http://www.purpleboxagency.com/

Purple Box Agency est une agence web née en 2011 et basée à La Seyne-sur-Mer spécialisée dans la création de site internet.

http://www.freecssshowcase.com/

BizPro is a clean, simple and professional template dedicated for businesses. BizPro, Clean HTML/CSS Template – Main Features: Valid XHTML Strict Clean and professional look Fixed & 4, 3 or 2 Columns Layout 3 unique color schemes like, -  Green -  Red -  Yellow Featured jQuery Nivo Slider Cufon Text Replacement Layered PSD Files included Well structured.

http://www.haluko.com/

I’m a multidisciplinary designer for digital platforms.
My name is RJay Haluko. I have 12 years experience, and currently work as the Creative Director for a digital agency based in Princeton, NJ. My passion is at the intersection of art and technology

http://www.prologue.ro/

Web design. Oferim servicii de web design, site-uri web, email marketing, eCommerce, web design, newsletter, cms, seo, webdesign, website.

WordPress is big business. Thousands of web designers build for the popular platform that powers over 25 million blogs (which seems to be an outdated number considering February 2011 numbers suggest WP 3.0 has been downloaded more than 32.5 million times), according to it’s official site, including many high profile blogs as well as your current location, the Tuts+ network.

Evident through the success of authors at ThemeForest, custom theme design has a major market. The landscape for premium theme design (and development) is constantly changing, especially with the updated releases of the core software behind it.

The purpose of this article: In this article, we’re going to take a look at the latest WordPress trends as they relate to web designers. You may have never even touched the platform yourself; You may have used it before, just don’t know how to keep track of the latest developments; You might even hate WordPress and prefer another system like Drupal or Expression Engine… either way, it’s a platform that most web designers can’t afford to ignore because of it’s sheer popularity and mass adoption by the industry.

From a web design perspective, this article should help to bring to light a lot of the latest trends with custom themeing. Why is this important? With more and more sites being built on WordPress, it’s important to know what’s happening in terms of backend functionality, content management, and front-end design. Even if you never plan on writing a line of WordPress code in your entire life, having a good idea for what it’s capable of will help you create more intelligent designs for it (and there’s a very good chance that if you’re a web designer over the next year, you’ll be asked to create a site built on WordPress).

If you’re interested in finding out more about coding with WordPress, be sure to check out Nettuts massive archive of articles and tutorials on WP.

Ok. Enough intro, let’s dive in.

Why Should Web Designers Care About WordPress Right Now?

Brandon has promised a much larger article on this next month, but let’s break this down into three distinct reasons:

Reason 01: WordPress allows for a wide range of creative solutions. A few years ago, most web designers griped about CMS’s because of how damned ugly they all looked on the frontend. Sites built on old CMS’s looked like churned out templates: rigid layouts, ugly fonts, and a lack of flexibility for creating custom page designs. Nowadays, WordPress actually allows for just about as much creative freedom as you can possibly imagine. Just looking at a handful of the more eccentric themes out there should convince you that choosing to design for a CMS doesn’t mean giving up creativity in the design department:

Reason 02: WordPress empowers your clients. Chances are, if you’re a rockstar web designer, you probably don’t spend a lot of time creating custom content management systems (CMS’s) and database software. WordPress, along with a number of other awesome CMS’s that compete with it, is the best way for you to create a design, have it coded into a CMS, and allow your client to essentially manage his or her own site. For freelance web designers, this is revolutionary. No more late night calls for making content updates (ok, fewer of them); and less time spent training a client how to take care of their own site.

Reason 03: WordPress is popular. Sure, everyone loves to hate the popular kids in high school… but this is one case where popularity is actually very very important. Why? Because it means that you can pitch WordPress to clients (or your boss) and most of them will have at least heard of it. Most people savvy with the web will even have used it once or twice. This means less fighting over the platform, and more time spent actually designing. WP’s popularity also means that 1) it’s supported, tested, and stable by a huge community and 2) you can pitch projects to bigger clients simply because it’s stable enough to handle the likes of the biggest sites in the world. That means more potential $$$ for you as a designer.

What’s New: WordPress 3.0 and Above

The last year has seen the third major release of WordPress to 3.0, dubbed “Thelonious”. At the moment of publishing this article, the blogging software is on version number 3.1.1. As with each major release, this iteration introduced new features including a set of new features allowing users to customize themes with ease. From a premium theme designer/developer’s standpoint, this allows users to customize their themes with relative ease, especially important if selling on a large scale (such as at ThemeForest).

In previous releases, users who wanted to edit their theme would have to do the most through the bare code which requires a bit of knowledge. However, this could divert customers if they don’t have experience in this field. Luckily, the new features allows things like backgrounds and menus to be user-defined removing the need for end user coding.

Custom Headers & Backgrounds

WordPress 3.0 added new dashboard features that allowed an end user to upload backgrounds and headers to rebrand themes. WordPress’ own theme, Twenty Ten, demonstrates the ease of uploading a custom image for the homepage.

This is a great feature to implement to lure potential buyers. Boasting easy rebranding methods can help to convince buyers and clients with little to no back-end knowledge.

Menu Managment

WordPress 3.0 introduces a new dashboard-centric menu management system with a simple drag-and-drop interface. For a long time, menus would either need to consist purely of tags and/or categories or be hardlinked and only editable if you ventured into one of the theme’s files. This could be a pain to edit and all hell would break loose should you accidentally delete the ending of a tag or a vital part to your theme’s successful execution.

The latest from WordPress allows users to customize their own menus within the WordPress dashboard. It also means that, from a developer’s perspective, theme customization is a lot easier as one doesn’t need to develop a theme options page. Instead, they only need to add a few extra lines to enable the dashboard-located options pages which integrates an easy system to use – one that might pull buyers back for a second purchasing round.

Custom Post Types

I’ve always been a big fan of Tumblr and currently run my own blog off their platform. I find it a pleasing and simple blogging software and love the various post types such as image, text and quote posts. The simplicity is superb! WordPress introduced a similar feature in 3.0 that would allow different post types to be styled individually and not all through a generic text-oriented template.

This really opens the floodgates for a bunch of new and unique themes, especially since custom post types are not “enabled”, they are created and are dependent on the theme’s aim. This development means WordPress is much more of a CMS now, rather than just a simple blogging software. For example, one could use a custom video post type to launch a video-centric blog. Or, imagine you ran a technology blog, it’s going to be a lot easier to use custom post types so you have alternative views for both content and reviews. It’s a really interesting prospect for customers and it’s all built into the familar WordPress dashboard.

Already, WordPress theme designers are taking advantage of the new features and this can be seen on the selection of ThemeForest themes who advertise this as a main feature.

Continuing Marketplace Success

Premium theme marketplaces continue to grow at a rapid rate. Envato, this site’s parent company, also operate one of the (if not the) most popular premium theme marketplaces clocking over 960 WordPress themes that range in price from to for non-framework themes. The success of these themes are unprecedented with some individual ones reaching an unbelieveable 7,470 (that number is based on regular license price multipled by sales number. I haven’t factor in extended licenses!) in sales at the time of this writing. That’s one theme!

There’s clearly a nice market for these low-cost themes. New themes that were released a matter of days ago can instantly reach hundreds of dollars in sales and continue to grow by the day. As the marketplace grows, so does the opportunities for indie developers to grab some of the cash. Marketplaces like ThemeForest allow smaller developers to be put in front of a big audience when they wouldn’t have a chance otherwise.

As many people’s lives become dependent on the success of WordPress, this offers some free marketing for the blogging software. I am more of a design type and do little development away from WordPress and when I talked with a potential client today, I tried to convince him to move the WordPress way. In a way, I was offering some free marketing by trying to push a fairly popular blog onto a new platform. With the increasing developer-base for WordPress, more and more bloggers are being introduced to the software, fueling and demanding it’s growth.

Themes Are No Longer Just Designs

A trend that keeps rising is tagged-on functionality to themes. When WordPress first started out, themes were just designs that styled the appearance of a WordPress blog. Now, premium themes come with custom shortcodes, plugins and all sorts of add-ons that change WordPress’ functionality and not just it’s appearance.

As you peruse ThemeForest’s selection of themes, it’s unusual to frequent many themes that don’t advertise additional WordPress shortcodes or custom forms or sliders built-in. When a buyer purchases your theme, they’re buying into an “experience” that combines both appearance and function.

And in return, the custom plugin market is growing. Initially it was just themes that were mass-sold, but now CodeCanyon is home to a thriving custom plugin market where files are turning over more than individual themes!

Final Thoughts

The key line to take away from this article is that, as WordPress grows, so does a major industry. As the developers of the world’s most popular blogging software introduce new features, a theme designer’s proposal becomes so much more attractive. In it’s current state, a theme is a simple plug-in and play proposition that adds a styling and function to WordPress. And it’s now easier than ever for end users to customize the themes.

So as a blogger, I just want to say: keep designing and keep fueling the development of the world’s biggest blogging platform.

If you’re interested in finding out more about coding with WordPress, be sure to check out Nettuts massive archive of articles and tutorials on WP.

WordPress is big business. Thousands of web designers build for the popular platform that powers over 25 million blogs (which seems to be an outdated number considering February 2011 numbers suggest WP 3.0 has been downloaded more than 32.5 million times), according to it’s official site, including many high profile blogs as well as your current location, the Tuts+ network.

Evident through the success of authors at ThemeForest, custom theme design has a major market. The landscape for premium theme design (and development) is constantly changing, especially with the updated releases of the core software behind it.

The purpose of this article: In this article, we’re going to take a look at the latest WordPress trends as they relate to web designers. You may have never even touched the platform yourself; You may have used it before, just don’t know how to keep track of the latest developments; You might even hate WordPress and prefer another system like Drupal or Expression Engine… either way, it’s a platform that most web designers can’t afford to ignore because of it’s sheer popularity and mass adoption by the industry.

From a web design perspective, this article should help to bring to light a lot of the latest trends with custom themeing. Why is this important? With more and more sites being built on WordPress, it’s important to know what’s happening in terms of backend functionality, content management, and front-end design. Even if you never plan on writing a line of WordPress code in your entire life, having a good idea for what it’s capable of will help you create more intelligent designs for it (and there’s a very good chance that if you’re a web designer over the next year, you’ll be asked to create a site built on WordPress).

If you’re interested in finding out more about coding with WordPress, be sure to check out Nettuts massive archive of articles and tutorials on WP.

Ok. Enough intro, let’s dive in.

Why Should Web Designers Care About WordPress Right Now?

Brandon has promised a much larger article on this next month, but let’s break this down into three distinct reasons:

Reason 01: WordPress allows for a wide range of creative solutions. A few years ago, most web designers griped about CMS’s because of how damned ugly they all looked on the frontend. Sites built on old CMS’s looked like churned out templates: rigid layouts, ugly fonts, and a lack of flexibility for creating custom page designs. Nowadays, WordPress actually allows for just about as much creative freedom as you can possibly imagine. Just looking at a handful of the more eccentric themes out there should convince you that choosing to design for a CMS doesn’t mean giving up creativity in the design department:

Reason 02: WordPress empowers your clients. Chances are, if you’re a rockstar web designer, you probably don’t spend a lot of time creating custom content management systems (CMS’s) and database software. WordPress, along with a number of other awesome CMS’s that compete with it, is the best way for you to create a design, have it coded into a CMS, and allow your client to essentially manage his or her own site. For freelance web designers, this is revolutionary. No more late night calls for making content updates (ok, fewer of them); and less time spent training a client how to take care of their own site.

Reason 03: WordPress is popular. Sure, everyone loves to hate the popular kids in high school… but this is one case where popularity is actually very very important. Why? Because it means that you can pitch WordPress to clients (or your boss) and most of them will have at least heard of it. Most people savvy with the web will even have used it once or twice. This means less fighting over the platform, and more time spent actually designing. WP’s popularity also means that 1) it’s supported, tested, and stable by a huge community and 2) you can pitch projects to bigger clients simply because it’s stable enough to handle the likes of the biggest sites in the world. That means more potential $$$ for you as a designer.

What’s New: WordPress 3.0 and Above

The last year has seen the third major release of WordPress to 3.0, dubbed “Thelonious”. At the moment of publishing this article, the blogging software is on version number 3.1.1. As with each major release, this iteration introduced new features including a set of new features allowing users to customize themes with ease. From a premium theme designer/developer’s standpoint, this allows users to customize their themes with relative ease, especially important if selling on a large scale (such as at ThemeForest).

In previous releases, users who wanted to edit their theme would have to do the most through the bare code which requires a bit of knowledge. However, this could divert customers if they don’t have experience in this field. Luckily, the new features allows things like backgrounds and menus to be user-defined removing the need for end user coding.

Custom Headers & Backgrounds

WordPress 3.0 added new dashboard features that allowed an end user to upload backgrounds and headers to rebrand themes. WordPress’ own theme, Twenty Ten, demonstrates the ease of uploading a custom image for the homepage.

This is a great feature to implement to lure potential buyers. Boasting easy rebranding methods can help to convince buyers and clients with little to no back-end knowledge.

Menu Managment

WordPress 3.0 introduces a new dashboard-centric menu management system with a simple drag-and-drop interface. For a long time, menus would either need to consist purely of tags and/or categories or be hardlinked and only editable if you ventured into one of the theme’s files. This could be a pain to edit and all hell would break loose should you accidentally delete the ending of a tag or a vital part to your theme’s successful execution.

The latest from WordPress allows users to customize their own menus within the WordPress dashboard. It also means that, from a developer’s perspective, theme customization is a lot easier as one doesn’t need to develop a theme options page. Instead, they only need to add a few extra lines to enable the dashboard-located options pages which integrates an easy system to use – one that might pull buyers back for a second purchasing round.

Custom Post Types

I’ve always been a big fan of Tumblr and currently run my own blog off their platform. I find it a pleasing and simple blogging software and love the various post types such as image, text and quote posts. The simplicity is superb! WordPress introduced a similar feature in 3.0 that would allow different post types to be styled individually and not all through a generic text-oriented template.

This really opens the floodgates for a bunch of new and unique themes, especially since custom post types are not “enabled”, they are created and are dependent on the theme’s aim. This development means WordPress is much more of a CMS now, rather than just a simple blogging software. For example, one could use a custom video post type to launch a video-centric blog. Or, imagine you ran a technology blog, it’s going to be a lot easier to use custom post types so you have alternative views for both content and reviews. It’s a really interesting prospect for customers and it’s all built into the familar WordPress dashboard.

Already, WordPress theme designers are taking advantage of the new features and this can be seen on the selection of ThemeForest themes who advertise this as a main feature.

Continuing Marketplace Success

Premium theme marketplaces continue to grow at a rapid rate. Envato, this site’s parent company, also operate one of the (if not the) most popular premium theme marketplaces clocking over 960 WordPress themes that range in price from to for non-framework themes. The success of these themes are unprecedented with some individual ones reaching an unbelieveable 7,470 (that number is based on regular license price multipled by sales number. I haven’t factor in extended licenses!) in sales at the time of this writing. That’s one theme!

There’s clearly a nice market for these low-cost themes. New themes that were released a matter of days ago can instantly reach hundreds of dollars in sales and continue to grow by the day. As the marketplace grows, so does the opportunities for indie developers to grab some of the cash. Marketplaces like ThemeForest allow smaller developers to be put in front of a big audience when they wouldn’t have a chance otherwise.

As many people’s lives become dependent on the success of WordPress, this offers some free marketing for the blogging software. I am more of a design type and do little development away from WordPress and when I talked with a potential client today, I tried to convince him to move the WordPress way. In a way, I was offering some free marketing by trying to push a fairly popular blog onto a new platform. With the increasing developer-base for WordPress, more and more bloggers are being introduced to the software, fueling and demanding it’s growth.

Themes Are No Longer Just Designs

A trend that keeps rising is tagged-on functionality to themes. When WordPress first started out, themes were just designs that styled the appearance of a WordPress blog. Now, premium themes come with custom shortcodes, plugins and all sorts of add-ons that change WordPress’ functionality and not just it’s appearance.

As you peruse ThemeForest’s selection of themes, it’s unusual to frequent many themes that don’t advertise additional WordPress shortcodes or custom forms or sliders built-in. When a buyer purchases your theme, they’re buying into an “experience” that combines both appearance and function.

And in return, the custom plugin market is growing. Initially it was just themes that were mass-sold, but now CodeCanyon is home to a thriving custom plugin market where files are turning over more than individual themes!

Final Thoughts

The key line to take away from this article is that, as WordPress grows, so does a major industry. As the developers of the world’s most popular blogging software introduce new features, a theme designer’s proposal becomes so much more attractive. In it’s current state, a theme is a simple plug-in and play proposition that adds a styling and function to WordPress. And it’s now easier than ever for end users to customize the themes.

So as a blogger, I just want to say: keep designing and keep fueling the development of the world’s biggest blogging platform.

If you’re interested in finding out more about coding with WordPress, be sure to check out Nettuts massive archive of articles and tutorials on WP.

Webdesigntuts+

Forests are, without a doubt, one of the worlds most amazing natural landscapes! As a photography subject they’re incredibly versatile and can go from being mysterious, or downright terrifying, to being majestic and powerful in the space of a few hours!

There is something inherently awe-inspiring about trees, especially when you are surrounded by a seemingly endless host of them. Be it their magnificent size or enigmatic beauty, in the depths of the forest we remember nature’s ability to thrive.

In a moment we’ll take a look at some inspiring forest-based photography, but first we’ll outline a few simple tips that could get you well on your way to capturing something of the essence of the forest!

Take Time

One of the beautiful things about landscape photography is that there is no need to hurry. Take your time and get a real feel for what it is you want to capture. Time is on your side. Lighting conditions can change dramatically throughout the day, and if you’re really fortunate, the perfect shot may find you!

Wander through the forest and consider all the possible vantage points, try out both wide and telephoto lenses. A wide lens angled upwards at the trees can bring out the majestic size and scale of your subject, while a telephoto lens is useful for compressing a row of tree trunks and capturing patterns in the trees.

A Point of Interest

As with any photograph, find yourself a good point of interest. It could be a particularly fascinating tree, a splash of unexpected colour, or a pattern in the trees that simply begs you to photograph it.

Whatever your point of interest ends up being, it’s vital that you compose your shot in a way that highlights your point of interest to the viewer. Look for interesting patterns in the light; forests have some unique lighting conditions all of their own. Look for rays of sunlight piercing the conopy and creating pools of light on the forest floor.

In Every Season

Forests are a truly wonderful photography subject all year round. In any season, under any weather conditions, and at any time of day forests can show you a new side to their character. From the bright colours of autumn and the bleak depths of winter, to the thriving life of spring.

Hopefully the photographs below will inspire you to get out and capture something of the awesome beauty of the forests.

Photo Inspiration

ViaMoi

paul (dex)

Luc B

Fred

Stella

MorBCN

Luke Andrew Scowen

ViaMoi

Nicholas

josef.stuefer

Fred

Evan Leeson

Ken Douglas

MorBCN

Trey Ratcliff

Nicholas

Dieter Orens

MorBCN

Jose Maria Cuellar

Ken Douglas

Nicholas

Brian Hathcock

David

Jorge Orte Tudela

Trey Ratcliff

Stefan Perneborg

Ken Douglas

Trey Ratcliff

Judy Baxter

Bianca de Blok

josef stuefer

Anna Falactik

Trey Ratcliff

aspheric.lens

ex.libris

Marc Soller

Angelo Juan Ramos

Daniel Peckham

Daniel Hoherd

Michael Klaas

Daniel Hoherd

Vincent Brassinne

José Luis Mieza

Paul Friel

Dietrich Bojko

Eric

Tobi

Jean-François Chénier

Tobi

Kristian Madsen

Joel Bankhead

Frank Wuestefeld

Trey Ratcliff

Simon Bray

Reto Fetz

Further Reading

Here are a few links to really useful tutorials and articles that will teach you more about this type of photography:

• Photographing in the Forest
• Landscape Photography Tips
• Quick Tip: Getting Started With Landscape Photography
• A Beginner’s Introduction to Wide Angle Photography

Share Your Own Images!

