Today we’re releasing a set of 14 textures. The photos were taken in a park after some snow. The textures can be used in your personal or commercial projects, not attribution is required. They cannot be re-distributed or sold.
In this freebie, we are giving away 7 High-Resolution Heavy Watercolor Spatter brushes to add to your design resources.
You didn’t think we’d close out the year without a “Best of 2009” post, did you? Well, you’re not getting off that easy.
Here’s the best Copyblogger content of the year, based on your enthusiasm via comments, links, retweets, and gratuitous offerings of produce-based holiday desserts. We thank you all for your continued support (but we [...]
Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.
As a result of last nights post, I dove in and added a check to my Robots Meta plugin that checks whether you’re allowing search engines to spider your site.
If not, it’ll throw an ugly warning on each and every page until you fix it:The code for it is easy, and as I’d like other [...]
Checking Blog Privacy Settings is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
One of the most significant challenges that designers face is the need for continual improvement and development. The industry and technology can change very quickly and staying on top of things and working to improve your skills is necessary in order to have a successful career in web design. Fortunately, learning and improving will naturally occur to some degree as you continue to work on different projects and in different scenarios, but there will be times when you will have to make an effort to work on your own development.
In this post we’ll look at 10 keys to growth as a designer. This list and discussion should serve as a reference or guide for any designer that wants to improve. Focus on these areas and you will become a better designer. Please share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.
There are plenty of different things for aspiring and improving designers to learn, and more than enough resources and tutorials to make it happen. One of the temptations is to jump ahead and try to learn too many specifics before having a firm grasp on the essential fundamentals of web design. Some tools, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, can lead designers to think that they don’t need to be proficient in HTML and CSS. However, having a solid knowledge of HTML and CSS, plus basic design principles, is necessary and trying to learn too many other things at once can lead to confusion. If you have not already reached this point, make it a priority to attain the foundational knowledge first before you try to build on it.
Ok I just had to post this, as it’s too funny. I got a Google Alert this afternoon for this post, which mentioned one of my plugins as being listed by Web Designer Magazine. So, I Googled them, as the post didn’t link to them, and got this result:Notice something? I know I did: there’s [...]
Web Designer Mag should fix its SEO is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
As a final post for 2009, let’s take a look back at the best tutorials for creating website layouts in Photoshop. There were a number of great tutorials of this kind throughout the year, many more than in years past, making it a great year for anyone who wants to improve their design skills. Here is a look at 25 of the best.
Create a Company/Business Web Layout Using Photoshop
A good old fashioned list of New Year’s resolutions for Designers… sans the vision boards.
Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.
Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.
By Louis Lazaris Not many of us will have the opportunity to attend or participate in a live web-related event, conference, or presentation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from the information exchanged at such events. Many of the sites associated with those events provide supplementary information, summaries, presentation slides, plus audio and video footage [...]
For some reason, your WordPress blog can send some info to external sources, as such as AUtomattic, the company behind WordPress. Although you don’t really have to worry about it in my opinion, you can block those requests with the following technique.
Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!
From time-to-time we publish collections of specific styles of Photoshop brushes. One of our most popular collections features floral brushes and it’s now over a year old. Since the time that post was published many new brush sets have been released and we’ve come across some other good sets that weren’t included in that post. Here we’ll present a follow up with more than 250 brushes from 19 different packs.
Grunge and Smooth Floral Brushes (66 brushes)
In Part 1 of this tutorial series, you learned step-by-step how to design an awesome band website in Photoshop. Now in Part 2, you’ll learn how to take that PSD and turn it into clean, working XHTML/CSS code.
Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.
Having the right icons can help to make a web design look much more professional and complete. Fortunately, there are some excellent free icon sets available that offer very high quality icons. In this post we’ll feature 35 sets that every web designer should be aware of. Keep these icon sets handy and they will meet your needs for most projects.
Our gallery site Icon Fever was launched to help designers find the icons that they need. To find more icons, please visit Icon Fever.
Winter is upon us (in the Northern Hemisphere at least). Few things in this world can be so solemn and magnificent at the same time, the winter season being one of those things. In this collection, we share with you a stunning set of photos that capture the true beauty and essence of winter.
Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.
Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.
Since the year is winding down, we thought it would be helpful to go back and pick out the best Illustrator tutorials that were published in 2009. The year was full of great tutorials, and 50 of the best are featured here. For more Illustrator tutorials please see:
Smoothly Shift Winter Colors While Creating an Icy, Vector Landscape
Since the year is winding down, we thought it would be helpful to go back and pick out the best Illustrator tutorials that were published in 2009. The year was full of great tutorials, and 50 of the best are featured here. For more Illustrator tutorials please see:
Smoothly Shift Winter Colors While Creating an Icy, Vector Landscape
By Matt Cronin Being able to organize data and information is a skill not to be overlooked. The way you organize content and text, generally referred to as copy, has a direct effect on how that content is received by users. You must find a way to organize information so that it is scannable and can [...]
Conditionnal tags are very useful when you need to know if you’re on a post, page, homepage, etc. But how to know if you’re are on a specific page template? Nothing hard, just use the following recipe.
Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!
For designers, website and blog headers are frequently areas where creativity is on full display. In this post we’ll feature 25 blogs with unique header designs. For more blog design inspiration please see our blog gallery Blog Design Heroes.
On Christmas day of 2009, Pingdom, a service that will monitor the uptime and response time of your websites and servers, and alert you of any downtime, gave out twenty 1-year subscription to their Basic Plan service (valued at close to $120 each).
We’ve managed to compile a list of the 50 of the very best Photoshop tutorials this year. Happy learning and wishing you all the luck in 2010!
By Matthew C. Gallagher So you have sold your idea, your client has committed to the project, the next step is – How do I manage this most effectively to successfully complete this job? There are generally 3 accepted rules of project management: time (delivery to client or launch of product), budget (cost to deliver project) and [...]
To honor the season of giving and sharing, Pingdom, a service that will monitor the uptime and response time of your websites and servers, and alert you of any downtime, has decided to give 20 lucky readers a 1-year subscription to their Basic Plan service (valued at close to $120 each).
Here’s to a safe and joyous holiday season for you and yours. In case you’re actually looking for something to read, here are some Copyblogger gems for your solstice surfing pleasure.
Copywriting 101
Content Marketing 101
How to Write Magnetic Headlines
SEO Copywriting 2.0
Landing Pages Turn Traffic Into Money
Keyword Research for Bloggers
Internet Marketing for Smart People (free 20-part course [...]
Search engine optimization by SEO Design Solutions