April was a busy month, we have been watching great news, articles, tutorials, scripts, tips and lot of inspiration for web designers popping up everyday so we thought it would be a great idea to wrap all those resources in one package where you can check to fuel your energy for creativity.

Today we have a round up of useful CSS, Ajax, Tutorials, tools, Graphics and articles we’ve found in April that is worth your time.

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Tutorials

1) Build a Sleek Portfolio Site from Scratch- There’s nothing like building an entire site to show you a good overview of how a CSS layout should work. This tutorial will take you through steps to convert a PSD file and build it with some nice clean HTML and CSS.

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2) This is How You Get sIFR to Work- Follow this tutorial to get a basic understanding of how sIFR works. Afterwards you’ll be able to expand into more advanced areas.

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3)Create a Powerful Mental Wave Explosion Effect- How to create a crazy explosion, like a mix of Magneto’s ability with Peter Petrelli’s power.

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4)50 Essential Photoshop Text Tutorials- 50 of the best Photoshop tutorials for working with text.

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5)Create Abstract Backgrounds- Using Gradient Meshes, Steps Blends and Opacity Masks you can quickly create an abstract background.

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6)Lighting effects Photoshop Tutorial- How to create a beautiful lighting effect using Photoshop.

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7)Relflections, a Web 2.0 Staple

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Ajax

8 ) Custom JavaScript Dialog Boxes- A lightweight (~4.5kb) JavaScript dialog box library. The script currently offers four dialog styles: alerts, warnings, prompts and success.

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9) Ajax Image Sliders Part 2: Intervals with On Demand

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10) 41 of the Best MooTools Ajax Examples and Downloads- 41 MooTools examples that you can freely download and learn or use from.

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11) 10 things IT needs to know about AJAX- 10 things you should take to heart about Ajax.

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12) Assign Anchor IDs Using MooTools 1.2- Looking to use the MooTools SmoothScroll plugin but don’t want to go through hundreds of HTML pages to add “ID” attributes to your anchors? You don’t have to — simply assign anchors with Moo!

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13) jQuery Examples - Horizontal Accordion- An accordion effect that reveals a caption for each thumbnail.

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14) jQuery.ui Sortable- jQuery’s Sortable is a cool client side jQuery plugin that lets lets you create sortable unordered/ordered lists or a plain group of contained DIV tags.

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15) Getting Started with Ruby on Rails- Great overview on getting started with Ruby on Rails by Dan Benjamin.

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CSS

16) The Highly Extensible CSS Interface- The Highly Extensible CSS Interface is an excellent 4-part series of articles, now gathered together on one page for easy reference.

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17) Hartija - CSS Print Framework- Hartija is “mini” CSS Framework for web printing. The goal of this framework is to improve and ease the creation of “printer friendly” pages with minimum effort.

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18) CSS Gradients, Transforms, Animations, and Masks- Safari / Webkit shows the future of CSS! Gradients wirh CSS and without any image.

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19) Combine Your CSS Media Styles Into One File- Using some easy CSS, you can combine your CSS medias into one file!

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20) CSS do’s and dont’s Part 1: CSS Selecting- Css Globe is starting a series of lightweight articles named “CSS do’s and don’ts”. This series is aimed at pointing out some of the bad habits when it comes to css and web standards in general.

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21) Date Stamps- A list of all six styles, each with an example of the timestamp and the code you can use to create it.

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22) Simplifying and Demystifying CSS Backgrounds- A great article to show how to use background images with CSS.

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23) Web to Print: Restyling Pages on the Fly with CSS- Matthew is sharing the experience he gained while writing a print stylesheet for Bits O’ NewMedia.

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Freelance

24) Deciding When to Use Project Pricing - Billing by the hour is the most common way to make money in the freelance world, and it can be both safe and profitable. But it does have a few drawbacks. First, potential clients tend to balk at higher hourly rates.

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25) Why Giving Clients What They Want is a Bad Idea- Why giving client’s exactly what they expect is a way to ensure that your work is complacent and how it avoids creativity.

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26) 12 Practical Ways for Freelance Designers to Increase Leads- There are plenty of different ways to find potential clients, Steven Snell is writing a very useful post on Freelanceswitch taking look at 12 things you can do to increase the number of leads you receive.

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Web and Graphic Design

27) How to Blog Design Style Guide- Different design elements affects a website design’s look and feel, Blogdesignblog have broken these different design elements into nine different parts. The more attention you give to each part, the better your overall blog design will be.

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28) Awesome HOT TIPS for YOUR WEBSITE in 2008- Fadtastic, have secretly been trawling the best websites and breaking down what’s good about them all. They’ve conveniently made a list of these unmissable golden nuggets of advice below. Use with caution - you don’t want to be too hard on your competition!

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29) 70 Excellent Vintage and Retro Graphic Works- A celebration of retro and vintage design — ads, illustrations, book covers, pins and posters from 1920-1980s.

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30) Logo Design Process for Just Creative Design’s Award Winning Logo- Jacob Case is talking about how he came to the name for his freelancing business ‘Just Creative Design’ and also the logo design process that is used to design the logo of his website.

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31) How to switch the “on” state of navigation links for dynamic pages- From Askthecssguy.

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32) How to Use Adobe Illustrator to Create a Unique Distressed Text Effect

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33) IE CSS Bugs That’ll Get You Every Time- Here are the major bugs in IE that’ll get you every time.

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Freebies

34) BB Petie Boy Original Font from Bittbox- Website Bittbox has released it’s very first original free font. BB Petie Boy is available in four weights, one of which is a grunge style.

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35) Free PSD Icons (24 icon sets)- Free icons for any use.

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36) Exclusive You The Designer Free Vector Graphics- Free computer icons to enhance your website design.

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Tools and Online Generators

37) IETester- IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP.

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38) Mutapic -Mutapic is an online picture generator. It is a free tool you can use to rapidly create original art.

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39) 7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design- Some useful tools that you can use to ivaluate a Web design

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40) 10 Website Statistic Tools- Keeping track of visitors to your website is vital, and these tools allow you to monitor and review traffic in different ways. Some are free, some require a small charge - all of them will help you know exactly who is passing eyes over your design.

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WordPress

41) 10+ Free Magazine Style WordPress Themes to Choose From- A list of free magazine–style themes.

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42) WordPress Security Prevention, Reactions, and Scares

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43) Custom Digg Counter in WordPress with PHP- A PHP function to grab the number of Diggs from the Digg API and display it in the WordPress post.

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Typography

44) On Choosing Type- Choosing type can be sticky business and often result in going back and forth. Check out these guidelines to keep you safe.

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45) 5 Principles and Ideas of Setting Type on the Web- Principles, rules and ideas for approaching Web typography decisions in this useful post.

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46) 101 Awesome Downloadable Fonts for Designers- PWebsite Free Geekery has a nice list of free fonts all nicely categorized by font style.

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Inspiration

47) 49 Professional and Innovative Websites- This is a solid collection of professional websites for inspiration.

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48) 20 Blinding White Portfolios- Designflavr has collected a great set of Portfolios, Light or simple White portfolios.

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49) Awesome Light Graffiti Pictures- Long Exposure pictures can get pretty awesome if you have the right ideas. Here are some nice collection of Light Graffiti Pictures.

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New Lanuches

50) DD Whois-A new Ajax tool that lets you painlessly look up the availability of a domain name, or for registered domains, its whois records.

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51) NETTUTS launched!- Collis Ta’eed, the creator of the very successful PSDTUTS, has launched a sister blog about web development titled: NETTUTS - Spoonfed Web Skills.

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52) CSS Blogger- A new showcase website featuring some of the best designs.

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