Reckon you have a photo that belongs alongside the above images? Post a link in the comments, we’d really love to see your own favourite shots from the forest!

Phototuts+

http://www.deadcow.fr/

webagency spécialisée dans l’open source : drupal, wordpress, opencart, prestashop…

You’ll find lots of web design and development tutorials out the net… but very few tuts that take you from start to finish. Lots of tutorials are only for design, and others are only for coding. Today we’re starting a new series where we’ll design and develop a complete website from scratch; We’ll take you from the initial wireframe to the full site design (including 5 pages). Then we’ll be coding the design (in Nettuts of course) and finally converting this complete XHTML theme to a working WordPress theme!

Project Objectives!

Our aim is to design and develop a simple site design with a modern layout that’s conducive to CMS systems like WordPress. We won’t be applying any wild and crazy style effects in our design (the point here is to keep it simple), but we are going to approach the entire process, from start to finish, as a study in layout and a proper use of margins and padding.

We’ll be using the 960 grid system from start to finish, so if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to use the system, now’s a great time to learn! We’ll be making a few deviations from the norm, but for the most part we’ll be using 960gs in the design and coding phases.

Once you guys/gals are done, you’re welcome to customize the design all you want with your own fonts, colors, styles and textures! Remember, this is just a starting out point – you’re welcome to go as nuts as you want when it comes to the personality of your own version of the design.

A Brief Course Outline. We might break this up differently once we hit the coding phase, but this should give you a good idea of where we’re heading with this series:

• The Design Phase
• Session 1: Laying The Groundwork and Designing the Homepage
• Session 2: Designing the Support Pages (Available Next Week)
• The Coding Phase
• Session 3: Slicing and XTHML Coding (Available Soon)
• Session 4: Convert To a WordPress Theme (Available Soon)

Resources Used For This Project

You can use your own resources if you’d like, but here’s the full list of the images and icons that I’ve used in the tutorial:

• Images – Lil Rhody Dan, Flickr
• Merry Christmas (photo)- from PSDTuts flickr group
• Social Icons – wefunction
• Twitter Bird – webtreats
• Use these values for text colors- Heading color: 0f5193; Text Color: 7c7c7c; Link color: eaa000

Let’s Get Started: Day One of the Design Phase

So, without further delay, let’s start on the design phase! This design phase is divided in two parts. Today, we’ll lay out the wireframe using the 960gs system, and we will design the homepage. In second part (coming next week), we’ll design the other support pages.

The main thing you’ll want to keep track of today is how we’ll be using two different variations of the 960gs (a 12-column layout and a 16-column layout) together in the same file. I’ll explain more about this later, but keep track of when we use each different layout as it’ll play a big role in the coding phase later on!

Today’s four sub-parts are:

• Part A Laying Out the Site Wireframe
• Part B Designing the Header
• Part C Designing the Main Content Area
• Part D Designing the Footer

Part A: Laying Out the Site Wireframe

Step A1: Creating A New Document Using 960gs

As we are going to work with 960 grid system, go ahead and grab the 960 grid system from here.

Inside the main folder (what you have just downloaded from http://960.gs), go to “templates->photoshop” and open “960_grid_16_col.psd” in Photoshop. Rename this file to “index.psd” and save it in a new folder of your choosing, as shown in image A – 1a.

Now that we have the 16-column file setup, we want to also import the guide-layer from the 12-column file.

Open the “960_grid_12_col.psd” in Photoshop (from the same folder you have opened the “960_grid_16_col.psd” file. Now unlock “12 Col Grid” layer and position, then drag it to our newly created index.psd file as shown in the image A – 1b and A – 1c. Also unlock the layer and position of “grid_16_col”.

You may be asking yourself, “Why should I to use two different grid files“? As the grid_16 can’t give us three equal columns, we need to use grid_12 as well. The 960gs system is actually built to be used this way, so it won’t cause any conflicts down the line. We’ll also use these two grids in the XHTML conversion phase.

Select the “grid_12_col” and “grid_16_col” layers, then select “Align top edges” and “Align horizontal centers” from the options panel as shown in image A – 1d (while selecting these options, make sure you have also activated the Move Tool (V)). And your final result should look like image A – 1d.

Step A2: Setting Guides, Rulers And Units

It’s the time to set up our guidelines and rulers to easily position our elements. Go to “Edit->Preferences->Units & Rulers” or press “Ctrl+K” to call the Preferences dialogue box. Then select “Units & Rulers” tab. In the “Units & Rulers” pane’s Units sub-section, set “pixels” for both “Rulers” and “Type” options as shown in image A – 2a.

Now select “Guides, Grid & Slices” tab and in its Grid sub-section, set value “100″ and unit to “pixels” for “Gridline every” option. And set “10″ for “Subdivisions” field as shown in image A – 2b.

Step A3: (Re)Sizing The Document

Now press “Ctrl+Alt+C” or go to “Image->Canvas Size” to call Canvas Size dialogue box and change settings as shown in the image A – 3.

As we have increased our canvas height, now we have to select and enlarge our grids according to the height of our document.

Select both grid layer and press “Ctrl+T” or go to “Edit->Free Transform” then drag those grids as shown in image A – 3b. Now lock both grid layers and hide the “grid_12_col layer” as shown in image A – 3c.

By default we have positioned the guides of grid_16_col as we are started from the grid_16_col.psd file. We don’t have guides for grid_12_col, but we really don’t need them as we’ll only use grid_12_col in rare circumstances.

You also can check your document’s grids and guides by pressing “Ctrl+’ (View->Show->Grid)” and “Ctrl+; (View->Show->Guides)” respectively as shown in image A – 3d.

Step A4: Creating The Wireframe

Our document width is 1020px; When using the 960 grid system, we are supposed to use 940px for our content width. We’re going to deviate just a bit from the 960 model by using a 20px left and right padding (40px total) for its content column. So our total content width is going to be 980px. Select the Background layer and press “Ctrl+Backspace” or “Ctrl+F5″ or go to “Edit->Fill” to call Fill dialogue box, then select “Color…” option from “Use”. And set the value to “e7e7e7″ as shown in image A – 4a

If you’re having trouble doing this in older versions of Photoshop like CS4, first “rasterize” the Background layer then apply the background using above step.

Now select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” set “Radius” to “10 px” in the Options panel and set “Foreground” color to “f1f1f1″. Draw a rounded rectangle in the artboard measuring size 980 x 150px. Name this layer header bg and place this layer inside a layer group and name that group Header. And organize your layer palette as shown in image A – 4b. And always keep grid layers above all the layers in the layer palette.

To create a group, simply select the layer(s) you want to set in a group (holding down the Ctrl or Shift key) and then press “Ctrl+G” or go to “Layer->Group Layers”. And to change a group name or layer name simply double click on its default name then it’ll become an editable textfield as shown in image A – 4b.

Select the Convert Point Tool from tool palette’s Pen Tool group. Then “Ctrl+Click” the header bg rectangle and click on the four upper corners as shown in image A – 4c. And delete very upper two points using Delete Anchor Point Tool from Pen Tool group as shown in image A – 4d.

Now our header bg rectangle should have a height of 140px as we have deleted the upper two points. Select header layer group and background layer then select Align top edges and Align horizontal centers from Options palette as shown in image A – 4e.

Apply a layer style in the header bg layer using settings shown in image A – 4f. Nudge this layer 1px top to hide the top glow.

Now once again select the Rounded Rectangle Tool and draw content region (measuring 980 x 1400px). Name it bg and place it inside a layer group named content and apply the same layer styles as header bg. Draw another rectangle (measuring 980 x 570px) call it footer bg and place it inside a layer group named footer and also apply the same layer styles. Delete bottom two points of footer bg rectangle using the same method of header bg. Keep 20px distance between each section (e.g. header, content, footer). Place everything as shown in image A – 4g.

Wire-framing everything then adding actual content would eat up our valuable time… So we are going to go straight to adding some “real” content for this mockup in the next section.

Part B: Designing The Header

Step B1: Populating The Top Portion of the Header

Select the Line Tool then draw a line with 1px weight and 940px in length (press and hold “Shift” key while drawing for perfect line). Place it as shown in image B – 1a. Name this layer hr, fill its background with color cdcdcd and a layer style as shown in image B – 1a.

Now select the Rectangle Tool and draw a 200 x 24px rectangle, apply layer styles and place it as shown in image B – 1b. Set its background color to 000000 then reduce its fill opacity to 10%.

Type some quick link text on the left side of our search field. Select the Text Tool from the Paragraph pane, and select Right align text. Then type some menu names and separate them with a “|” (vertical bar). Use image B – 1c as a guideline. Set its text color to ababab. For the search field type label Search with color ababab then select Custom Shape Tool and from Shape menu select Search shape then draw and place the magnifier shape as shown in image B – 1c. Set magnifier color to f1f1f1.

Step B2: Setting The Logo And Creating Navigation Menus

I’m not going to guide you how to create this logo as this is not super important that you duplicate it perfectly; I hope you’ll be able to easily create your own logo to use. Place the existing logo (or your own) as shown in image B – 2a.

Select the Text Tool, then enable the Right align text from PARAGRAPH pane. And type some menu names using the settings as shown in image B – 2b.

span>Step B3: Creating Sub-Menus

Since most keyboards don’t have the “>>” key, first select and copy this arrow (») then paste it in the Photoshop and name this layer arrow. Use the same color as the menu color and set Horizontally scale to 150% and select arrow layer (if not already) press “Ctrl+T” then rotate it as shown in image B – 2c.

Draw a rounded rectangle with radius of 4px with any measurement. Then set its fill color to d5d5d5, apply the shown layer styles and type some submenu names as shown in image B – 2d.

Part C: Designing The Main Content Section

Step C1: Designing The Image Slider

Draw a rectangle measuring 940 x 338px, then apply layer styles as shown in image C – 1a. Name this layer slider bdr. Place slider bdr in the content area as shown in image C – 1b.

Place and select an image above the slider bdr layer then Ctrl+Click slider bdr layer to gain slider image area (image C – 1c). Then go to “Select->Modify->Contract” in the Contract dialogue box set 1px and press “Enter”. Now press “Shift+Ctrl+i” or go to “Select->Inverse” to inverse selection then hit “Delete” key from keyboard. Now we should have a perfect image slider as in image C – 1d.

Select the Ellipse Tool and draw a circle measuring 16 x 16px. Apply a layer style as in image C – 1e and position them as shown in image C – 1e. Group those circles and name their layer group: radios.

Step C2: Creating the Promos & Testimonial Box

First, we are going to create four column promo items. To create four columns group, enable grid_16_col. Divide those 16 columns with four and you’ll find four equal width columns. Populate your columns with the content as shown in image C – 2a. Next, place a line with the same settings of header‘s hr position it according to image C – 2a.

When creating multiple line rules such as HRs and VRs, it’s usually important that they have the same basic styling and color.

Those icons are from tutorial9. You can download them from here.

Step C3: Creating the Second Promo

This is a three column promo section. For this, we’ll hide the grid_16_col and unhide grid_12_col. Use every fourth column as a single column to place promo items. First draw a rectangle measuring 300 x 140px and place it as shown in image C – 2b. Now place an image on top of this layer then select and crop image areas (which are overdrawn from its lower rectangle area) as we did it for image slider section. Now apply layer styles as shown in image C- 2b.

Let’s add some text now. Select Text Tool and draw a text block as shown in image C – 2c and type some heading also type some short description and a link text as shown in image C – 2c.

Now make a group with these layers with a name of “promo”. Then copy and paste the “promo” group two times, and then finally group all three “promo” groups with a name promo-col-3 and position them and your layers as shown in image C – 2d.

Step C4: Creating The Testimonial Box

Select Rectangle Tool draw a rectangle with 940px in width and set its height according to your need. Fill this rectangle with 000000 color and reduce its Fill opacity to 5% and name it testi bg.

Now select the Custom Shape Tool from Shape menu and select the Triangle Shape. Click on the Vector mask thumbnail of the testi bg layer. You should have a shape selection now.

Enable Add to shape area (+) from the Options panel and draw a triangle inside testi bg shape. Then with the Delete Anchor Point tool delete one side of the triangle and place it as shown in image C – 2e.

Next, apply the shown layer styles, position it, and populate it with some text as shown in image C – 2f.

Step C5: Creating Recent Project Items

Select the Rectangle Tool draw a rectangle measuring 940 x 40px and name this layer bar. Put this rectangle inside a layer group and label this group recent projects. Set rectangle’s fill color to FFFFFF, and set its Fill opacity to 15% then apply layer styles to the rectangle as shown in the image C – 2g and position and place some pictures below it with the settings and position shown as in image C – 2h and those pictures size is 220 x 180px.

For images, use the same techniques and layer styles we have used for the promo-col-3 sections. From now on, use this very same technique and styles for designing any images for this theme in first part and second part. Why? Because it’ll help our design have a unified, consistent style scheme. From now on, I’ll only reference this styles and techniques using “apply image styles” instead of repeating all these steps.

Part D: Designing The Footer

Step D1: Creating the Twitter Section and Social Icons

In the footer layer group create a layer group and name it top. Inside this group place contents and format them as shown in image D – 1a. For the vertical ruler use the same color and layer style of horizontal ruler hr. Finally place your layers as shown in image D – 1b.

Download those social icons from wefunction and twitter bird icon from webtreats.

Now create the footer’s main content. Populate and position the content as shown in image D – 1c. Position your layers as shown in image D – 1d.

Click for the full size image

Select the Custom Shape Tool, from Shape menu select Triangle shape and draw a triangle measuring 10 x 10px. Fill this with color cdcdcd and apply a stroke from layer style as shown in image D – 1e, and name this layer top arrow. Finally add some text and place the elements as shown in image D – 1f.

Now your design should look just about like our demo:

End of Day 1

This concludes the first part of our massive tutorial! By now, we’ve successfully setup the basic framework for the site and designed our homepage. In the next design session (coming next week), we’re going to design the support pages. Finally, we’re going to slice the design and get it ready for XHTML, and eventually WordPress coding!

Webdesigntuts+

http://www.psdtowp.biz/

Convert PSD to WordPress in affordable price. Get PSD to WordPress Conversion, Custom WordPress Development & Highly Designed WordPress Templates, Blogs & Websites – Psd to Wp dot Biz.

Today we’ll be continuing our “The Best Of” series for our sister site, ThemeForest. Every month, we review the past thirty-ish days of our premium themes marketplace from our favorite new author to a file you can grab for free! Searching for inspiration? Looking for something to buy? Be sure to check out the roundup below!

The Month at ThemeForest

It’s hard to believe it’s just been a month and a half since the new year… here’s the latest news on what’s happening at ThemeForest.

First author hits 20,000 sales

The Austrian based web designer has over 3,000 sales since his August 2008 membership. Tuts+ interviewed Kriesi, real-name Christian, back in December so be sure to check that out!

WooThemes Joins the ThemeForest Bandwagon

WooThemes launched a selection of their own premium Drupal and EE themes on the Marketplaces recently. Unfortunately, WordPress alternatives are not available yet, but surely that is only a matter of time.

Envato Launches WP-Select

ThemeForest launched WP-Select this month, a hand-picked selection of premium ThemeForest themes from Envato staff. The site features some new search filters such as colour schemes, layout and price to be able to pick the best theme to suit your needs and budget. Read the full announcement at EnvatoNotes!

The Best of ThemeForest…

As per always, February has been a busy month at ThemeForest with lots of great new themes being released across the board from new and legacy editors alike.

Synoptic

Synoptic is a beautiful PSD and HTML template available at the tiny price of . Synoptic is obviously oriented around business and portfolio pieces and includes some great CSS3 animations. The theme already has a straight 5-star rating and 112 sales.

Utopian

Utopian is a very image-heavy HTML site template by our February featured new author.

SideWinder

SideWinder is one of the more unique themes aimed at portfolio users. It’s based around the grid layout and is an image-centric, fully skinnable theme.

Oh and did I mention it’s made by the editor of this very site

Multimedia

Multimedia is a colour-heavy, image-intensive WordPress theme aimed at multimedia producers and bloggers as it’s name suggests. The theme went live on Valentine’s Day and just three days later achieved 00 in sales.

Child Care Creative

Child Care Creative is a unique theme in that it has some great typography choices. The scheme of fonts used match the target audience impeccably. For it’s high-for-themeforest-but-still-very-low price tag, you get bonus shopping cart and newsletter features.

Ermark

Ermark is a very unique, urban-style site template which comes with included PSDs. The blog theme, not currently available for WordPress, is made by a graphic design (something which is pretty event). The great integration and usage of serif and Cufon typography makes this look stunning and one of the best themes i’ve seen on ThemeForest this month! It even comes with an even better looking mobile theme!

Plus over 70,000 more…

As always, ThemeForest hosts thousands of great themes. Marrying a great review team with stringent quality guidelines, pretty much every file on ThemeForest is great and you should be sure to check out the wide selection available.

Free File of February

Xero by wizylabs is this month’s free file of the month, the one file on ThemeForest you can download without charge for one month only.

Xero is an HTML/CSS site template aimed at portfolios and professional blogs. There’s three robust portfolio options and a full working PHP contract form included. There’s also a very nice jQuery dropdown menu included and used in the theme. Plus, you get eight different colour options to brand it any way you want. Grab it before the end of February to grab it for free!

Featured Author

This month’s featured author is tonyc. Their portfolio consists of 14 ThemeForest files with, alongside a CodeCanyon file, have amassed over 1,370 sales across WordPress and others.

Featured New Author

3circlestudio is a new author to ThemeForest who launched his first item in January. In the month or so since then, Utopia has already reached over 0 in sales and a full five star average rating.

3circlestudio also has one CodeCanyon file, the navigation bar from his Utopia template. Expect more from him soon.

Webdesigntuts+

While photo sharing websites like Flickr can be a fun way of putting photos online, I’m sure that most photographers would like to have their own personal website. But what if you don’t know how to put a website together and get it online?

Well, the good news is that it’s easier than you think. In this article I’m going to introduce you to WordPress – a popular and relatively easy way of building your own website. There isn’t space in one article to cover WordPress in detail – so I’m going to give you an overview and direct you to websites where you can learn more (they are listed at the end).

What is WordPress?

The main function of WordPress is blogging software. Blogs have moved way beyond the online diaries they were originally intended to be. As well as blogs, WordPress is used as the platform for personal websites (such as Jake Garn’s website), magazine style websites (including Phototuts+ itself) and photoblogs (such as the Fine Art Photoblog).

WordPress has developed beyond its original purpose of blogging software into an excellent content management system (CMS). What’s a CMS? It lets you upload content to your website, where it’s stored in a database. The CMS software, in this case WordPress, then displays that information in your browser according to the theme that you’re using.

If you want to change the appearance or layout of your website, you just amend your theme or change to another one. A CMS separates the appearance of your website from it’s content, so that you can change the appearance without altering the content.

The main advantage of WordPress for photographers is that it lets you make updates and publish new photos or new blog posts whenever you like. If you had someone build a website for you that wasn’t a CMS, you would have to go back to them every time you needed something added. This is time consuming and expensive – especially as photographers, we always have new stuff that we want to add to our websites.

Best of all, WordPress is free (you download it from the WordPress.org website). The only costs to you are buying a domain name and a hosting package. Depending on where you live, the outlay for the cheapest hosting packages is only a few dollars, pounds or euros a month.

Do I Need a Blog?

If you’re looking for a website rather than a blog, then maybe WordPress isn’t for you. But WordPress is still worth considering because it’s very flexible. For instance, you can use it to build a website and use the blogging part of the software as a ‘news’ section. Just because you use WordPress doesn’t mean that you’re committed to maintaining a blog or making regular updates.

Who Is WordPress For?

WordPress could be what you’re looking for if you are one of the following:

• You have more time than money (WordPress isn’t overly difficult to use but it still takes time to learn).
• You want to learn a new skill. If you work in media, publishing or for any employer who has a website, learning to use WordPress could be a very useful skill, especially if you are the only person in your organisation who knows how to use it.
• You know, or want to learn, how to use HTML (hypertext markup language – the building code of all websites) and CSS (cascading style sheets – the code that controls the appearance of web pages).
• You don’t mind doing some of the work, but don’t want to get involved in anything too complex. WordPress is easier to use than a lot of other content management systems.

