler specific elements or syntax are only temporary to CSS3 as these browsers and compilers begin to adapt to CSS3 and its elements. For example, in the future we will no longer need this browser specific syntax for the border radius and will soon adapt to just border-radius. However, organization whether temporary or permanent is key to keeping your code neat and readable down the line.

CSS3 Fallback Practices and Techniques

As with everything that is new in the web technologies or web related area, anything new that comes out and we adapt to it must have a fallback for those that have not adapted. What this means is, the elements that CSS3 has expanded on such as the background element that includes more capabilities including the use of RGBA gradients or multiple backgrounds are not compatible with browsers that do not support CSS3.

With that said, if you are using these new additions to elements or even the new elements that are available to CSS3, you need to assure you have some sort of fallback mechanism that can take place if a browser does not support these CSS techniques. Think of it as the Internet Explorer dilemma that is ever ongoing, with every new version Microsoft release, we need to create workarounds and fallbacks to suit each of these versions that we wish to support.

Furthermore, the easiest fallback technique for CSS3 is to implement the elements that worked in previous versions of browsers in your CSS style sheet as well, or to create a separate style sheet altogether.

If you are using the fallback technique within the same style sheet by implementing cross compatible elements, make sure these fallback elements appear on top of the new elements you implemented. The reason for this is that CSS is interpreted in sequence, from top to bottom. Therefore, when the fallback element is read, it is overwritten by the other element you implemented only if that new element is recognized by the browser.

If the browser does not recognize the new element, the fallback element remains the same and is the only one identified. If you swap the fallback element with the intended element that you wish to use, making the fallback below the intended element, the intended element will be overwritten by the fallback element whether the intended element is supported or not. Therefore, the order in which you place the elements in is very important to the way you intend it to compile.

Test, Test, and Test

One of the main problems new CSS3 designers or developers are forgetting to do is test their code in the applicable browsers and their current and previous versions. By failing to do so, many times the websites become intolerable for the viewers who have browsers and or browser versions that do not support CSS3. These designers or developers automatically carry the thought that whatever they implement using CSS3 will automatically have a fallback for unsupported browsers, however, this is not true for many cases.

For example, implementing the RGBA gradients for the background that is not supported for other browsers causes no background to return, and with some website designs that rely on the background to create a contrast between the typography and the background, will make it very difficult to locate and read the typography. Therefore, always test your work in applicable browsers whether or not you think or know that certain elements you implemented have fallbacks.

Get Inspired: 25 Cool Pieces of 3D Style Typograhy

Hilde — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:20 +0000

Typography is an art-form that holds great variety. While many pieces usually are 2d, there are a handful of really cool 3D style pieces that we’ve found for you today. This show great skills from the artists and can inspire us all – no matter what type of design we do daily.

So sit back and enjoy!

10 Twitter Tools That You Should Definitely Know About

Rishabh — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:56:06 +0000

Twitter has gone large, really large. Everyone of us has seen the tremendous growth this nifty little service with just a basic and simple idea has gone over the years. The main thing that makes twitter so powerful is their API. The twitter API enables developers to develop their own custom twitter applications and tools. With the API provided by twitter, developers can call the twitter services and integrate them into their applications and tools very easily. There are zillions of twitter tools and apps out there. Some offer enhanced tweeting user experience while others are useful for personal and business analytics. With twitter, we have collected some of very useful and indispensible tools that we think you should be knowing about. So here goes the list:

TwitterAnalyzer

TwitterAnalyzer is one of the most comprehensive Twitter analyzer tools out there. It tracks followers who are online when you are, number of readers that have been exposed to your message, your tweet habits, who is retweeting your updates, twitter follow statistics, growth rates, conversations being made about you, the size of your audience and your followers’ demographics. It will let you research the way your fellow tweeps behave. It will surface which messages they answer and which ones they paid attention to, drilling down to their occupations and which users and are in your line of work.

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader is another third party app which calculates a grade for a particular twitter on a scale of 0-100. It will show you your ranking in your city, state, and country. It will also show you active and influential Twitter users that you may want to follow. The Tweet Cloud indicates the frequent user words in your Tweets with the most commonly used in larger print. This is very beneficial because its a quick overview of your content.In addition to the TwitterGrader, Hubspot also has a Facebook Grader, Website Grader and Press Release Grader that you should check out as well, if those stats are important to you.

TweetPsych

Still in Beta, TweetPsych is a work in progress. Its purpose is to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their Tweets. It compares the content of a user’s Tweets to a baseline reading that was built by analyzing an ever-expanding group of over 1.5 million random Tweets, and then highlighting areas where the user stands out. Dan Zarella,the developer behind TweetsPsych continues to expand his set of psychological definitions, while also refining the system and its algorithm to better analyze Twitter-specific content.

TweetStats

TweetStats will graph your total tweets by the month, by the day, and by the hour. It also tells you your number of @replies and which interface you used to Twitter your tweets. By calculating the volume of your tweets and retweets it quantifies your tweet density. Most people who say they get no value from Twitter should first look at their usage and consistency to realistically evaluate what they have invested in Twitter before they consider the results.

Tweetag

Tweetag display the most discussed topics in the last 24h in general, or the most talked topics related to a given topic. You can also get a free email alert whenever a keyword appears in Twitter Lists of your choice.

Twist

This tool offers trends of keywords or product name, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph. Select an area on the graph to zoom into trend for specific time range. Click on any point on the graph to see all tweets posted during a specific time. One can also see the latest tweets on the topic.

TwInfluence

TwInfluence is a tool for measuring the combined influence of your Twitter account and followers, and then assessing your reach through the quality of your followers. Since all users and all followers are not created equal, this analysis will determine the “horizon of communication” that extends beyond your own direct contacts. This is demonstrated whenever somebody “retweets” your message and its influence begins to create ripple effect throughout the Twitterverse. TwInfluence uncovers one’s reach, velocity and social capital, and its worth the time to spend with this tool to learn how these components interact.

Twitturly

Tracks popular URLs tracker on Twitter. With Digg-style interface, it displays 100 most popular URLs shared on Twitter over the last 24 hours. On Digg, people vote for a particular web content, whereas on Twitterurly, each time a user share a link, it is counted as 1 vote. This is a good tool to see what people are ‘talking’ about in Twitterville and see total tweets that carry the links.

TwitterFriends

This tool focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users’ behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links. Its TwitGraph displays six metrics – Twitter rank, CQ, LQ, Retweet Quotient, Follow cost, Fans and @replies. Its interactive graph (using Google Visualization API) can displays relationships between two variables.

TwiBuzz

Twibuzz is a tool that let’s you see how often people are using Twitter to tweet your favorite keywords in real time. Try terms like swineflu, or compare two terms like google,apple. TwiBuzz will plot the current and historical tweet rate in tweets per minute (TPM) for your search term(s). TwiBuzz tracks a predefined list of terms, but you’ll find that it’s easy to add to that list. Once a term is added, TwiBuzz will have it’s first TPM data point for that query within a few minutes.

30 Absolutely Awesome Free Social Media Icon Sets

Hilde — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:07:24 +0000

This time we’ve made a great collection for those who are looking for good social media icons. These are all good ones and they’re free to use. If you don’t have the time to design your own, or just think these are better than anything you could ever make yourself – make sure to get them!

These can be used to spice up your designs, inspire you and add that final touch to your blog/website.