However, WordPress is not for you if any of the following apply:

• You don’t know how to use HTML or CSS and you have no desire to learn.
• You have money, but no time. If you have the money to pay for it, and need or want a professional website, then consider paying someone else to do it.

If either of these apply to you, there are alternatives. One is to use WordPress.com – it’s a blogging service hosted by WordPress. You don’t need any programming knowledge but it’s more restricted and less flexible than using the WordPress software to build your own website.

The basic service is free, and may be all you need, and there are some extra features that incur a small charge. Steve McCurry’s blog is a good example of what you can use WordPress.com for (Blogger and Typepad also offer similar services).

If you’re looking for a photography website rather than a blog, then gallery websites like Clikpic are a good option. For an annual fee you can build your own website using their online website creator – no programming knowledge is required and full details are on their website.

Web Hosting

Before you install WordPress you need to buy a domain name and a hosting package. There are lots of companies that offer both online – I use Web Hosting UK and they’ve done a good job for me so far. Whichever host you go with, there are a couple of terms you need to understand:

Shared hosting: This is where your website is stored on a server along with a lot of other websites. The least expensive hosting packages are always on shared servers. This is fine for most people.

Bandwidth: Your hosting package will come with a bandwidth restriction. Every time someone views your website they use bandwidth – and if you come to the end of your monthly allocation your website may go down until you buy more bandwidth. Only a concern if you start getting lots of traffic to your website.

Semi-dedicated server: Servers with only a limited number of websites stored on them. More expensive but will give you more storage space, bandwidth and a faster website.

Dedicated server: A server all to yourself. The most expensive hosting option, it’s designed for high traffic commercial websites where website performance is a priority.

Whichever option you choose, you need to make sure that it has the features to support WordPress (most hosting packages do). You will need to be able to create a database, and it must support PHP version 4.3 or greater, and MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater.

That gives us a couple more terms to look at:

PHP: A scripting language used to create dynamic webpages. The PHP is embedded in the HTML code that makes up the webpage – every time that a PHP command is encountered the server accesses the database to check what content to display.

MySQL: The database management system. SQL stands for structured query language.

But don’t worry, you don’t need to know any PHP or MySQL to use WordPress.

How to Download and Install WordPress

Once your domain name and hosting package are in place, you can download WordPress and install it on your website. Start by going to the WordPress home page and clicking the orange Download tab in the top right corner.

Once you’ve downloaded the software you need to unzip it and upload it to your website. But first you need to create a database on your server and decide which FTP client you’re going to use to do it.

Creating a Database

The database is where all the information for your website is stored. Check your host’s instructions to find out how to set up a database on your web site.

It’s normally quite easy to do, and at the end of it you will have a database name, a database username and a password. You’ll need this information for the installation.

FTP Clients

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. An FTP client is the program you use to transfer files from your computer to your website’s server space. You need an FTP client to upload the WordPress files to your server.

I use Transmit (Mac only, ), but there are plenty of free FTP clients too. Try Cyberduck for Macs, and CoffeeCup or FileZilla for PC’s.

Installation

The installation process is too detailed to cover in this article – however, all the instructions, including troubleshooting tips, are on the WordPress website. For a quick explanation of the installation process, go to the Five Minute Installation Guide.

The WordPress Installation Guide has detailed information, including a troubleshooting guide.

WordPress Themes

Once you’ve got WordPress installed and running, log into it to access the dashboard – this is the screen where you get to make posts and control every aspect of your WordPress website.

One of the first things you’ll want to do is to change the theme. WordPress comes with a basic theme – it works but it’s not very exciting. But how do find a theme to suit you? One way is by looking at other websites built with WordPress – there is usually a link to the website from where they obtained the theme at the bottom. There are also a number of themes on the WordPress website.

Some themes are free, some you pay for. You may pay anything up to 0 for a premium theme. These are aimed at commercial websites and often look more polished and have more functionality than than free themes.

A good place to start looking for themes is Envato’s ThemeForest. You’ll also find themes designed for photographers here,here and here.

You’ll find instructions on choosing and installing new themes in WordPress’s support section.

Altering Themes

Once you’ve chosen a theme, you may want to alter it. You will need to know some HTML and CSS to do so. You’ll find the information you need to get started at these websites:

• Web Design From Scratch
  has some of the easiest to understand articles on HTML and CSS that I’ve read.
• ThemeShaper has a series of articles explaining how to modify WordPress themes.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress as you download it has plenty of functionality, but it doesn’t do everything. Plugins, most of them created by independent developers, fill the gaps. You can find out more about plugins at the WordPress plugin page. Here are the some useful ones that I use:

• Askimet: Filters spam comments left on your blog. A big time saver as these can soon add up.
• WordPress.com Stats: Lets you see how many views your blog gets, where visitors come from and which pages they visit.
• WordPress Related Posts: Generates a list of posts related to the one that the viewer is reading. Encourages visitors to read more posts.
• SexyBookmarks: Places icons and links at the end of each post so that readers can share on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon.
• WP Super Cache: Speeds up the performance of your WordPress website by saving cached versions of pages to serve up to visitors. Also saves bandwidth usage.
• TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker): Scans theme files for potentially malicious code (a possibility if you don’t obtain your theme from a reputable website).
• WP Greet Box: Places a welcome message at the start of each post encouraging visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed or share the link on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Promoting Your New Website

Now that you’re the proud owner of a WordPress website, you’ll want to let the world know that it’s there. Start by announcing it on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, so that your friends and contacts get to see what you’ve done.

When it comes to website promotion, it’s important to have a website that’s worth visiting. This is a long term strategy – it takes time to upload a decent selection of photos and blog posts. But if you post stuff that is interesting and useful you will get traffic from search engines and social networks.

I’ve found Networked Blogs to be a good way of promoting my blog. All you do is register and it will post an update on your Facebook page whenever you make a new post. It also brings in traffic from people browsing for interesting stuff to read.

Another option is to ask other photographers if you can write a guest post on their blog. This can bring traffic if they have a popular blog – it’s also a good way of reaching a new audience.

Useful Articles

Need more information? Here is a list of useful articles and websites:

• Nettuts+ WordPress tutorials
• Photoblogs and Galleries (from the WordPress website)
• Ultimate Guide to Using WordPress for a Portfolio
• Designzzz
• WPdaddy.com
• WPCandy.com
• Blog Design Studio

Phototuts+

http://www.simplywp.net/

simplyWP – Custom blog design and free WordPress theme

Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! Each weekend, we’ll feature a recommended web design related lecture on Webdesigntuts+.

In this weekend’s talk, we’re going to be watching a panel presentation by from SXSW 2010; The topic is all about whether WordPress (and other CMS platforms) is killing the creativity in web designers. Watch the video and let us know what you think!

Video Lecture: Is WordPress Killing Web Design?

This is a panel presentation from the SXSW 2010 Interactive Conference. If you haven’t heard of SXSW, it’s an Interactive, Film and Music conference that happens each March. It’s one of the premier conferences of the entire year for web and interactive audiences, and it features some of the sharpest thinkers of the year on topics ranging from App Design to Industry Trends.

This particular video discussion was about whether WordPress is squashing web design creativity… or more specifically, does designing a site for a specific CMS (like WordPress, Expression Engine or Drupal) limit web designers’ creativity by forcing them to design within a certain template or pre-determined layout?

The two most dangerous things in the world are handguns and Content Management Systems…
– quoted by Brenden Dawes

What Do You Think?

It’s certainly an interesting question… but people have been saying things alluding to the notion that “Technology Limits Creativity” for a while now. Heck, print designers have been saying that since the dawn of the internet. But what do you think?

Does technology ever really limit creativity?

Have you worked with CMS’s like WordPress or Expression Engine and felt like you can’t break the mold?

Do you feel like you are limited in what you’re allowed to design for when you work with these systems?

Post your thoughts in the comments section below!

SXSW Interactive 2011 is March 11-15!

As a side note, this year’s SXSW is coming up shortly (March 11-15). If anyone is interested in attending, now is the time to grab tickets I’ll be speaking with a panel there on the topic of “Making Money From WordPress, Without Working for Auttomatic” with Shane Pearlman, Alex King (Crowd Favorite), and Sonia Simone (CopyBlogger), so be sure to drop into our panel if you decide to go!

Webdesigntuts+

http://wakwaw.com/

We are a Creative Designer & Developer Team with a heart of passionate about what we do, and how we do it. We create clean, smart and effective websites and applications. We believe that creativity blended with technology is the key to unlocking ideas and delivering results. Homes in Tangerang and Jakarta, Indonesia.

Ready for this month’s dose of web design typographic awesomeness? I’ll bet you are! Max is taking the month off, but he’s given us a list of 15 sites that showcase some of the best typography for you guys n’ gals to check out. Let’s dig in!

About the Web Typography Series

Talking about the technical rules of proper typography is great… but where the rubber really hits the road is when we can begin looking at examples of typography in action and analyze why it works. One of the beautiful things about typography is that, much like the languages that we use to communicate with each other in, the way in which you use type in a design gives it a voice. You can yell and scream or you can whisper quietly… it’s all up to you and how you want your message to be heard.

Each month, we’ll be looking at between 10 and 20 examples of excellent typography in web design… but more importantly, we’ll also analyze why the typography works. Let’s dive into this month’s offering:

01: Thrive Solo

It’s far too rare that I come across sites like this… honestly. It’s an approach that you tend to see a lot of in print design, but rarely brought to the web. What are the components?

• Big, Bold Type (set in a simple, top to bottom hierarchy)
• Structured Grid Layout (with intelligent breaks from the grid)
• Vibrant Color (just three colors – Orange, White, Black)
• Simple Texture (enough to give it some grit)

Look at how simple the design is… there isn’t a single element that a first-year design student can’t create… but how elegant and sophisticated does it feel on the screen? This is what we’re talking about when we discuss inspirational typography. By using a simple, well structured layout, the designer manages to articulate a sense a confidence and professionalism before the visitor even reads the text.

02: Amazee Labs

Sometimes a design requires something out of the ordinary to grab the visitor’s attention. This is what the Amazee Labs site does so well. Not only does Amazee opt not to use standard web fonts, they also blend HTML set type alongside image-based type to deliver a high level of creativity and excitement. In many ways, Amazee is breaking the rules… but it’s how they do it that makes it shine:

• A consistent layout for similar elements (like the informational blocks down below)
• Type Blocks and images are well aligned with each other.
• Consistent color usage – everything falls under a handful of “brand” colors.
• Consistent “functional type selection” – while there are probably 20 different typefaces on the homepage alone, when it matters (h1, h2, h3, paragraph, links, etc), the typefaces used are consistent.

All of this helps to preserve the sense of order, even when the type selection is all over the map.

03: Finch

The Finch site is surprisingly minimal in it’s type usage. Don’t be deceived by the huge logo on the front page… everything in this design is understated (in a good way).

The thing about using type on a blank page is that, when done properly, the page feels like it has a lot more going on than just text.

04: Image Mechanics

We mentioned Image Mechanics in our Yearly Web Design Trends post, but it’s worth bringing up again because it rocks. The design deviates from the standard UI navigation paradigm by making actual blocks of text the navigation (as opposed to single words or buttons). This draws the visitor in, reminding them that there are actual ideas behind each link. The actual body content within the design is remarkably well designed as well – it feels almost like a magazine, with big, bold header text, well paired illustrations, and subtle color changes (kinda like spot colors in a print zine). I also love the huge logotype on their “Meet the Makers” page!

05: Kaleidoscope

Alright, I’ll admit that I’m immediately drawn in by the huge, sexy color-wheel-erific illustration… so much so that the typography might even be horrible without it (it’s not), and I probably wouldn’t notice. The point I’m trying to make with this one is that properly pairing image with type (through size, style, color, etc.) can do wonders to create a memorable site design. Want to make a lasting impression? Take some notes on Kaleidoscope’s bold approach.

06: Fe.rocious

The Fe.rocious site is an instance where each and every part of the site feels “designed”. Which is to say that nothing has been left to the default browser settings to style… This can often be a bad thing when it’s not done right, but in the hands of the Fe.rocious designers, it feels smart and stylish.

07: RGA

I’m not going to say too much about this design because I think it speaks pretty well for itself. The layout and type usage is pretty ordinary, but where it gets interesting is in the big images used in the slider. Remember, web typography can exist in images too… creating a distinct visual style for image-based typography can bring a lot to an otherwise ordinary layout.

08: Ghost Horses

I’ll be the first to admit that I love Condensed Sans-Serif Typefaces… but they can go oh-so-wrong if not used properly. Here, they take center stage as a cross between a headline and accent font. The result: just the right amount of shouting. Integrating the fancy script font helps to bring a bit of style to the rigid forms of the League Gothic face as well. Notice how the two fonts balance each other out. Good? Yeah, it’s great.

09: Infinvision

The Infinvision site structure is simple and subdued… which helps to emphasize and draw attention to the fantastic little type-driven illustrations that they use to introduce their company. White space works suprisingly well here – nuff said.

10: King Size (WordPress Theme)

King Size is the only template on this list – What I like about it typographically is that it doesn’t feel like a WordPress theme at all. The big ribbon, combined with the laurel design makes this feel stark and Roman in aesthetic… something that you don’t see often (if at all) in template designs that usually feel rigid and predictable.

11: Devin’s Heaven

The logo for Devin’s Heaven is great, but what I really like about the site is how the type is laid out for the blog posts. The intro paragraph is full width, and the rest of the posts revert to the standard 2-column content/sidebar approach. It’s so simple… but that full width intro paragraph makes you feel like the entire page is dedicated to that single article. Where other blog layouts feel like templates that articles simple fit into, this one feels like it’s all about the article first and foremost.

12: Greater Dunnellon Historical Society

The Greater Dunnellon Historical Society site just feels fun. Consider first the purpose of the site: to preserve Dennelon’s history for the community. As such, the typography within the site mimics much of the characteristics of the society that they are preserving. There isn’t anything wild and crazy… but everything from the multi-columns, newpaper inspired body copy to the buttons feel authentic to the history (with a few modern updates). The crown molding, whimsical illustrations and shelving adds the right amount of depth to make this site really feel like a mini-time-capsule for this community.

13: Stuart Hobday

Stuart Hobday’s site layout is a breathe of fresh air after looking at some of these highly illustrative sites. Its stark minimalist approach feels simple and unpretentious. Everything is placed logically and without embellishment… sometimes what a designer can do with less says a lot more about how much his maturity and discipline. In a world of extravagant portfolios and harsh competition, it takes some serious confidence and vision to pull off an understated design like this.

14: Ryan Scherf

We’ve covered Ryan’s new site in our 2011 Web Trends article, but it’s honestly great enough to mention again. Ryan blends type and illustration seamlessly in a beautiful vertical scrolling site. The combined effect is one that creates a sense of adventure and creative exploration… which works perfectly as a method of promoting himself to potential clients.

15: Pat Dryburgh

Pat Dryburgh’s site stands in contrast to Ryan Scherf’s… but not in a bad way. Pat uses a rigid, well designs structural layout, sophisticated typeface selection, and an interesting blend of positive and negative space to create an overall aesthetic that feels confident and professional. I especially like the large columns of white-space left on the left-side of the big areas of type (under the main image). Could he have filled that space with something? Sure… but what he’s decided to leave out of the design speaks volumes to his constraint as a designer.

Conclusion

Well, it’s that time of the post again. We’ve had some laughs, some cries, but together we’ve made it to the conclusion, and here I have to leave you. As I mentioned up above, if I did’t hit your own favorite this month, be sure to share it down below in the comments section! I’ll be sure to check it out for the post next month!

Read more about Web Typography at my post on Choosing the Right Font: A Practical Guide to Typography on the Web!

We’ve also started a great list of articles in the Web Typography category… so check them out too!

Webdesigntuts+

Put simply, the scaling fallacy is the phenomena where people wrongly assume that something that works at one size will also work at another size. In this article, we’re going to discuss how this fallacy comes into play in the real physical world, and then we’ll explain how to apply the lessons to your own web designs.

The Scaling Fallacy

Ugh, as if a giant 50 foot tall scorpion could even move, let alone do battle with a demi-god.

I was recently watching the movie remake for Clash of the Titans when this old design principle came to mind. In an early climactic scene, giant scorpions proceed to attack the hero of the movie in an epic battle to the death. The scorpions, scaled to gigantic proportions, were nimble and deadly as you might expect when dealing with such a fearsome foe…

The power of digital special effects nowadays makes it seem entirely possible that such a scaled up monstrosity could occur given the right alignment of Zeus and the Growth Ray from Honey, I Blew Up the Kids (another awesome example of why science and Hollywood should never make babies). However, the reality of a gigantically scaled up monster is physically impossible.

While much is said about tiny insects being able to lift huge weights compared to their relative body size, the sheer reality of that same strength being transferred to a super-sized version of that same insect just doesn’t work in the physical world.

A tiny ant may be able to lift 50x it’s weight, but that doesn’t mean that a massive 1,000lb ant would be able to lift 50,000lbs. The effects of gravity on a tiny insect are virtually non-existent, but gravity becomes a very real power once the size is scaled up. A 1,000lb ant would have a hard time just rolling out of bed in the morning.

The scaling fallacy doesn’t just work on scaling small things to big though – A massive mountain can stand through a thousand rain and snow storms… but a tiny hill of dirt will be washed away by the gentlest breeze.

You get it… what works at one size doesn’t always work when scaled out beyond the original design intentions. The design, function, and usability of just about anything in the entire world are tied to each other by scale. The fallacy occurs when a designer assumes that usability will be retained when a design is scaled up or down.

Applying it to Web Design

The Scaling Fallacy comes into play in web design in two key areas: interactivity assumptions and load assumptions. We’ll discuss both in a moment, but as you read, I want you to consider how easy these scaling problems are to solve.

As the old saying goes, “hindsight is 20/20“… it’s being able to accurately predict the future that’s so darn tricky.

In the majority of cases, solving these design problems is quite simple (adding a pagination system, protecting a layout from oversized images by using the CSS overflow: hidden property, instructing clients to never mess with the navigation system, etc.). All of these tasks are easy to do… it’s identifying these issues before they happen that requires careful thought and preparation.

Alright, let’s dive into the nitty gritty stuff:

Interaction Assumptions

Interaction assumptions occur when you create a design based on an assumption that the user’s behavior will be the same at different levels of scale.

The classic example is of a fire escape plan: A general fire escape plan for a small house is simple: exit the building as fast as possible, call the police. The same exit strategy, when applied to a skyscraper office building packed with people would result in catastrophe. The problem isn’t the design per say, it’s the fact that the design hasn’t accounted for the new scale.

A Web Design Example

In web design, similar interactivity assumptions can occur when you assume that a client is going to populate your web design with content as you expect them to.

For example, the placement, style and size of a navigation bar may perfect sense when a blog only has 4 or 5 categories, but the same navigation bar becomes nearly unusable when 20 or more links are added:

A navigation bar design, as it’s intended to be used.

The same navigation bar, this time with 20 or so links, making it difficult to read or use.

In this case, the solution is quite simple: instruct the client who is using the website to keep his main navigation links limited to a handful (or use a dropdown menu for additional links).

Identifying Interaction Assumptions

Identifying interaction assumptions isn’t rocket science, but it requires a sort of flexible thinking that accounts for different possibilities. In terms of web design, if you design an element under the assumption that it will only be used in a single way (either by a user or the person inputting the content a year after you leave the project), there’s a very good chance that the element will malfunction when it’s used in a way outside of what you intended it for.

Here are just a few examples where simple interaction assumptions are made… these aren’t all of them by any means, but it should give you good idea of how this works:

• Images - Imagine you’ve designed a website that uses all 200px by 200px images. The client later on adds a 400px by 100px image, which breaks the layout.
• Navigation Menus – You design a site with a innovative “docked” menu system that requires a user to hover over a certain area to see the menu… but you neglect to tell the users how to do this.
• Sidebars - You design a sidebar that’s exactly 300px wide, but the client adds images that are 500px wide, breaking the styling.
• Layouts - You design a site that relies heavily on multi-column layout, but the client later on wants to use a layout that uses the full width (without a sidebar).

Most of these problems should be easy to fix… just a few additional lines of code or a simple educational meeting with a client can prevent any problems from ever occurring… but what I want you to take away from this is that you must always anticipate scenarios where your designs are used in ways that you don’t originally plan them to be used.

Load Assumptions

Load assumptions are a little bit different – they occur when a designer assumes that the stresses on a given system will be the same at every scale. Load assumptions happen a lot on the development side of a web design project; Making assumptions that an image heavy web design that works when 1,000 people visit the site a month can be blown out of the water when more than a million people visit in a day and put additional stress on the server. The same principle can apply to the actual visual design of a site too…

For instance, you design an image gallery layout that is incredibly easy to browse when there are just 10 images… but by failing to provide a proper “pagination” system, the entire layout becomes difficult to browse when more than 25 images are added.

A pagination system is perhaps one of the simplest examples of tweaking a design to account for scale.

The solution is pretty simple in this case: by adding a simple pagination system, the very same design can be made “scalable” with a few small tweaks. A numbered pagination system is added, and whallah!, your design is usable again… at any reasonable scale. You would only encounter the scaling problem again if your library of images exceeded the reasonable limits of the pagination system… at which point you would have to consider a more refined tagging and search system.

Identifying Load Assumptions

Identifying load assumptions is pretty simple too: just imagine that any specific part of your design being stretched to it’s limits in terms of content… then plan accordingly. The solution might be a design or UI tweak (like the pagination example), but it also might be as simple as instructing users what the limits are. If your design only allows for 100 images and there’s nothing that you can do about it, just tell the users that up front. See how simple that is?

Screen Size Assumptions

The last type of assumption that I’d like to describe is one that most of you are familiar with: screen size assumptions. This topic alone is worthy of it’s own blog post (more on this next week), so I’ll try to keep this brief:

If you’re designing a website and never stop for a moment to test out how it looks in a different resolution, stop right now and do it!

Long gone are the days where 75% of internet surfers are browsing on a 1024×768 monitor. Nowadays, people are surfing the net on screens of all shapes and sizes… from tiny iPhone screens to massive HD televisions.

Designing a website under the assumption that everyone out there has a certain screen size isn’t just short-sighted, it’s undermining the core usability of your site. While it might not make sense to create a different website for each different type of device out there, it’s certainly worth taking an hour or two to at least consider how your site will fare on different screen types and resolutions.

Finding just a few adjustments that you can make during the design phase of a site will save you a lot of grief in the long run. Here’s just a few quick tips for avoiding screen-size assumptions:

• Don’t rely on complex menu systems that require a mouse to accurately use. Hint: 8pt font isn’t finger-friendly.
• Consider adding a mobile-friendly fallback theme to a WordPress site.
• Avoid designing “full screen” sites (sites where the core content occupies more than 960px wide) unless the site can scale itself down for smaller screens.
• Don’t use Flash for core navigation, unless you have a damned good reason (or an HTML fallback method)
• When in doubt, make all of your body text 2 points bigger… it won’t hurt the readability on normal monitors, and mobile users will actually be able to read your text.

Avoiding the Scaling Fallacy

No plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy.

The only real way to avoid the scaling fallacy is to constantly be on the lookout for it. Throughout the design process, you should be aware of your own tendency to make these sorts of assumptions.

Don’t just design under the assumption that everything you create in Photoshop or Fireworks will stay the same when the website gets launched. Unless you are on a project where you’re going to be the sole entity that designs and adds content to the site, chances are high that someone, at some point, will add content that will break your expectations for how that design was intended to be used.

Likewise, avoid designing things that only work in a severely limited scale. As we all know, making customizations and revisions to a web design can be a painful, arduous and expensive process… designing under the scaling fallacy only makes these problems multiply as you’ll be required to revisit your old designs as often as people’s behavior falls outside of your own assumptions.

Conclusion

That’s it for now! I hope everyone finds this post useful… The Scaling Fallacy is one of those enigmatic principles that’s easy to explain in the abstract, but hard to nail down in concrete designs… so it takes lots of practice and constant vigilance to avoid the major pitfalls that come from the assumptions that we discussed.

If you liked the post or have something to add, post it below in the comments. Cheers!

Webdesigntuts+

http://foreverheavy.com/

The work of Nicholas Coates, a Designer/Developer in North Carolina.

http://www.pinkturkey.com/

Pink Turkey offers professional web design, illustration, seo and print to the Princeton, NJ and Middlesex County markets and beyond.

http://www.wp-newsletter.com/

Create, Customize and Send your cool newsletters in a second

Are you in the mood for something different? I’ll guide you in the process of creating design of Stuff – horizontal-oriented blog and portfolio. Make sure you visit Stuff online version to see the final result!

Step 1 Create A New Document in Photoshop

Make it 1300 x 800 px. All that space isn’t really necessary, but it’s good to feel the panoramic character of the design while we work.

Step 2 Creating The Background

Create a new fill layer using the solid color #bfc6cd

Adding Noise To The Background

Convert new layer to a “smart object” (right click > Convert to Smart Filter) and apply the filter > Add Noise (you can adjust it later if needed thanks to smart filters feature). Lock the layer. To keep the project clean and organized, you can delete the layer’s mask and make it the default background layer (optional).

Step 3 Creating The Big “Stuff” Arrow

Create a new arrow shape using the “shape tool” preset. Then use the Direct selection tool adjust shape to make it look nice (move the points around as you see fit).

Select Free transform tool, move the arrow 310px from top, then grab and move the horizontal ruler to create new guide. Snap it to the middle of the arrow. From now it will represent the main horizontal axis of the site.

Add 4 styles to the arrow (by double clicking on the layer): drop shadow, inner shadow, outer glow and gradient overlay (from #cbcbcb to #ffffff).

Add a new text layer above the arrow layer.

Add styles to text: inner shadow, gradient overlay and stroke. For a better depth effect, make the stroke visible only on the bottom half of the text by using a “gradient” stroke with the alpha settings of the top half set to “0″ opacity.

Outer and inner shadows give the arrow more 3D look, but to make it even better, let’s create a simple glossy light effect. Create a new rectangle and use the Convert point tool modify its shape to create a slight curvature. We’ll mask this over the Arrow layer to create a glossy effect.

Set this layer fill to 0% and add gradient overlay style with subtle vanishing white.

To avoid the light layer go beyond the arrow: ctrl+click on the arrow layer to make a selection add layer mask to the light layer

Step 4 Adding backlight

To focus viewers’ attention to the logo, make a light to stand the arrow out of the background. You can use a primitive method which is:

• Create new layer (ctrl+shift+N)
• Select gradient tool
• Reset (D) and reverse (X) colors
• Select white-to-full-transparency radial gradient

• While holding shift drag a line creating the gradient

• Make the gradient layer opacity 80% (8)

Step 5 Create the Content Holder Template

Create a white 240px width rectangle (the height should be a bit taller than the document).

• Duplicate it (ctrl+d) and change the color – it will represent an image in blog post,
• Transform it (ctrl+t) – set size to 216 x 130px, and move its center to page axis,
• Add vertical guides to mark borders of the future content

Step 6 Add Text

Above the photo, create new text box and fill it with blog title. Use a condensed font like League Gothic (free at the League of Moveable Type). Below the photo, create another new text box for the general content.

Step 7 Styling the Content Holder

Make a selection for the content and create a new mask layer for the big rectangle. Change the mask density to 80%

Add outer (black) and inner (white) glow styles to the strip layer for the more 3D look.

Step 8 Adding Meta Text

Add meta info text above the post. I’ve used 12px Georgia italic, 17px line height. Remember to make use of guides to keep texts in one line

Step 9 Creating the “Read More” Button

Create “read more” text below the post

One layer below it, create new rectangle to be a read more button.

Add gradient and stroke styles to it. Tip: make the stoke inside, to have perfectly sharp corners of the button

Add a subtle gradient to text layer too.

Step 10 Creating a Post Badge

To create the badge use another rectangle, add text (I’ve used Arial), and rotate both layers together 45 degrees.

Add mask to rectangle layer to hide unnecessary corners

…and add 2 small rectangles as an illusion of the badge going under image.

Add a subtle shadow to the badge. Tip: for shadow blend mode use Normal instead of default Multiply, so it will take effect even if you use the badge as the transparent PNG file

Step 11 The Menu

Create a new text layer. Instead of black color (which can feel unnatural on light backgrounds), use dark gray to achieve more natural look.

Tip: To create horizontal lines instead of using line tool create not anti-aliased text using underline glyph “_” It will be always pixel-sharp and spaces between the lines will be easy to control thanks to line-height parameter. Use the same line-height as in menu text and create as many lines as menu items, minus one. Make the lines longer then needed.

Set this layer fill to about 15% and add a white shadow.

Add mask to lines layer and paint with smooth brush on it to achieve vanishing edges.

Step 12 Create the Search Form

Create rectangle with rounded corners (3px) for a search input.

Add inner shadow to the box and make layer’s fill to 70%

Above it add search text and create custom shape as a submit arrow. Add inner shadow to the box and make layer’s fill to 70%

Step 13 Where to Get Social Media Logos

As vector images are recommended for this purpose I suggest to find needed logos in www.brandsoftheworld.com service. In most cases it’s the fastest way. Open the logo in the Illustrator, copy outlines and paste in Photoshop as shapes. You can also use the Buddy Icons from Orman Clark.

Set layer’s fill to 0% and add styles (drop shadow, inner shadow and color overlay) to achieve the 3D look. To get the logo in the active (lightened) state, change color and intensity of the Color Overlay style.

Copy this style and copy to other logos (right click on the layer / Copy Layer Style)

Step 14 Creating the Comment Box

To add comment box, create another rounded-corners rectangle about 520px wide and add Drop Shadow style.

Select the bigger part and add mask to this layer.

Duplicate the layer and invert it’s mask. Make the new layer’s fill 25%.

In the blending settings check “Layer Mask Hide Effects” option, to avoid inconsistency in the shadow line of both layers.

Create black vertical line on the border between these boxes, make it’s fill also 25% and add 1px white shadow directed right.

Add some sample avatar and texts using previously used colors.

Step 15 Creating Arrows for a Portfolio Slider

Create circle shape and paste layer styles from the logo arrow. Cut the arrow shape from the circle using Custom shape and cutting mode.

Below this button layer create another circle – same size or smaller, and paste the gradient style from logo. Tip: If some layer has many styles, and you want to copy just one, you can drag the style while alt pressed and drop it to another layer.

Add light (the same way as above to the logo arrow).

If you want to make some small improvement, which nobody will notice, create separate lights for button and arrow-shaped hole, and move the second one a little down. And if you already have two separate lights, you can easily (without additional masking) make the button light stronger to be better visible on the very bright button.

Select all button layers and create Smart object of them.

Duplicate layer, move and flip horizontally. Now if you edit one arrow (double click smart layer) both will change.

That’s It!

All other elements can be done by copying, pasting and resizing the existing elements that we’ve designed.

Tip: League Gothic font and other cool freeware fonts with web designer-friendly licenses can be found at www.fontsquirrel.com

Would You Like to Create the HTML or WordPress Version of Stuff?

OK, so you have PSD more or less ready, and would like to go further. As Stuff needs some different approach to content, because of its horizontal character, it’s really tricky to code it properly. I don’t know many horizontal websites which managed to avoid common errors (e.g. not working mouse scroll). Please leave a comment if you would like to know the best ways of coding this design and we’ll see if we can’t bring the tutorial to the site!

Anyway, if you want to save some time and have it all on the silver plate, you can download HTML template or WordPress version of Stuff for a few dollars. Thanks!

Webdesigntuts+

In this design tutorial, we’re going to create the portfolio design “Smart Portfolio” by Curt Ziegler, available on ThemeForest as a WordPress or HTML theme.

About the Author: Curt Ziegler, also known as Cudazi, is a web designer specializing in WordPress theme development with 10 years of design experience, a number of highly successful products and over 6000 sales at ThemeForest! You can also find more of his work at cudazi.com.

The Smart Portfolio theme design has sold nearly 1000 combined times, and helped pave the way for many other minimalist template designs. This template will walk you through how to create the design yourself, but more importantly, we’ll also be discussing why it works. Once we’re done, we hope you’ll be able to create your own version of this sleek, professional design using your own style, fonts and colors!

Step 1

Start by creating a new Photoshop document. 1000px wide, 1200px tall, 72 pixels/inch. The height may be a bit excessive for our home page but I would rather have too much room vertically than not enough and have to go back and adjust.

Step 2

Set the foreground color to f3f5ec and fill the background layer by pressing Alt+Backspace.

Step 3

Let’s create a guide mid-way across the page to help keep things aligned. Instead of manually dragging a guide onto the canvas with the move tool, let’s be more exact.

• Go to View > New Guide…
• Select Vertical
• Position: 500px

Step 4

At the very top of your canvas, create a rectangle using the Rectangle tool in the vector shapes area of the toolbar. Create it as wide (or wider) than the canvas and 7px tall. Since this is using the vector shapes tool, double click on the colored thumbnail to set the color to 51767c, a nice green.

Step 5

Add a simple line to the bottom by double clicking your layer above and adding a stroke in the Layer Style window.

• Size: 2px
• Position: Outside
• Color: 8baaaf

Since your header line is full-width and at the very top of the canvas, you are only going to see the lighter green line at the bottom – just what we wanted to accomplish.

Why not just draw another line below the 7px line? There’s no right or wrong way but I prefer to use the same shape, if I want to change or move this area, it is one less layer to track down.

Put your new header line in a folder called Header to keep things organized.

What’s with the vector tools and layer styles? Using layer styles and the vector tools is one of the many ways you can apply styles, colors and shapes with the freedom to change down the road.

Step 6

The logo for this site is standard, editable Photoshop text with a few different layer styles applied.

Start by choosing the text tool and click on your canvas, typing out the words: Smart Portfolio.

Highlight the text and apply the following settings in the character tools:

• Font: Georgia
• Weight: Regular
• Size: 58pt
• Tracking: 0

Color (left side): 51767c

Color (right side): 514829

Step 7

Now, let’s apply some layer styles to turn things up a notch, double click on the text layer and add the following:

Apply a Drop Shadow, Gradient Overlay and Stroke:

Step 8

Now we need to center the text on the page to align with the center guide we placed at 500px.

As with anything, there are many ways to accomplish the same task. One failsafe way is to use the align tools.

Choose the move tool from the main toolbar.

Click once on your text layer to be sure it is active.

Press Control+A (select all) – your entire canvas should have a selection around the perimeter.

In the align toolbar, select align horizontal centers.

Your text will jump to the center of the page, now we need to place it 40px from the header.

Step 9

Choose the move tool from the main toolbar.

Double check that your text layer is still selected in the layers panel. If not click once on it.

While holding down the shift key, click on the text and carefully move it up so it rests up against the bottom of your header lines. (Holding down shift ensures you will stay on your vertical center line)

Now, with the move tool still active, hold down shift and press the down arrow on your keyboard four times. This will bump the text down in 10px increments totaling up to 40px away from the header.

You could have set another guide and measured but this is a very quick way to get things where you need them. Again, there are many ways to accomplish the same task.

Place the logo in its own folder titled Logo to keep things organized.

Step 10

Now it’s time to add a tagline under our logo.

Using the text tool, add the following text:

Welcome to the online portfolio of Jane B Doe,
Ph.D. student, designer in Cityname, State.

The text settings are:

• Text-align: center
• Font: Georgia
• Weight: Regular
• Size: 26pt
• Tracking: 0
• Leading: 38px
• Color: 51767c

Step 11

Using the same techniques as the logo above, we first need to center this text on the page and move it to be 40px below the bottom of our logo.

Place the tagline in its own folder titled Tagline to keep things organized.

A bit of a side note here: It’s important to be consistent with your spacing of elements both vertically and horizontally.

If your elements are different distances apart, they should be that way for a reason. Elements that are close together imply a sense of relation to one another where items placed farther from one another feel independent.

Step 12

The divider bracket is what it appears to be, a gigantic bracket, rotated on it’s side.

This specific one is ImprintMT Shadow but feel free to use any style you feel appropriate if you do not have that specific one installed.

For ImprintMT Shadow, the font-size used was 440pt.

The color of the bracket is 51767c with the layer opacity set to 10% to tone things down, otherwise the bracket dominates the page and is intended to merely lead your eye down to the lower sections of the home page.

You have two options when adding the bracket, choose the standard type tool and rotate the text 90 degrees with the transform tool (Control+T) or to use the vertical type tool. I prefer the first option since it’s just a single element on the page and rotating it isn’t that big of a deal.

Step 13

Center the bracket on the page and place it 40px below the tagline just like we did with the logo and tagline above.

Place the bracket in its own folder titled Bracket to keep things organized.

Step 14

Now we can create some small items to lead visitors into the various sections of our site. In my example, I used three columns, each with its own icon but you can add more or even two rows if need be.

The icons I used can be downloaded free of charge from wefunction.com.

Step 15

Since we’re getting used to centering items on the page, let’s start by creating the center column and work our way out.

Using the standard text tool, create the first item, Education. The font settings are:

• Font: Georgia
• Weight: Bold
• Size: 24pt
• Tracking: 0
• Color: 51767c

Before we get to centering anything on the page, we need to also add the icon.

Step 16

There are multiple ways to get an image in your project but I like to use File > Place.

Choose one of the icons downloaded from wefunction.com, I chose paper_content_pencil_48.png.

When you place the icon on the page, you will notice the resize handles, while you see those, you can set the width and height to 70% since they are a bit large for our design.

You can always go back and do this by selecting the layer and pressing Control+T to use the transform tool.

Step 17

We need to align the text with the icon before aligning both overall with the page.

Make sure your layers for the icon and text are next to one another in your layers panel and then select both by clicking and holding down shift.

Now, in the align toolbar click align left edges and then click align vertical centers. We’re almost set.

Select your icon layer and using only the left arrow, move it 10px away from the left edge of your heading.

Place your heading and icon in their own folder titled Section to keep things organized and to use for additional alignment.

Step 18

Now we need to align the “Section” folder with the page.

Click once on the folder titled Section to select it.

Press Control+A (select all) – your entire canvas should have a selection around the perimeter.

In the align toolbar, select align horizontal centers.

Your text and icon in the folder will jump to the center of the page.

Using the same techniques as we have all along, move this folder 40px below the divider.

Step 19

The sections I show also have a small description on the home page. Inside the section folder, add the following text as an example:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing elit.

Proin molestie posuere.

The font settings are:

• Font: Arial
• Weight: Normal
• Size: 13pt
• Tracking: 0
• Leading: 22pt
• Color: 858872

Step 20

Center this text on the page and move it 40px below the title and icon.

We now have a completed section we can duplicate for the other areas.

Select the Section folder, it should contain the icon, title and text we just added. Under Layer, choose Duplicate Group… and enter a name. Do this once more so we have three total, all stacked on top of one another.

Step 21

Select one of the duplicated layers above and using the arrow keys, move the layers an equal distance from the center. This distance will vary depending on how wide your sentences are and how long your titles may be but keep the distance between the three columns consistent.

Swap out the icons and text in each section to customize further.

Step 22

Now that we have an idea of how “tall” this page will be, we can add in the background.

Click on the background layer so the next layer created will appear just above this, otherwise it will appear above all our content.

At the very top of your canvas, create a rectangle using the Rectangle tool in the vector shapes area of the toolbar. Create it as wide (or wider) than the canvas and tall enough to go behind all the items we have created so far, mine is 620px tall. Ideally, it will be 40px taller than the bottom of the three sections we just added. Use the ruler tool in the main toolbar to check and adjust the background height accordingly to hit 40px.

Rename this layer body solid background.

Step 23

Double click on the colored thumbnail to set the color to ffffff. (White).

Double click on the layer to bring up the layer styles window and apply the following settings:

Drop Shadow and Gradient Overlay

This will create a nice fade at the top edge of the background.

Step 24

Now we can add some simulated paper-like texture.

Create a new layer above the background we just added and fill it with solid color: f5f7ed.

Double click on the layer and add a Pattern Overlay layer style. (Pattern library: Artists Surfaces > Granite)

Set the opacity to 15% and hit OK to apply, you will notice the pattern takes over the entire page – let’s fix this in the next step.

Rename this layer body texture overlay.

Step 25

Select the body texture overlay layer and then click add a vector mask from the bottom of the layers panel.

Now, select the gradient tool from the left toolbar and double check you are using the default white-to-black gradient from the toolbar.

Layer masks don’t “see” in color but instead use black and white to determine what to hide (mask) or what to show in the layer the mask it attached to.

Step 26

While holding down shift (to keep it perfectly vertical) drag down on the canvas from the upper green bar at the top of the page down just about 100px. This will fade out the granite pattern into a solid page background, adding a touch of paper-like texture to the site without becoming distracting.

Place the body solid background and body texture overlay layers in their own folder tiled Body Backgrounds to keep things organized.

Step 27

The social media icons are not from a set but created from the actual logos. A great source of the icons and logos is www.iconfinder.com – find the ones you would like to use and apply the following changes to each item:

Set the layer mode to Luminosity
Set the opacity to 10-40% depending on the logos used
Resize each so they are all of equal height.

Step 28

Add the footer text centered and placed 20px below the social media icons with the following settings:

• Font: Arial
• Weight: Normal
• Size: 11pt
• Tracking: 0
• Leading: 22pt
• Color: 858872

Final Product

Bonus!

The PSD download also includes a bonus portfolio style page!

Conclusion

That’s it! I tried to keep everything as simple as possible for those of you just starting out but with any design there are multiple ways to accomplish the same results. If you are interested in the final HTML or WordPress versions stop over to my ThemeForest portfolio!

Webdesigntuts+

Navigation is one of the most important aspects of designing for any website, but the challenges associated are more sensitive for a blog or any content heavy site. Some designers take it as a mechanical task and they design the navigation accordingly. However, in my opinion, navigation is as much an art as it is a science, and designers need not limit themselves to default solutions.

The Mission of Blog Navigation

The ultimate mission of any website’s navigation design is to effectively guide readers around the site so that their needs are met. That is why navigation is understood to be the most critical aspect of usability to any type of website.

Designing an effective navigation system for a blog is an especially sensitive matter… owing to the fact that content that is continually being added, increasing the complexity of navigation with each new post.

This is where the mission of blog navigation begins to take on a little more complexity than a general definition. In a blog, the key design goals are as follows:

• Users shouldn’t miss out on anything new or special.
• Users should quickly understand what content is available.
• Users should know how to find the content that they are seeking (if they are on a mission to find something specific).
• Once that content is found, users should be able to find more content that interests them.

This presents some additional challenges for a designer because so much of these scenarios happen after the design is complete. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of “design paradigms” at your disposal to address these challenges to prepare your blog designs for usability success.

To put it simply: the easiest way to make an ideal navigation for your blog is not to leave any surprises for the reader and to put things where they would expect them to be found. Just what this means will be a little different for every project, but we’ll identify some key strategies below. In all of the tips that we’ll be examining, I want you to remember one principle:

The goal for any blog’s navigation system is that the main navigation elements stay the same, even when content changes on a daily basis.

With that in mind, let’s dive in!

The Challenges of Designing Blog Navigation

What follows are some of the fundamental challenges associated with blog navigation, and ways to address them with simple design and content strategies.

Once a blog hits about 40 posts, it becomes unrealistic to expect readers to keep hitting the “More Articles” button as their primary form of navigation. Once a blog hits 100 posts, it’s just plain cruel.

Our goal here is to help you to identify the type of problem withing your design’s navigation… once we’ve done that, solving the problems is actually pretty easy:

Challenge 01: Finding Old Content

When you start a blog, navigating content seems easy… it’s often not until you have several months (or years) worth of content that this challenge begins to show it’s ugly face. As the blog grows further and you keep adding content on weekly basis, finding these older posts becomes harder for readers.

With the blog growing and new content continuously being added to it, there is a great percentage of the visitors who will miss out on some of the best content you have posted on your blog. This is bad for two reasons:

1. Reader’s are missing out on great content that you have to offer.
2. You (or your client) is missing out on traffic from the older posts.

I have seen many blogs which were full of all sorts of interesting stuff; However, when I tried to dig the content deeper to check out the older posts, I was left with no choice but to browse it page by page and hope that I stumble upon a great article. And so, I realized the importance of making the older content findable.

Solution: Design Usable Archives

My suggestion for dealing with the challenge of finding older posts is to integrate archival content into your design. Any WordPress user can include a simple “monthly archives” widget… but in my opinion those monthly archives are silly and archaic.

If a reader can’t find an article using the “Search” tool, what makes you think a monthly index is going to help? It’s not!

My advice is to follow two principles:

1. Categorize and tag your content properly (we’ll cover this in a minute)
2. Use a search system that actually works (for people who know exactly what they are looking for).
3. Integrate smarter types of archival content than simple monthly archives.

This can be easily achieved with including the ‘Popular Posts’ panel on your blog. While there really isn’t any harm in opting for archiving and older post plugins, using a manually created list of Popular Posts in the sidebar is the best way to deal with this challenge. This will enable the blogger to highlight older content according to his own choice (and analytics), rather than forcing readers to guess whether or not May 2007 was a good month for articles.

Apart from Popular Posts tip, some other ways to improve older posts navigation are Internal Links and Contextual Links to cater to those visitors who are reading a post and would be interested in related information that the blog has covered in the past. We’ll cover this a bit more in the section on “Related Posts”.

Challenge 02: Category Chaos

Categories are another important aspect of your blog’s navigation. They are useful for organizing the content and to simplify the user experience of your blog. Consider your blog as a complete business set up where the Categories are the cabinets or file folders where the whole data is kept and organized. The sole purpose of the Categories is to organize; however, if the Categories are not organized themselves, then the navigation will become chaotic and confusing.

When addressing the navigation of your blog, take a look at your category list and ask yourself 2 questions:

1. How many main categories are there? (more than a handful can become confusing)
2. Can you easily understand what the site is about from the category listing? (ie: Coffee Beans, Coffee Makers, Coffee Reviews, and Coffee Philosophy – you can guess this is a blog about coffee.)
3. Are the categories relevant and useful for finding content? (or are they just taking up space?)

The underlying issue is one that designers should be aware of, even it it’s someone else’s blog you’re designing: Useless categories create confusion. This not only makes the blog look busy and cluttered but also leaves the visitor confused and disappointed if they open up a category only to find .

The Solution: Design Categories for Usability

To address this issue, my suggestion is to make the category list more relevant, simple and user-friendly. You can start off by removing a few specific categories from the list that either have very few posts or aren’t that relevant to the subject matter. This way the shorter list of categories will be a bit easier to digest.

It’s important for the categories to be intuitive and understandable. When you are initially making the categories on your blog, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and make it as obvious as possible. It is equally important to strike a balance between creating categories that are too specific and too broad, so the reader may not get confused with too little or too much content in the categories section.

Bonus tip: Creating categories based on Search Engine Optimization is another way of doing it right. Using some of your blog’s most popular keywords in your category titles can help boost your search engine results.

Challenge 03: Encouraging Visitors to Keep Reading

At one point of time, reading a blog was a very “active” process – a reader would need to navigate the content to find what he wanted. That’s fine in theory, but it can result in high “bounce rates”, where readers will leave your site the instant they find what they were looking for.

The Solution: Bring Relevant Content Forward

This is one area of blog design that, thankfully, has improved dramatically over the past year. Thanks to a variety of new plugins (available for everything from WordPress to Expression Engine), there are countless pre-built tools to bring relevant content to users on the very same posts that they are interested in.

Many blogs have started using plugins to include a list of Related Posts at the end of each post. The Related Posts plugins are meant to smooth out the internal navigation of the blog by guiding readers to relevant content… but we can still improve on them by manually setting the “related posts” rather than letting the plugin set them for us.

Manually curating posts as “Popular Posts” is a great way to help readers find interesting content.

Call it what you want: Related Posts, Popular Posts, Relevant Articles, etc., but they all come down to achieving one thing: helping users find content that’s proven to be interesting to them. It’s funny, but something as simple as saying, “If you enjoyed this article, you would also be interested to read…”, can encourage visitors to actually move around a site rather than leaving the moment they find what they thought they wanted. If you customize the Related Posts list yourself and manage it according to visitor’s trends, it can prove to be far more successful than automated plugins.

To Conclude…

I’ll conclude by emphasizing the importance of navigation for your blog. The challenges we just reviewed aren’t rocket science, but it’s amazing how a few simple changes to a blog’s navigation design can dramatically improve the user’s experience on a blog (or any other heavy content site).

Just look at Amazon.com for example – part of their success has been as a result of their “customers who bought this product also bought this:” widget (shown below)

Amazon.com does a great job at driving visitors to products that interest them through simple strategies.

This addition to their site seems so simple on the face, but consider how many times you’ve clicked those “related products” yourself. Sure, Amazon.com isn’t a blog – but it makes for a great example of how using simple design and content strategies can improve usability and the overall user experience.

A large number of blogs rely far too much on the wealth of information in their archives… most of which never finds the visitor’s eyes. If you address the aforementioned issues according to the suggested tips, you will be able to maintain a good level of blog efficiency and usability, making its navigation ideal of your visitors.

Webdesigntuts+

http://capsicum.in/

Professional Website Design, Graphic Design & WordPress Services by Nirav Dave. Capsicum Mediaworks LLP is a Mumbai based Creative Design Studio.

http://www.frogsthemes.com/themes/wordpress/365-pro

365 is a WordPress Photography theme designed for photographers seeking to  showcase their 365 photograpy project.

It’s the holiday season. And to celebrate, we’re launching something special: the Tuts+ Holiday Quiz. Each day for 10 days we’ll publish a quiz question on a different Tuts+ site. Together, the answers will form a secret URL string that will give you access to an equally secret entry form. The prizes we’ve assembled will blow you away!

Read on to learn how to take part in the Tuts+ Holiday Quiz (it’s going to be plenty of fun!) and earn the chance to win a copy of the Adobe CS5 Suite (courtesy of the competition’s lead sponsor, Business Catalyst), a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet, a library of Rockable Press books (13 eBooks) , a library of Smashing Magazine books (5 eBooks), licenses for several popular Mac Apps, and more! The prizes add up to thousands of dollars in value, and only dedicated participants will be able to win.

Day #1 Question
Psdtuts+

According to Skellie, her thoughts worth a dime, Mortal Kombat was the _th best video game cover of all time?

Look for the answer using site search. The answer is a single-digit number.

Important: Please do not post answers in comments or elsewhere in public. Entrants found to have shared answers will be disqualified. By sharing answers, you take the fun out of the competition and lower your own chances of receiving a prize!

TIP Getting started

Many of the answers will require you to use the site’s search function. We use the excellent Relevant Search WordPress plugin by valendesigns to handle search. You should find that you can dig up anything you’re looking for! However, we hope that loyal readers might be able to guess some of the answers instantly.

TOP SECRET Finding the Entry Form URL

Once you have the answer to the above question, note it down. This is the first part of the secret URL, which will be in the format of enva.to/############. Replace the hashes with the 12 character answer string.

We will be releasing questions in the following order, on the following days:

1. Psdtuts+ / 20th December
2. Activetuts+ / 21st December
3. Cgtuts+ / 22nd December
4. Webdesigntuts+ / 23rd December
5. Nettuts+ / 24th December
6. Mobiletuts+ / 25th December
7. Audiotuts+ / 26th December
8. Vectortuts+ / 27th December
9. Phototuts+ / 28th December
10. Aetuts+ / 29th December (ENTRY FORM UNLOCKED)
    1. Photoshop CS5 Extended
    2. Illustrator CS5
    3. Fireworks CS5
    4. Dreamweaver CS5
    5. Flash Professional CS5
    6. Flash Builder4 Standard
    7. Flash Catalyst CS5
    8. Contribute CS5
    9. Acrobat 9 Pro
    10. Adobe Bridge CS5
    11. Adobe Device Central CS5
    1. Intuos4 large pen tablet
    2. Intuos4 Grip Pen
    3. Intuos4 mouse
    4. Pen stand
    5. Ten replacement nibs (five standard nibs, one flex nib, one stroke nib, and three hard felt nibs)
    6. Nib extractor
    7. 2.5m USB cable
    8. Quick Start Guide
    9. Installation CD (includes tablet driver software and electronic user manual)
    1. How to Take Great Photos –
    2. Getting Good With Git –
    3. iPhone App Entrepreneur –
    4. Theme Tumblr Like a Pro –
    5. How to Build a Successful Blog Business –
    6. Rockstar WordPress Designer –
    7. Rockstar Presentations –
    8. Photoshop to HTML –
    9. How to Write Great Copy for the Web –
    10. Twitter Up Your Business –
    11. How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer –
    12. Freelancer Statistics Report –
    1. How to Create Selling E-Commerce Websites –
    2. Mobile Design for iPhone and iPad –
    3. Professional Web Design –
    4. Successful Freelancing –
    5. Mastering Photoshop –
    1. Artlandia SymmetryShop plug-in
    2. A comprehensive User Guide
    3. Installation instructions
    4. Quick Reference Card file
    5. SymmetryShop Sampler (patterns created with SymmetryShops—learn by example)
    1. Artlandia SymmetryWorks 5 plug-in
    2. A comprehensive User Guide
    3. Installation instructions
    4. Quick Reference Card file
    5. SymmetryWorks Sampler (patterns created with SymmetryWorks—learn by example)
    1. This competition is not open to Envato employees.
    2. Entries will be accepted worldwide.
    3. If you do not respond within 7 days to a notification that you have won a prize, we reserve the right to select another winner.
    4. All prices quoted are in USD.

This is the same order that you should assemble the answers in order to discover the URL string.

So, for example, if the first three answers are B, 7 and 10, the URL string would look like this: enva.to/B710######## (with the remaining characters in the string to be uncovered with future quiz questions).

Make sure to visit Activetuts+ tomorrow for the second question!

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THE GOOD STUFF Prizes!

We have prizes to appeal to everyone. On the contest entry form, you’ll have the ability to choose your 1st and 2nd preference for which prize you would like to win. This is to make sure that we connect the right people with the right prizes.

If you select a prize as either your first or second choice, you’ll be entered into the running for that prize. A winner will be chosen using Random.org’s random number generator.

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PROVIDED BY:




1 x 99 Adobe Creative Suite 5 – Web Premium

This prize is provided by the lead sponsor of the Tuts+ Holiday Quiz, Business Catalyst. Our friends at Business Catalyst provide a web service that helps you build powerful Online Businesses for your clients. Because their #1 users are designers, they know a lot about what goes into good design!

The Adobe CS5 Suite will be available to the winner in either PC or Mac versions. It contains the following software:

ABOUT BUSINESS CATALYST

Adobe Business Catalyst is a new hosted service that replaces 5 or more separate tools with one integrated solution. Incorporating web hosting, content management, eCommerce features, email marketing and built in customer management tools, Business Catalyst can help you accelerate your projects and increase your profit margins. Try it out for free at businesscatalyst.com.

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2 x 7 Wacom Intuos 4 – Large Graphics Tablet

We have two large tablets to give away, provided by Wacom. The large Intuos4 tablet is perfect for creative professionals who work in large format or who are trained to work from the shoulder or elbow. With 102.5 square inches of working area, this tablet provides a generous workspace. The large has eight ExpressKeys with illuminated displays that provide easy reference for your assigned functions.

Like all Intuos4 tablets, the Intuos4 large features Wacom’s new tip sensor technology to deliver an even finer level of control. You can initiate pen pressure control with only a single gram of pressure and a feather-light touch. With 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity and 60 degrees of tilt recognition, the Intuos4 pen simulates like never before the natural feel and accuracy of working with traditional brushes, pens, and markers.

Professional photographers, designers and artists agree: Intuos4 pen tablets speed production time for photo editing, design and art creation. When working with digital assets, there isn’t a more natural tool than a pen for increased comfort and control.

Included in the large Intuos4 package:

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1 x 9 Rockable Library – 12 eBooks

Get a copy of every eBook ever released by Rockable Press.

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3 x Smashing Library – 5 eBooks

Get a copy of every eBook ever released by Smashing Magazine on the Tuts+ Marketplace.

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1 x 9 Trapcode Form



Our friends at Red Giant Software have provided a copy of industry standard After Effects plug-in Trapcode Form for one lucky winner!

Words dissolve into sand, logos catch fire, and water droplets ripple to bass guitar. All of this is possible with a single powerful plug-in that generates animated 3D shapes to mesmerize and entice viewers. Choose from 61 customizable presets, or tweak your own to get just the look you want. Full integration with After Effects’ 3D environment allows you to fly cameras through and around your animated forms.

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1 x 9 Magic Bullet Looks 1.4



Red Giant Software have also provided a copy of the much-loved Magic Bullet Looks plug-in for After Effects!

Desert sunrise, Arctic tundra, nighttime urban streets: the look of your footage defines the mood. Now you can define the style of your video or film, regardless of on-set conditions, with powerful imaging tools. Choose from 100+ Look presets, to help set the mood for everything from a wedding to the next Sundance original. You also get the standalone Magic Bullet LooksBuilder, for pre-visualizing looks on set or anywhere. Portable presets load into any editing hosts, so the same Looks you create on set are the ones you finish with in the editorial suite: no need for an expensive finishing system.

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3 x .95 Billings 3



Billings 3 is a powerful invoicing app, and we’ve got three copies to give away.

Image is everything.
Your invoices should reflect your professionalism. Billings combines powerful features with stylish designs so you can send elegant invoices right out of the box. Choose from any of the customizable templates, or create your own with the built-in WYSIWYG designer. Either way you’ll send polished professional invoices in seconds.

Track time and expenses easily

Easily track time from any application using the convenient menubar timer. Or use global hot keys to start/stop timers. Any way you look at it, Billings makes it easy to track those valuable minutes.

One click invoicing

Sending your client an invoice is as easy as a click of a button. You can send an invoice for specific projects or send a consolidated invoice for any or all completed work.

… and lots more!

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3 x Pixelmator



Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. Perfect for when Photoshop is too much horsepower for what you need to do. The makers of Pixelmator have provided us with three licenses to give away.

Precise selection tools
Someone who is editing images must be able to select the right shapes, portions or objects in images. With Pixelmator’s powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images. That means you can edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures, remove unwanted objects or even cut out objects from one picture to put on another. Thanks to the masks palette in Pixelmator, you can even save your selections for later. Now, that’s handy.

Full assortment of painting tools
Another bunch of tools in Pixelmator are painting tools. The real greatness of these tools is the ability to use different brush sizes, shapes, hardness, even blending modes when painting. You can paint with Pixelmator as you would traditionally, play with beautiful gradients or even fill colors with other ones. There has never been a more satisfying way to paint. What’s more, Pixelmator’s painting tools can be used not only for any style of painting, but also for improving your selections with masks or even retouching.

Retouching tools
It is a snap to perfect your aging or buggy photos with Pixelmator. With its advanced retouching tools you can easily blur hard edges or sharpen fuzzy areas of your image. Or paint with a sample of an image to remove wrinkles from faces or scratches in your photos. In fact, you can use any of the adjustment or painting tools to polish or to refine your images.

… and much more!

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5 x .95 Little Snapper



Real Mac Software have provided us with 5 copies of Little Snapper to give away. The app is perfect for people who regularly need to take, edit and organize screenshots. If you have trouble organizing your visual inspiration, Little Snapper can help.

Snap
Built for people who love to capture webpages or their desktop, LittleSnapper is full of great snapping tools. There’s full webpage capture that lets you save a page to your library straight from your browser of choice and the powerful built-in browser that lets you snap specific page elements using the DOM element capture.

Thanks to LittleSnapper’s all-new screen-capture engine you can capture your entire desktop – multiple displays included – and the powerful area and window-snapping tools make it super-simple to capture any area of the screen you require.

Edit

LittleSnapper’s beautiful vector-based annotation tools allow you to mark up your images with text, callouts, shapes, lines, arrows, blurs and highlighting. Best of all, the annotations are all non-destructive allowing you to hide and show them at a moment’s notice.

Marking up images for technical documents, blog posts and customers has never been easier with the useful callout tool that allows you to link text annotations to numbered badges on the page.

… and more!

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5 x .95 Courier



Real Mac Software have also provided us with 5 copies of Courier to give away. Courier allows you to share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services – including Flickr and Facebook. Create an Envelope; drag on the stamps for the services you want to send files to; then just drag and drop on the files you want to deliver! Whether you’re uploading files to one destination or three, Courier can handle it.

Courier has a stunningly simple interface that hides all the unnecessary complexities of uploading your files to the internet, and has been built from the ground-up for Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Anything Goes

Our seven built-in plugins mean you’ll be able to start sharing in under 30 seconds – and with Amazon S3, Ember, Flickr, Facebook, FTP / SFTP, Vimeo and YouTube support, we’ve got the most-requested services in the bag!

Simply drag on the stamps for each service you want to upload files to, and Courier will upload all the items you’ve dropped onto it – whether they’re a photo, movie, document or something else.

Destination Known

Have you ever wondered where your files physically end up in the world? While designing Courier we thought it’d be far more fun to show where your files are actually going – so each upload is plotted on a map with the route showing a progress bar that fills as the files are uploaded.

Once everything’s been uploaded, Courier ensures handy links to the published files are ready for use and we even keep the history of all uploads so you can easily retrieve links to each file.

… and more!

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1 x 5 SymmetryShop

Artlandia SymmetryShop is all you need to do professional pattern design in Photoshop. This plug-in lets you create patterns quickly and imaginatively, with the full power of an automatic pattern builder behind you. Create interlocking patterns, use natural blends, and let your design elements overlap as if in a hand-painted design. Pick up right where you finished when you need to make changes down the road. Here is what comes in your package:

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1 x 9 SymmetryWorks

Artlandia SymmetryWorks, the exciting, powerful, easy-to-use, and most affordable software for pattern design, is just a few clicks away. This Illustrator plug-in is best for working with vector objects, but it lets you use raster images in your patterns too. SymmetryWorks will save you hours on each pattern you make. And it will enable you to create designs that you simply cannot do by any other means. Here is what comes in your package:

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NEXT Solve the Next Question

One you have answered today’s question and have the first character in the URL string, make sure to visit Activetuts+ tomorrow for question #2.

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READ FIRST Entry Terms




Psdtuts+

http://capsicum.in/

Professional Website Design, Graphic Design WordPress Services by Nirav Dave. Capsicum Mediaworks LLP is a Mumbai based Creative Design Studio.

http://vibefolio.com/

Make your portfolio unique with our WordPress portfolio theme

http://www.shiridesignstudio.com/

Web Design San Francisco WordPress

1. JournalCrunch Free WordPressTheme

Download or View Demo

2. SimploBlack Free WordPressTheme

Download or View Demo

3. Fwonez Free WordPress Theme

Download or View Demo

4. Maggallery – Free WordPress Theme

Download or View Demo

5. Piano Black Free WordPressTheme

Download | View Demo or depositfiles.com

6. Bitana Free WordPressTheme

Download or View Demo

7. eDeco – Free WordPress Theme

Download or View Demo

8. Picture Perfect – Free Photo WordPress Theme

Download or View Demo

9. Aurelius – Free WordPress Theme

Download or View Demo

10. Fotofolio Landscape – Free Photo WordPress Theme

Download or View Demo

Today we’re firing up a new monthly feature post from our sister site, ThemeForest. Every month, we’ll be reviewing the Free File of the Month, top selling files, authors, and other news from the marketplace. If you’re searching for inspiration or just want to know what’s happening on the marketplace, check it out here!

Author of the Month

The author of the month is ThemeFuse. ThemeFuse has amassed nearly 4,000 sales with a portfolio of 9 unique and innovative design templates. Check them out at the ThemeFuse portfolio. ThemeFuse has a signature style that combines bold color, professional layouts, and they have a knack for breaking UI paradigms in a way that’s both fun and useful.

Viewer’s Choice

Life Premium WordPress Theme was the winner of the “viewer’s choice” poll at the ThemeForest forums. Utilizing about every new feature of WordPress 3+ with custom post types, WP Menus, Custom fields, meta boxes – you name it we got it. With fully detailed PDF documentation covering installation and setup and running of your site with explanations and screen shots PLUS manual comes with 5 associated videos built in to the admin area to make your job easy.

Free File of the Month

Robust is a premium HTML & CSS Template that was created to showcase your company’s or freelance work in a cool and professional way. Robust comes with 5 unique color skins (can be viewed in the screenshots) and 3 jquery sliders. The theme is very easy to customize as I have well commented the code.

Oh, and it’s free for the month of December 2010, so grab it while it’s hot!

The Best Of ThemeForest…

It’s been a busy month with lots of fantastic designs, but we’ve narrowed down a handful for our featured list; Check out some of the hottest files on the marketplace in December.

Dandelion

Dandelion is a Powerful Premium WordPress Theme. This theme provides all the main functionality you will need to present your products, work and yourself in an elegant and professional style. The Dandelion theme is highly flexible, so changing the color scheme is super simple and for the most parts you won’t need an image editor. The theme is best suited for any business, portfolio, photography and personal sites.

Brainstorm

Brainstorm is a powerful HTML Template that brings lot’s of features so you can make every page unique.

Titanium Folio

Titanium Folio is a professional developed, clean designed Theme. That is well suited for personal portfolio, blog, or any kind of business website. A wide range of page layouts for any needs. You can easily setup layout and choose custom sidebar for each page. This theme comes with 23 different color variations that suits anyone taste, fully styles typography etc.

Fadelicious for WordPress

The newest file from Elemis features some pretty hot new admin panel options and a clean, uncomplicated frontend design.

Stereoline

Stereoline is a News/Video/Magazine theme with a strong SEO structure. Provided with 30 beautiful theme color and a good admin panel, you can edit the theme quickly and easily. Give it a try!

What’s New?

ThemeForest recently launched the new category, “Landing Pages“. These landing pages are a great way to take an existing site and improve it through a re-vamped landing page design. Most of these are focused on optimized SEO, clean coding, and easily skinnable designs. There’s already over 20 great landing page designs available, so be sure to check them out or contribute one of your own!

Webdesigntuts+

http://www.beautifulwordpress.com/

Hand picked Best wordpress driven websites, free wordpress themes,Premium WordPress Themes for inspiration – Beautiful WordPress

http://www.ivansignorile.it/

Hi, I’m Ivan Signorile, I’m a web designer, WordPress theme maker, javascript programmer, iPhone developer…and I need a dribbble invite!

http://themefuse.com/

We create original WP themes that come with 1 click wordpress auto install and dedicated AfterCare support services. Your awesome new website will be up and running in no time.

One of the most difficult steps in any design process is selling that design to your clients and getting it signed-off. This is something that I have grown to really enjoy as I have become more experienced… in this article, I’ll share a few secrets to getting your designs approved by clients quickly and easily.

Getting Approval

A lot of people would think that if you understood the client and project well enough, made the right decisions and put in lots of hard work, your design should sell itself and the sign-off will go on very smooth, but as much as you would like your design to speak for itself, walking the client through a design and discussing comments always has a stronger impact and a higher probability for approval.

Here are a few tips to help you turn this fearful step into something you would enjoy and look forward to…

Tip 1. Make Well Researched and Studied Design Decisions

Assuming you came up with a great and wonderful design, you will still need to think through and study your designs. In order to sell something and gain approval you will need to be able to explain why certain decisions were made, although this may seem obvious, but I have been through hundreds of design meetings to know as a fact that designers almost always make design decisions without really knowing why because it’s easy to work on instinct and not fully think through decisions as they’re being made. DO NOT fall into this trap, it will come back and hurt you when it’s time to sign-off your designs.

Tip 2. Know Your Stakeholders

It’s highly important to know who will be reviewing your work as early in the process as possible, don’t trust that your clients will simply give you this information and never rely on assumptions.

Ask them specifically who will be making the decisions, doing this will help you tailor your presentation and could influence your design decisions as well, but beware; even if you’re 100% sure who will be reviewing your work and who is making decisions, always be prepared to present your design to anyone, I cannot say how many times a new decision maker was introduced in the middle of a project or even in the middle of the presentation itself, and usually you will find that this person is someone who’s opinion carry’s a lot of weight, this will happen from time to time, so always be prepared.

Tip 3. Set Expectations

It’s important to set yourself up for success from the beginning, tell your stakeholders what you’re going to do and how the design process is going on, explain your design decisions and tell your client why they are a good fit. Tell them they are going to love the work you’ve done before showing them anything, the more you can be in the mood the better it should go.

Always remember that your clients hired you to help them as a professional consultant, they will let you lead them if you step up and take the reins from the beginning.

You’ll find out that it’s always better to stick to decisions you are comfortable and 100% convinced with than try to please a specific client or do something just because the client asked for it.

Tip 4. Only Show the Great Stuff

I am a big fan of doing my homework and researching what the client needs then target one single design, however in many cases this is not an option and some clients need to have choices.

If you are presenting multiple options, you should only show the ones you feel are good enough, if you show 2 good designs and one “not so good”, you’re not only disappointing your client, but you’re just asking to get stuck with a design you’re not happy about.

You have to also beware of ending up with a combination of two or more totally different designs, you need to avoid the client’s love for playing the “mix and match” game, make sure they know upfront and before you show them anything that this is not an option.

If your designs are presented as JPEGs, always keep your quality up to a max, never compress review designs, it’s better to stick to PNG files as they keep the full quality of the original design.

Tip 5. Getting Feedback

When going into a feedback cycle with your stakeholders, be sure and let them know in detail what kind of feedback you need. “I just don’t like it” kind of feedback will not do, they need to be extremely specific and detailed in the feedback they give, they need to have a reason for not liking something, make them really have to think about what they’re telling you. Not only will it help get your designs approved later on, it will also give you much better feedback to work with when it comes to revisions.

Educate your client into giving you problems not solutions. The difference between what clients often think they’re paying for and what we really do is exactly the difference between architects and construction workers. Architects plan and design new buildings, and construction workers implement those plans. Likewise, there are two tasks in creation of a new website: the planning/design, and the implementation. In some cases, they are both done by the same person — but it seems that many clients are expecting their web designer to be far more concerned with the implementation than with the design. That is to say, they sometimes see us as web monkeys who simply carry out whatever they ask of us. But the reality is they’re losing out on half of our skill set when they do this — and it really should be our responsibility to educate them as such.

“Make the logo bigger” is a solution. “The brand isn’t prominent enough” is a problem; it’s the client’s job to bring problems, and the designer’s job to find solutions. A good designer needs to be able to lead their stakeholders to a certain extent, clients are very often non-designers (and sometimes non-creative in general), it’s common for them to only see — and therefore suggest — the obvious solution.

Clients who insist on art directing every step of the way usually lose out — and frustrate the hell out of a designer.

Brandon wrote a complete article on “Getting Feedback” – read it here.

Tip 6. Defend, but Never Become Defensive

Be prepared to defend yourself without being defensive, chances are you will get some feedback you don’t agree with, sometimes it could really damage the integrity of the design. Your goal here is to not let your clients do something they will regret later on and whatever you do DON’T roll over on major design decisions, but take care, the last thing you would want to do is getting defensive, don’t let your ego get in the way, a defensive attitude will clearly show and you’ll damage your credibility and the designs with it.

When it comes to the smaller stuff, go ahead and let the client win, it’s not worth fighting over something trivial, pick your battles and fight those only worth fighting.

Tip 7. Listen Up!

The most important thing during a design review is listening; you have to understand your stakeholder’s questions and feedback. This simple fact of listening and letting them share how they feel about your work will help you sell it, always remember you are working for and with them, they are an essential part of the design process and you need them to succeed.

Be patient in your replies, listen first, think it over then reply, do not disagree or reply with the first word that comes out of the client’s mouth, don’t over interrupt your stakeholders, give them space to talk, the more they talk the more likely they will listen to you.

Tip 8. Print It!

Printing your design on paper (preferably A3 size), although avoiding the true user experience such as scrolling, clicking, hovering and the above-the-fold phenomenon, it keeps change requests down to a minimum as it makes stakeholders comfortable with the medium they are reviewing and lets you avoid unexpected cases such as power outage, broken projectors, bad screens…etc.

Tip 9. Prepare Comps

If you know your client would want to see design or color variations for certain components, DO IT. Not doing so risks having your client not approving on the spot because they are waiting to see the “other variations”, I am not talking here about different designs, but only different variations or colors from the same design.

Satisfying their need to see variations will help you guide them to the best one and make a decision.

Do you have any of your own tips for getting quick client approval? Have a comment or question? Post it below in the comments!

About the Author

Ahmed Hussam is currently UI Manager at Link Development and Adobe User Group Manager in Egypt. He is an Architect With over 15 years of experience in the design and web development world, an experienced CFML developer, and was managing 2 of the most successful creative teams in Egypt over the past 10 years. He’s also an MCDBA and is GAIQ certified. He writes about Design, UI Development, User Experience, Management, Technology, Gadgets…and much more.

Webdesigntuts+

In this tutorial you will learn how simple, straight forward design techniques can create a clean community blog theme in Adobe Photoshop. A few techniques discussed in this tutorial include the use of proper spacing, typography, colors and visual hierarchy — a few essential tools in a successful designer’s toolbox. Let’s get started!

About the Design

Today we’ll be looking at the design for Alex Pascal’s “Revolution Magazine” theme for WordPress. The fully coded version is available on ThemeForest as a WordPress blog theme.

Revolution Magazine is clean, modern, premium WordPress magazine, which also doubles as a community blog, personal blog, or whatever you shall use it for. If you have been looking for the spark to ignite your plain old blog into a popular magazine, you have found it.

It all starts with the design though, and Alex is going to walk us through how he approached the design phase of this project. As this is just a design tutorial, he won’t be going into the theme-coding, but remember that you can check out the Revolution theme at ThemeForest to see a live example. There are also a bunch of great WordPress Theme coding tuts over at Nettuts (like this one). We hope you like it – let’s dig in!

Step 1

Go to File > New > then set the height to about 2000px, the width to 1400px, and the resolution to 72dpi.

We also need to make sure that our Rulers and Guides are viewed. So, we’ll go to View > Extras / Rulers / Snap (so that our objects snap in alignment with our Guides).

We now need to set up some quick guide lines to use later on in the design. Go to View > New Guide… > Check “Vertical” and type in the following values, pressing “OK” after each one to insert it. We want guide lines at 220px, 250px, 380px, 420px, 830px, 860px, 880px, 1155px, and 1180px.

Now let’s fill our background with a solid color. Select the layer “Background,” right-click on it, and choose “Layer from background” and give it a name. Now, using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), create a selection over the whole canvas and fill the selection with #d0d0d0.

Step 2

We will now create a header background. Create a new layer and call it “header”, then grab your Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a selection at the top of your canvas spanning 175px high and fully across the canvas and fill it with any color. Double click on the layer you have just created and click on “Gradient Overlay” > existing gradient image > then set the right-most color to #383838. Position the left color at about 60% and change the color to #2D2D2D.

Now go ahead and duplicate the “header” layer and move it directly under the first header. Double click the layer once again and go to “Gradient Overlay” > existing gradient image > then set the right-most color to #e0e0e0. Position the left color at about 50% and change the color to #d0d0d0.

Now click on “Inner Shadow” and change the color to #EEEEEE, the opacity to 100%, distance to 1px, choke to 100% and size to 0px. Change the angle to 90 degrees and uncheck “Global Lighting” as we will be using different light angles throughout the theme.

Now that we have the background all ready to go, let’s make a logo for our site! Create a new layer, about 40px from the top and ligned up with the first guide line, using the Horizontal Type Tool (T), type the name of your site in your preferred font (demo images display Helvetica Neue LT Std but regular Helvetica or Arial works just fine). Proceed to changing the Layer Styles as displayed in the example below.

This is what your header should be looking like so far.

Step 3

A web site is nothing without a navigation, and a good one at that! Let’s now create a navigation bar that blends in with our existing header background.

Navigation

Create a new layer and call it “Vertical Gradient” and grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a 960px by 40px selection 115px from the top of the canvas, leaving about 20px underneath the selection for the background and fill it with any color. You can then add the Layer Styles shown in the image below to the layer you have just created.

Now duplicate the layer you have just created and rename it to “Horizontal Gradient”. Change the Layer Styles according to the image below.

Finally, create a 960px by 1px line in a new layer called “darklight” right above the previous two layers and fill it with #1d1d1d. Your navigation should now look somewhat like in the image below.

Now let’s try making a custom “home” link button that will stand out from the rest of the links in the navigation. Create a new layer, and make a selection with the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) about 50px by 60px vertically, filled with #444444, and fill in the bottom rounded edges so the selection is only rounded at the top.

Download this home icon, open it in Photoshop, and import it into your existing canvas. Resize it to about 18px by 17px and fill it with #999999. Center it in the previous layer you have made and now you have a stylish home link!

Next we are going to add navigation items to our navigation! Grab your Horizontal Type Tool (T), set the following styles below, and type in a menu item. In our example, the first item is “Documentation” with a description of “theme support & guide”. Add as many items as you’d like, leaving a padding of 20px between each menu item.

Social Media Icons

For the next step, we are going to need social media icons. We’ll start by downloading this set of social media icons, by KomodoMedia, and then placing four icons and desaturating them (Shift + Ctrl + U) like in the image below.

Congratulations! The header of our site is now complete! Let’s continue onto the body of the site.

Step 4

Now that the entire header is done, we are going to keep going on to the body of our site.

Main Body

For starters, we are going to divide the body into two halves — one for the main body content and the other for the sidebar. Create a new layer, call it “main body” and make a selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) 640px wide and as tall as you want (at least 1000px or so), starting directly below the header background. Fill this selection with #ffffff. Now create a new layer, call it “sidebar” and make a selection 320px wide on the right of the “main body” layer and make it as tall as the main body. Fill it with #e6e6e6.

Next, we will give the sidebar a slight inner shadow on the left side to create an “indented” illusion. Add the Layer Styles below to your “sidebar” layer.

Featured Slider

Create a new layer and using the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M), make a 960px by 360px selection right at the top of our body, directly beneath the navigation and fill it with #e6e6e6. Create another layer and leaving a 25px margin on all sides, inside the previous selection, make a 910px by 312px selection and fill it with #ffffff. In Layer Styles, add a 1px #dddddd inner stroke on this layer.

For the next step, we will need a sample image to use as a placeholder. Any image of anything will work so just find something that is 580px by 300px and put it in a new layer, fitting it 5px away from each side of the container we have just made.

Create a new layer and call it “tab_hover”. Grab the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) and make a 320px by 41px selection directly right of the image, in the top-right corner of the white slider container. Fill it with any color. Using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, click 20px left of the rectangle, exactly halfway in vertically and hold Ctrl while dragging diagonally up and right until you meet the rectangle’s top-left corner. Still holding Ctrl, drag down until you meet the bottom-left corner and finally, go back to the starting position. Fill this selection with any color.

Proceed to adding the styles shown in the image below to the “tab_hover” layer.

Now make a 320px by 92px selection with the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) directly beneath the tab, put it in a new layer called “tab_space” and apply the necessary Layer Styles described in the image.

Now let’s repeat the steps to create the rest of the tabs, following slightly different styles in order to differentiate the “active” state from the rest of the tabs.

Finally, we should come up with something that looks similar to this and all ready to go!

Step 5

Whew! We’re almost there! With the hardest part out of the way, let’s continue onto the body of our site. In this step, we will discuss key techniques such as spacing.

Let’s begin our “Latest Post” section with a post. Let’s make a border by making a 615px by 210px selection with the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M), filling it with any color in a new layer called “border” and then adding a gradient described in the image below. As soon as we’re done with that, insert a 610px by 200px image, leaving 5px padding within the frame. The image is not important, so once again, you can use whatever you would like as a placeholder!

Proper spacing is essential in a successful design. Our community blog theme demostrates its strength in overall consistency and spacing by having congruent margins all around the post elements to help the reader’s eye easily flow down the page. Let’s take a look at how our post will look, with the help of some guidelines!

The next part is relatively explanatory. Using the Horizontal Type Tool (T), type out a heading, meta information, and excerpt for placeholders (you can use the text used in the demo image to save time) referring to the previous image for spacing and alignment help. Refer to the image below for text styles needed. Once all of the text is added, grab the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and make some quick buttons (approximately 120px by 32px), align them with the left side of the post and add the styles shown in the image below. You should now have an attractive post that you can duplicate over and over until you are satisfied!

Step 6

Almost as vital a part as any in a community blog theme, the sidebar! For demonstrative purposes, we will just design a few generic widgets — obviously it would be impossible to cover a custom design for every widget out there but most of these will allow the creative juices to flow to create more!

For this part, we will need to download the free Icon Pack from Graphic River and import the RSS 48x48px and Twitter 48x48px icons into our project. Position these icons 20px away from the left side of the sidebar and make sure they are aligned vertically with the first post on the left.

Grab the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type in a random number for the subscribers and followers using the Georgia font, and the words “subscribers” and “followers” in Arial as described in the image below.

How about a simple advertisement widget? Sure! Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a 280px by 410px selection, fill it with plain white, and give it an inner stroke of 1px #dddddd. Grab a couple of sample ads from Theme Forest and drop them into the new container, leaving 9-10px padding between each (depending on whether it’s between the border or between each ad).

Finally, type up a quick Text Widget with the Horizontal Type Tool (T) using the styles provided in the image below.

Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a 280px by 225px container. Fill it with #eeeeee and give it an inner stroke of 1px #dbdbdb. New layer, make a tab about 84px by 37px in the top left corner of the container, leaving 4px padding on each side, then in the same layer create another 270px by 180px selection and fill it with white, creating a rectangle with a small rectangle sticking out in the top left. Give it an inner stroke of 1px #e0e0e0. Finish off the other 2 tabs, leaving 4px padding on each side at all times. Fill out the text with Arial 12px Bold. Make a 3px by 3px bullet filled with #bbbbbb and create as many items as you’d like.

That’s it for the sidebar, let’s move onto the rest of the site!

Step 7

Now we’re slowly wrapping up this site with… you guessed it, the footer! Let’s prepare our footer by creating a quick background for it. Grab the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) and create a 960px by 510px selection in a new layer, directly beneath the main body background. Fill this selection with #2d2d2d. This will serve as our footer with 4 columns in it. Directly beneath this block of color, make a selection 960px by 60px and fill it with #1d1d1d and put it in a new layer. This will serve as the “copyright” portion of the footer and a simple but effective way to signify the end of the page.

In our site, we will have 4 even columns in the footer, each 200px wide with a 25px margin between each one. To keep things uniform, we will also leave 25px at the top of our footer, after which we will have the headings of each column. Go ahead and grab the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and begin typing out the headings for each column, using the styles described in the image below. Leaving 20px underneath the headings, type out a short paragraph or a list of items separated by a simple “one pixel on, one pixel off” dotted divider.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have just designed a clean, community blog theme in Adobe Photoshop. Hopefully you have learned some tips and tricks on how to design certain aspects of cleanly organized sites and are able to use these skills in projects of your own in the future!

As this is just a design tutorial, I haven’t gone into the theme-coding at all, but you can check out the Revolution theme at ThemeForest to see a live example.

Good luck and thanks for reading!

Webdesigntuts+

Whether or not it’s a “good thing” that stock templates are so readily available to web designers has been an issue that’s been hotly debated over the past couple of years. This article will break down the argument in favor of using templates – and I encourage you to post your own thoughts in the comments section!

This is an issue that every designer should have on his or her mind at the moment, so grab a cup of coffee and get comfy!

Do Templates Hurt Working Designers?

A really interesting question came up at the ThemeForest forum a while back; If you don’t know, ThemeForest is a popular website where people can buy a website template for around . Someone on the forum made the comment that:

If you think about it… the fact that these template sites exist kind of kill business for web designers. Many potential clients know places like ThemeForest exist, so when they see a template for or whatever, they wonder why they should even bother paying a designer in the first place.

And there it was, just like that the question was on the table: Are web site templates actually hurting the business of other web designers that are building things from scratch?

It certainly isn’t a trivial accusation, but template usage has been growing like crazy for the past couple years, and it seems like most designers that I know either use templates themselves or are authoring templates as an alternative form of income.

Stock Artwork, Photography, and Web Templates Oh My!

My own personal opinion is this: the creation of stock templates doesn’t hurt the profession at all; Rather, it empowers designers to save time and money on development costs and it’s part of the natural progression of our industry.

If you look at any other industries in history and you’ll see the same trends towards the commoditization of items that were previous big-ticket services… It’s actually kinda surprising that it took this long for our quickly moving industry to hit this stage.

That doesn’t diminish the fact that some people are probably irritated by the new movement within the industry. Using templates feels… well, wrong … to a group of professionals that largely prides themselves on creativity, originality, and hard work ethic.

As an example though, let’s examine the case of the photography industry not too long ago – an industry that was for years steeped in mysterious and inaccessible processes that were dangerous and difficult to master – which left 99% of consumers reliant upon film developers to process their film into prints; Film developers were probably irritated when the first serious digital camera / printer combination came out, but Flickr is bigger than ever and the photography field as a whole has benefited.

A Lesson from History

Let’s dig even further back in history and consider the case of the Luddites. The Luddites were a social movement of British artisans who protested against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution. They were enraged that the Industrial Revolution was producing affordable items for middle class consumers. Their primary argument was that these mass-produced items were hurting the individual artisans who once made them painstakingly by hand.

The counter-argument is simple though: for as many artisans that lost jobs as a result of the movement, there were countless people that benefited from the affordable products. Likewise, many artisans adapted and found jobs that worked alongside the new production methods. The market changed – it was those that refused to adapt that were left behind.

Stock Artwork Doesn’t Diminish Our Work

There’s honestly no need to hide the fact that web designers are using templates – it’s not dirty or shameful or unoriginal if you’re using them properly. It’s only when the client finds out late in the game that you’re using someone else’s template that it becomes awkward and dishonest. Educating clients has always been a key to the sales process, this is just another in a long series of updates to the sales pitch. The alternative is an industry-wide knowledge blackout where web designers collectively try to convince their clients that they create web sites with magic wands and fairy dust.

Personally, I use templates (as do most of my colleagues and many studios that I work with) as a major selling point. Since we started using templates our rates have gone up, as have the number of gigs that we can take on per month. Even if your average price per project goes down, your volume should be skyrocketing at this point. Honestly, all that this recent trend has done is remove the headache part of web design and streamlined our ability to meet the ever growing demands of clients.

Since we started using templates our rates have gone up, as have the number of gigs that we can take on per month.

I understand the “fear of the entire industry collapsing” notion, but web design has always been an industry where you keep up or get out – every month there’s something new and hot that you’ve gotta adapt to – and most designers would be liars if they claimed that they wrote every line of code (including JS, jQuery, PHP , the entire WordPress backend, etc.) for each project they have ever worked on. Web designers recycle each others work and innovate beyond it – it’s part of what makes this such an awesome and invigorating job in the first place. Having readily available creative tools don’t diminish what we do, it frees us up to kick even more butt than we were previously kicking.

Don’t fear the templates, use them to your own advantage – the industry is never going to be the same as it was a year ago – whether it be 2000, 2010 or 2020, which is the reason most of us chose this as a profession in the first place.

Templates aren’t Killing the Profession, They are Changing It

The Envato Marketplace alone has over half a million members and almost 60,000 files!

I would imagine that, while bidding on web-projects for mid to larger size businesses is probably improved through templates, the small client sector of the industry is one that’s hard hit by the notion that you can buy a site for because they have the least amount of intuitive appreciation for the idea of paying $X,XXX for marketing (which most businesses do on a regular basis).

The fact remains that there were always (even before templates) clients who knew “a friend of their cousin’s girlfriend who says he can build my site for ” – bottom line is that if they can’t learn to respect and appreciate your work (whether through education or common sense), they probably weren’t a really great client to work with in the first place.

I will say that my own career started out with small clients though – and while small clients back then hadn’t heard of templates yet, they did still have their own set of reasons for why projects should cost way under what they actually were worth; Most gigs that I took on ended up paying me about 1$ an hour for what I was doing… was I rolling in cash at the time? Nope; but it’s kinda one of those things that you have to do at the start of a freelance career to jumpstart your portfolio. It helped that I had a day job waiting tables to help pay the bills.

So How Can You Adapt Your Own Sales Pitch to Include Templates?

The lesson is this: templating isn’t killing the profession of custom web design, it’s just moving the market towards businesses that can actually afford it.

It might help to explain to your client that they can think of templates like buying an automobile – it would be silly to assume that they could simply pay an metal welder ,000 to fabricate all of the materials of a single automobile from scratch (including the engine, upholstery, cup holders, etc.) – it’s the fact that they are mass produced in such volume that makes them relatively affordable to average consumers. Just the same though – if they want to customize that car to their own particular tastes (redesign the body, give it a new paint job, add extra seating, install a new sound system, etc.), it’s going to take extra $$$ that very well could exceed the initial cost of the car.

Perhaps a better analogy would be paying a band to create an album – it’s silly to think the cost of that album is just – the real cost can easily go into the millions of dollars for a single mainstream album nowadays – it’s the notion that the album is mass produced that makes it affordable to individual buyers. Still, most people don’t expect that because they buy an album that they can simply request Jay-Z (or any other artist) to re-record a track with slight modifications for another .

You get the idea – find analogies as a part of your sales pitch if they gripe over the cost.

Custom Design Still Exists!

The funny thing about the templating trend is that it actually raises the value of custom design by instilling a sense of it being rare. Let’s return to the case of the photography industry – the advent of services like Getty Images, Corbis, and more recently, micro stock sites like iStockPhoto and others has actually raised the value of custom photography. When you (Joe Businessman) can pick up a half-way decent image for , why bother spending thousands of dollars on a custom photoshoot? Now consider the big companies who may have been previously using stock images; they are now forced to pay for elaborate custom photoshoots if only to separate themselves from the herd of Joe Businessmen.

When 90% of businesses have a well designed website, having a mediocre site is no longer the status quo, it’s a liability.

The fact is that most of these “Joe Businessmen” weren’t going to fund a thousand dollar photoshoot in the first place – but now that he’s been introduced to the notion of buying a photograph, there’s a much better chance that he’ll need custom photography at some point in the future. Yep, that’s right – in this case the stock movement is growing the market, not shrinking it! Furthermore, he now understands that the photograph is a commodity and that true quality only comes when you are paying a professional serious cash.

Let’s take these lessons back to the design industry now. When small businesses can now pick up a decent quality website for a few hundred bucks (thanks to stock templates), there’s now a helluva lot more pressure put on medium and big businesses to fork out $XX,XXX to $XXX,XXX for custom sites – all because the Joe Businessmen of the world have entered the world of business websites. When 90% of businesses have a decent website, having a mediocre site is no longer the status quo, it’s a liability.

The lesson is this: templating isn’t killing the profession of custom web design, it’s just moving the market towards businesses that can actually afford it.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em!

The Top Sellers list at the ThemeForest Marketplace

My final point is this: if you’re still really irked by the stock template market and how it’s changing the design industry, why not use your creative powers to actually start authoring your own templates and make a little extra cash (or a LOT of extra cash in some cases). Setting up your own account and uploading files is actually pretty darn easy – and if you are the creative genius that you take yourself for, you’re probably going to crush it on the marketplaces. Don’t get mad at cheesy templates, bring your own flare for the original to the scene. There’s no feeling like that first month that you realize that you can actually pay a few bills with the income that you made passively just because you allowed some other designers to use your creative files.

Here’s some review points:

• Stock templates have actually grown the market for design
• They raise the rates for custom design by making it “rare”
• They empower designers and businesses to kick serious butt
• It’s happening whether you like it or not
• You may as well get rich off of it if you’re a designer

Full Disclosure

This is an editorial that I initially wrote almost a year ago, before I worked for Envato. I started creating stock templates about a year and a half ago as I was debating these issues – after spending nearly a decade freelancing and considering the issues discussed in this article. I’ve been on both sides of the issue, and I’ve thought long and hard about it. I also went to a college where using “stock elements” in projects was categorically disallowed on threat of expulsion, which is probably what prompted me to write this piece in the first place.

Let the Discussion Begin!

The great thing about an topic like this is that it’s relevant to so many different people within the industry. If you have a different opinion, post it down below (politely!) and let’s open this up for discussion with the community!

Webdesigntuts+

http://www.firstytheme.com/

Just another WordPress site

http://www.iintense.com/

My name is Bryant, feel free to look around and view my work.

http://www.gominimango.com/

http://netrino.net/

We have just launched the new online shop and blog design for Lifestylebazaar in Shoreditch, London. As well as a functional design that looks great we’ve added a modern wordpress powered blog.

Trained in design, and a self-proclaimed “web geek,” Liz Andrade has been working in the design field for several years. With experience working as the principal web designer at a Seattle boutique-style firm, she took a knowledge and passion for web to her own one-woman design studio, located in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne neighborhood.

Today, we’ll interview Liz to find out more about her studio, CMD+Shift Design. She’ll even walk us through a few of her projects to show us a little bit more about how she approaches different design challenges. Let’s dig in!

The Interview

No matter how much you love your job, no matter how cool your boss is — you’re still executing the vision of someone else. The way you interact with clients, the way work is presented, the philosophy and attitude of a small business comes from the owner. I had my own ideas of how I wanted to do things, present things, the philosophies and attitudes… so I had to start my own thing.

I see these are all different mediums under the larger umbrella of design. Some projects call for a marriage of illustration with web design… and some some projects are more focused on one medium — it’s all about using the right solution for each specific project/client.

Most of my clients come to me by referral — and then there is a group that randomly find me through my website. My greatest marketing effort is just to deliver good service to my clients — when they’re happy they tend to want to talk about the experience with others.

I get inspired a lot by my clients. My favorite person to work with is someone who is really passionate about their business and what they do. When you’re around someone like that you just can’t help but get excited about it yourself!

Observation and listening. I feel like the best work I do is when I am able to take a step back in the early stages and focus on listening to the goals of the project and really studying the needs of the clients community. Jumping too quick into a solution when you don’t fully understand the problem is probably one of the #1 mistakes designer make.

My first experience with WordPress was from using it on my own blog (cmdshiftdesign.com/blog.) Originally I used a pre-made theme and then modified it to fit the design I had in mind. I really learned WordPress by just jumping into it feet first! I’d change things and see what happened, I’d break things and figure out what I did wrong, I’d pick apart other themes and figure out what was good practice and bad practice.

When I started to see how versatile the software really was, I started selling my clients on it. It’s not JUST for blogs — and while it isn’t the right solution for all projects, it can do a lot of cool things! I love that is is so easy for my clients to use, it’s great to give them the power to control their brands message. It’s great that they can do that and feel totally comfortable.

Some sort of web-user mind reading maybe? To be able to look at a website and hear the thought process of the people using it. This could be a great time saver for the design process (no need to schedule any usability testing!) and possibly just entertaining!

The Case Studies

My Green Lake

I worked with the owner and editor of MyGreenLake.com to do a redesign on this blog that features daily news for the Seattle neighborhood of Green Lake. Amy was using a prepackaged theme that was cluttered and she had a laundry list of features her users where in need of that she wanted to integrate into the site without just adding to the clutter.

How did you approach the start of the project?

We took into consideration the needs of her users and advertisers — restructured the information on the site and gave the whole look a polish that has made it easier for her readers to interact with.

Were there any interesting challenges (either with the project or with client management)?

It was important to me with this project to not only stream line the design for the end-user, but also simplify the backend for Amy — so that maintaining her website could be stress free. She was updating all of her advertisements by editing page templates and having to fuss with updating files via FTP which she was not comfortable with. By allowing her to now manage all of her ads within WordPress she feels like she has better control over her website (which is better for her, her readers and advertisers!)

Undead Labs

Undead Labs came to me as a start-up game development studio. They had a set date for when they would be announcing the company and it’s mission to create a console based MMORPG of a Zombie apocalypse. They had a branding system and needed a blog, it was a really rushed turnaround — but ended up being a ton of fun and I’m really excited to be involved in such a cool project.

How did you approach the start of the project?

I totally landed this job by being a nerd. The client called me up after seeing my website and told me about his start up studio. He said “We’re going to be creating a console based MMORPG, which — do you know anything about what that is?”

Me: A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

Him: Oh.. you do. Awesome… what do you know about Zombies?

Me: Oh My God! Are you Making a Zombie Apocalypse MMORPG!?!? THAT’S SO COOL!

It was apparent — we were going to work just perfect together.

It was a fast-paced gig (i chronicled the process of doing a rushed project in a video diary – http://cmdshiftdesign.com/blog/tag/rush-project-video-diary) design done within 2 or 3 days and then development of the WordPress site in bout 3 more. It was a lot of long days and communication with Undead Labs. When you’re working on a rushed schedule, there is no room to go off on the wrong path!

Were there any interesting challenges (either with the project or with client management)?

It was a roller coaster, we did an initial round of design on the first day and then I started day 2 finding out that the branding had been changed — so we almost had to start all over again — but it was worth it, the end result ended up being 100% better!

Pioneer Squares

A couple months after finishing the Undead Labs project, the studios owner called me up to tell me about the Christmas gift he wanted to give to his wife… A new blog. Annie had a blog set up on Blogger where she wrote about her kids, family trips and the neighborhood that they live in and love so much — Seattle’s Pioneer Square. I agreed to the project and Jeff set up a meeting with me and his wife to get started on her present.

How did you approach the start of the project? Were there any interesting challenges (either with the project or with client management)?

Annie’s blog is purely personal — she is not growing a business or marketing to any market. So this project was a little different from many of my others, it was all about tapping into her style and translating that into this 2 dimensional space. At first, I was a little lost on how to do this — then, in the archives of her posts I found photographs of the condo Annie shares with her family in Pioneer square. It’s an absolutely beautiful space! Sparsely filled with simple modern furnishings. The walls adorned with russian propaganda poster art. ….I suddenly felt like I understood her, and understood that to her — her blog was an extension of her home… a way to invite her extended friend and family network into her families life — so I set about designing something that felt like you were going to visit Annie, Jeff and the kids in Pioneer Square.

Jodan Duvall

Jordan Duvall is a fashion photographer in LA and I worked with her on creating her logo and identity system. We then applied that to various print and digital marketing pieces for her — including her online portfolio, which was set up with Dripbook.

How did you approach the start of the project?

Many commercial photographers use template portfolio services, Livebooks is probably the most widely known — but there is a lot of them out there — Dripbook, ShowIt, A-Photofolio. The challenge of working with these is trying to work within the limited customizing options and still getting something that presents the clients work and is branded. I find it’s best to keep in mind that – it’s the photographic work that should be the focal point here — not the design.

Conclusion

Thanks to Liz for making herself available for this interview!

I think it’s interesting to hear other designers talk about their projects, their lifestyle, and their workflow. We’ll be doing a couple of these interviews with other web designers, developers and projects managers every month, so if you have any additional questions that you want to see become part of the standard set, let me know in the comments!

Webdesigntuts+

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Choose from our top quality selection of premium and free WordPress themes for your blog or website

Today, we’ll be examining what form validation is and why you, Joe Webdesigner, should care about it. Here’s a teaser: it’s one of the easiest ways to improve the usability of your designs and most web designers forget about it all the time! We’ll also showcase some examples of great form validation design. Read on young grasshoppers… knowledge awaits.

What Is Form Validation?

In the context of a human relationship, validation is when you feel the need to be told that you are right; In the context of a web-form, validation is when the form tells you that you’re wrong. To be specific, form validation is the process where a web-form checks to see if the information that’s been entered into it is correct.

For example:

• If a field is marked “Email Address”, the form might check to see if the text that’s been entered is a valid email address.
• If the field is marked “Phone Number”, the form might check for a specific formatting (or a certain number of digits)

You get the idea… validation just makes sure that the user hasn’t made a mistake.

It’s human nature to make mistakes though, and unfortunately, your web form probably isn’t exempt to human error. This is where validation plays it’s part in a user-friendly form. A simple visual reminder to the user that something isn’t filled in properly can make all the difference between the joy of a successfully filled out form and the intense frustration of having to guess what went wrong.

Why Do You Need to Design For It?

The primary principle of good form validation is this: “Talk to the user! Tell when them something is wrong!”

Integrating validation into your web designs isn’t hard… but the vast majority of designers never include designs for it. Why? Because validation is often left for developers to worry about at the last stages of a project.

This creates a scenario where you, Joe Webdesigner, are entrusting one of the most crucial aspects of the user experience to a developer who probably doesn’t know or care how the validation should be designed. Heck, in lots of cases, developers won’t even bother with anything beyond the most remedial form validation… which can leave users frustrated.

This isn’t a dig at developers or anything (and there are lots of great devs that will handle this with flying colors), but let’s assume the dev isn’t paying attention for the sake of argument.

Examine the following graphic:

Something appears to be wrong on this form… but the user is forced to guess what it is.

What’s wrong with this form? Sure – the form is “validating” itself by telling the user that something is wrong… but the user is left to guess what it is.

The primary principle of good form validation is this: “Talk to the user! Tell when them something is wrong!”

Let’s examine the next graphic:

Eureka!

Much better right? Now the user is given the information they need to fix the problem. This is a simplified example, but notice how integrating a basic response system improves the usability by leaps and bounds.

The 3 Common Types of Form Errors

Now that you understand what validation is, you hopefully want to apply this to your web forms. There are generally three mistakes that users could run into in your form:

Formatting Errors

This is probably the biggest problem users will encounter. Have you ever filled in a form only to find out you put an illegal character in the username field, or used a space in a web address? That’s where formatting validation comes into play.

Most fields in a web form are just alphanumeric, however, if you have an email, web address, phone number or password field, you may have a specific formatting required. You can probably guess the syntax of each field. So formatting validation is effective if you have specific information in mind.

Required Fields Errors

These errors happen when a user forgets / neglects to fill in a field that you’ve specified as “required”.

Match Errors

This happens when you need to check if one value equals another. This is so important in login forms especially, because you don’t want to allow users to login if their password doesn’t match the correct one.

It can also be used to make users retype their email or password when it’s vital they don’t make a mistake.

The Design Solution

While you can style your form a thousand different ways, there are generally three basic steps to helping your user fix the validation problem:

1. Inform the user that there is a mistake somewhere on the form.
2. Highlight the field that’s incorrect.
3. Show them an example of what you are expecting. (ie: email@email.com)

Color is one of the best tools to use when designing validation. Because it works on an instinctual level, adding red to error messages, or green to success messages is incredibly powerful.

Proximity is another important tool – keep specific notifications near to the problem fields and keep messages about the entire form away from any individual fields. If you can create custom “skin” solutions that make these strategies even more obvious (like making the notification look like it’s physically attached to a specific field), you’ll do even better.

It’s also a good practice to tell your users in advance where they could create errors. Many websites include a side-bar box with instructions on how the form should be filled in. Others have the correct syntax described under the label. Either method works, just as long as it’s there.

As we’ll mention in the “how validation works” section below, you’ll also want to run “instant validation” when it’s possible.

Examples of Great Form Validation

Now that we’ve gone through the theory of form validation… let’s look at some examples of this in action!

While you look at these, note that the solution is always simple: a tooltip, a boxed in notification, or a piece of plain text. As long as you keep the notifications close in proximity with the problem-field, you can design, skin, or style these any way you want. The only thing to remember is that you actually give the user some advice.

Let’s dig in:

ThemeForest

ThemeForest immediately brings up an error message under the field. Successful entries even get a green “Success!” message.

Frexy

Frexy uses a simple, but effective approach: Color the field that’s wrong, and add bright notification text below. Edit: As Boba noted in the comments, the green color could be misleading to some users, but you’ve gotta balance branding and usability to your own taste.

Twitter

Twitter adds a message to the immediate right of the field to indicate error. It does so instantly… and they even add color to the response system to emphasize the message!

Mint

Mint not only validates the form fields immediately, they also give both positive and negative feedback… it’s almost as if you’re having a conversation with the form!

FancyForm

FancyForm is a form-tool that shows how useful it can be to actually provide in-line feedback in the form of icons.

Virb

Virb adds a bright message when you’ve done something wrong. Bonus Points: Virb won’t even let you type in an unallowed character! Just try it…. they dare ya.

WordPress

WordPress will give you a basic message… but what’s special is that the form itself actually shakes when you enter the wrong information.

InvoiceMachine

InvoiceMachine uses the simplest approach. Instead of textual help, it colors the background in red to signify a problem. Keep in mind that a text-tooltip when the user hovers over the form would improve this even more.

WPCoder

WPCoder shows that a simple Javascript popup can work just fine as well.

Yahoo

Yahoo uses a humorous approach… rather than returning a basic error when a birthday is incorrect, they give you a little bit of attitude.

How Validation Actually Works

From a technological standpoint, there are two different ways to integrate validation in a form:

• Server-side validation is where a user submits the form, and the contact form script will analyze the content and bring up an error if the criteria is not matched
• Client-side validation is the type of JavaScript validation you may see on some modern forms. This is where instant feedback is generated on a field-to-field basis without submission.

Client-side validation offers the most user-friendly alternative because it can show the feedback live and instant so the user can immediately rectify their mistake. However, a major downside to client-side validation is that it generally relies on some sort of JavaScript. Therefore, if the user has JavaScript turned off, they will not see the live validation. So, be sure to still be able to fallback on server-side validation

You can read lots more about the technological side of validation at our network site, Nettuts!

Final Thoughts

The best forms are those that anticipate user-behavior. It’s important to plan a form out and understand how a user could make mistakes before it even gets built. Why? Because if you can anticipate a problem spot, it’s easy to design a solution to help users get past it. However, leaving the validation design until the last minute can be expensive to fix once the coding is complete. Taking some extra time to design strategies and styling for your forms will save time, money, and frustration in the long run.

Webdesigntuts+

Great Web Icons are a vital piece of any web designer’s bag of tricks… and while becoming a master icon designer can take years of practice, the good news is that there are a lot of designers that love to create high quality icon packs and share them with the design community. Today we’re going to show off some of the beautiful and breath-stopping icon packs that you can use in your own designs. Oh, and these won’t suck… there’s a good chance you’ll even use a few of them!

Resource Roundup: Web Icons

This is the first in our series of “Resource Roundups”. While these articles won’t be making up the bulk of our content here on Webdesigntuts+ (great articles and tutorials are!), we hope to provide a place for designers to find great quality resources (icons, fonts, textures, etc.) that stand out from the pack of ordinary junk-stock. Most of the icons are created for desktops, posters, banners, and mobile applications, but they make particularly great additions to website layouts. We’ll look at hundreds of creative, fresh and modern icons that will increase your own personal arsenal of design resources. All of these are FREE unless it’s stated otherwise!

To me, Icons are up there with Fonts as some sort of design crack. I’m not sure when I got hooked, but it’s been a while now and my hard drive is crammed with icon sets of all shapes and varieties. – Collis Ta’eed

Free Social Media Icon Set

This icon pack contains 42 well-designed and beautiful icons, available in 1 size with two formats (PSD and PNG).

Upojenie Icon Set

Upojenie is a beautiful and elegant icon pack that may fit mobile applications. The pack contains 40 icons with their respective .png files. The icons can be used in both, commercial and personal works.

The GraphicRiver Icon Directory

GraphicRiver is a site that allows designers to sell their own files (including some great high quality icons!) for just a couple bucks. These aren’t free, but for just a couple bucks you can pick up some of the highest quality icon packs available on the web… which can be a breathe of fresh air if you can’t find what you need in the free sets. The Function set is shown here.

Browser Navigateurs Icons

A set of high-quality and fresh icon pack. 10 different browser icons, with 3 formats and 1 size. Being available free of charge, you may use it in personal and commercial projects.

VectorTuts Freebie Pack

This is a new Pack of Vector Freebies is available exclusively from VECTORTUTS. We have a new set of web icons for you. If your looking to add a fun feel to your next web design, then check out these stylish graphics.

Shine Free Icon Set

Shine is a set of 31 shiny realistic icons. The combination of prominent 3d shapes and fresh color scheme make Shine really stand out from the crowd. With 31 icons in 5 different size in both vector and pixel formats, Shine is extremely versatile.

Fresh Free Icon Set

59 fresh and lively icons. The Fresh Add-on contains such useful and flexibly applicable icons as application and financial symbols, and the set surely will make your web applications and softwares more atractive and adorable.

Milky Free Icon Set

The Milky set contains more than 131 icons primarily colored in green, giving an eye-pleasant look and prominent display on either dark or bright backgrounds.

Mantra Icons Set

Mantra, is a elegant beautiful and modern icon set. It is available in the 32px size only with the .png format and 36 examples of icons. Available for personal projects only.

BuddyIcon Social Set

All 126 icons have been carefully created, by Orman Clark, in illustrator meaning the icons can be efficiently resized to suit your needs. Yes, the original .ai file is included in the download! In addition to the original artwork, all icons have been provided in 32x32px .png format. Nice.

SocialCube Pack

Perfect for a chilly winter month. If you’re looking for high-quality social icons for your next web project, then check out these icons. This set of 18 high quality freebies is available to download today! Enjoy!

OnStage Icon Set

The set contains 49 free vector icons including PSD which can be useful for both corporate and personal setting. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

Lovely Website Icons Pack

A pack of Lovely icons, distributed in the png format, available free of charge, can be used in personal projects only.

Socialize Icons Set

Socialize is a beautiful and elegant icon set created by DryIcons and is available in 6 different sizes and 4 formats.

Fugue Icon Set (3,000 Icons!)

Fugue is easily the most expansive icon set out there… and remarkably, the icons are all at amazingly high quality levels. These are great for any UI project and work especially well at small sizes.

Coquette Icon Set

Another excellent icon set that works well in just about any web design project. You can pay for the Illustrator files, but the PNGs come free!

WP-Zoom Icon Set

500 Icons designed specifically for the WordPress theme of the same name… but they’ll work great for any project!

Mobile Icon Set

This beautiful and well-designed icon set contains 10 different examples of icons available in 4 sizes. Free for commercial and personal projects.

Folded Paper Icons Pack

Pack of beautiful, elegant and fresh icons. Available in one size, and 6 different examples with the .png and .psd format distributed.

Modern Icon Set

High-quality and modern icon pack inspired from the Transformers movie. In the set 65 examples of different icons are available in just one size.

Fliraneo Icons Set

Fliraneo is a beautiful and high-quality icon pack including 5 icons in just 1 size with the .png file. The icons can be used in your personal and commercial projects.

Simplexity File Icons

Simplexity is a modern and high-quality icon set, containing more than 120 files, with their png and ico file formats. Can be used on personal projects only.

Incredibly Detailed Icons Set

A pack of beautiful, elegant, and detailed icons. Available in 1 size and the .png format. Can be used in commercial and personal works.

Feed Icons 2

Feed 2 is a simple but well-designed icon set containing 33 different examples of icons, available just in 1 size, in the png format.

Furry Cushions Social Icon Set

These are definitely out-of-the box… they won’t work for every project, but they’re just what the doctor ordered if you need something unique. Furry Cushions Social Icons is a set of beautiful, elegant, high-quality social icons available in .png format.

Derelict Grunge Social Media Icons

Derelict is a beautiful, grunge icon pack, available in 10 different examples in 2 sizes, with 2 formats.

Sleek Social Media Icons

This icon pack contains 25 beautiful, sleek and modern icons available in 2 different sizes, in the .png format.

Amazing Social Icons

Amazing is a pack of beautiful, modern, high-quality and 3D icon set. It is available in 12 examples in the .png format, with the right to use in commercial projects.

Isometrica Social Icon Set

Isometrica is a beautiful, modern, high-quality and well-designed icons, available in 16 examples with 2 sizes.

3D Vector Social Icons

Another beautiful, well-designed, 3 dymensional icon pack, available in PNG and AI formats in the 256x256px size.

Doodle Icon Set

This set of free hand drawn doodle icons includes 14 graphics tailored specifically for bloggers, the pack contains 14 examples in one size with the .png format.

Origami Web 2.0 Icons

Origami is a modern, elegant, high-quality and very original icon set. The pack contains 15 icons in 2 formats and 1 size.

Fruits Icon Pack

These are mostly just for fun unless you’re working on a fruit packing website – a pack of 8 different examples of fruit icons. Available in 5 sizes and can be used in your both, personal and commercial projects.

Licensing Notes

A note on licensing: Each of these packs that we’ve selected is free unless stated otherwise, but you’ll have to look at each individual packs’ licensing information to determine whether or not you can use them in commercial projects.

Oh – and it’s worth noting that it’s never our goal here on Webdesigntuts+ to post “garbage stock”, so if you spot a broken link or feel like something just isn’t up to par with our standards, leave a comment. You can leave some nice comments as well though! Share your own favorite icons sets, or discuss any tricks that you have for managing your own collection of icons down below.

Webdesigntuts+

In this design tutorial, we’re going to create the clean, minimal portfolio design “Minimal”, available on ThemeForest as a WordPress or HTML theme. We’ll also discuss the reasons why it works so well, and how you can create your own personal customization from the template.

Check out the end of the post for 3 sweet modifications of this template; the source files are on the house!

Released one year ago, the Minimal theme design has sold nearly 1000 combined times, and helped pave the way for many other minimalist template designs. This template will walk you through how to create the design yourself, but more importantly, we’ll also be discussing why it works. Once we’re done, we hope you’ll be able to create your own version of this sleek, professional design using your own style, fonts and colors!

Tutorial Details

• Program: Adobe Photoshop
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

Step 1

Begin by creating a new document in Photoshop 1020px x 1020px. Be sure your resolution is set to 72 pixels/inch and your background is set to white. We need to unlock the background layer so we can add some layer styles, right click the background and select “Layer from background”. You can then rename the layer back to background.

Step 2

Add a touch of gray at the top of the page by double clicking on the new background layer and selecting Gradient Overlay from layer styles. Just a quick note, you can always go to the Layers menu and select the layer style instead of double clicking on the layer.

Set the opacity to 5% and use a linear gradient of -90 degrees.

Click once on the gradient to open the gradient editor and set up two points:

• Black – #000000 at the location of 0% (this should be set by default)
• White – #FFFFFF at the location of 11%

Click OK in the gradient editor and layer style windows to apply the gradient to the background layer. You should now see a slight darkening at the top of the page.

Step 3

On sites with a very light or simple background, I like to add an element letting the user know they’ve returned to the very top of a page. In the case of this design, it is a 3 pixel line the width of the content area with a light line extending the rest of the way across the header.

When adding lines and shapes, I like to use Photoshop’s vector shapes tools. Unless noted otherwise, assume below that all lines and rectangles are created using this method. As with any tutorial, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same thing so feel free to use what you’re most familiar with.

Select the rectangle tool from the Vector Shapes area of the toolbar:

Draw a rectangle across the entire 1020px width of the page and 3px tall. Double click on the colored thumbnail in the layers panel to set the color to #DFDFDF. Move the rectangle to the very top of the page.

Step 4

At 940px wide, a second rectangle will match the width of our page content, let’s set some guides on the page to help us align everything evenly.

Go to View > New Guide…

Select Vertical and set the value to 40px.

Add another vertical guide at 980px. This creates a 940px area in the center for our content.

Step 5

Add a second rectangle on the layer above your previous one 940px wide and 3px tall. Double click on the colored thumbnail in the layers panel to set the color to #333333.

Move the second rectangle between the guides you created and slide it to the top of the page.

Step 6

Just a bit of cleanup to stay organized, move the two header lines into their own folder.

Step 7

It’s time to create the logo, which is a combination of two rectangles and white text. We will build it piece by piece and then move it into place once it’s complete.

The logo is the top point of our inverted pyramid design, where most people’s eyes will start when visiting this page before tapering down into the lower areas of the site.

Start by creating a rectangle 222px wide by 82px tall. Double click on the colored thumbnail in the layers and set the color to #333333.

Create a second rectangle 14px x 14px and place it in the lower right corner of your previous rectangle. Set the color to #FFFFFF. This will create a notched out effect of the rectangle without having to edit any shapes.

(If you do not see the “notch” check that your second rectangle is placed above your first in the layers panel)

Step 8

Add text to the inside of the shapes you just created. For this demo the text says: minimal.

Depending on your text used, you may need to adjust the sizes to fit properly.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 42pt
• Tracking: -20
• Weight: Bold
• Color: #FFFFFF

Step 9

Move all three layers of the logo you created into their own folder titled Logo. This will allow us to place it on the page much easier.

The logo should be 40px from the bottom of the header lines we created above. If you remember, they were 3px tall, so we need to add a new horizontal guide at 43px. Go to View > New Guide and set it to horizontal with a position of 43px. Set another guide at 125px which will align with the bottom of the logo.

Step 10

Move the logo, aligning the top of with the new guide you created above and centered on the page. Now we can move onto creating the menu.

Step 11

The menu is created with two horizontal lines and text centered across the page 40px below the bottom of the logo.

Add a horizontal guide at 165px, this will be the top of our menu. Create another horizontal guide at 209px to align with the bottom of the menu.

Start by creating a line centered between the main content guides 940px wide and 1px tall. Set the color to #AFAFAF and move it to the first guide we created above.

Duplicate the layer above by going to Layer > Duplicate layer. This creates a new layer in the exact same position. Move this new layer down to the second guide we created above. We now have the container for our menu.

Step 12

Add the text centered horizontally and vertically between the two lines created above.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 14pt
• Tracking: 0
• Weight: Bold
• Color #AFAFAF

Add your lines and menu text to a folder titled Top Menu to keep things organized.

Step 13

Next, we will create the large promotional text. This will be 40px below the menu, keeping with the consistent 40px spacing between elements.

Add a horizontal guide at 248px and 324px to serve as the container of our large promo text. This may vary depending on your text but will work for our two lines of sample text used.

Using the text tool, add the following text on your page:

Welcome to the online portfolio of Jane B Doe,
Ph.D. student, designer in Cityname, State.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 42pt
• Tracking: -50
• Line height: 45pt
• Weight: Bold
• Color: #AFAFAF
• Color (highlighted): #B86443

Center the text vertically and horizontally between the new guides.

Place this text in a folder titled Promo Text to keep things organized.

Step 14

The home page layout has three large stories with a round icon in the primary (left) column. As you probably guessed, we will create them 40px below the main promo text. Here’s what we will be creating:

Step 15

First, let’s create the three elements of each story. The headline and text will align 80px from the guide on the far left, leaving room for the story icon. Add a vertical guide at 120px.

Step 16

Using the text tool, add the heading: Learn more about me.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 21pt
• Tracking: 0
• Weight: Bold
• Color: #333333

Align the text with the new guide at 120px created above and place it 40px below the large promo text.

Let’s change things up a bit. Not that I have anything against guides, but there’s a faster way to space elements such as this headline 40px below the text.

Select the move tool and move the “Learn more about me” all the way up against the last line of the large text.

Now, hold down shift and tap the down arrow on your keyboard four times, the text will jump down 40px, 10 for each time you press down with shift held. (You can do it without shift but you would need to hit down 40 times which you’re more than welcome to do)

Step 17

Create the story text, which is slightly smaller and lighter in color. Align it left with the headline created above. Instead of the 40px spacing, let’s keep it close by at around 15px below the headline text.

Insert a vertical guide at 640px to serve as the right-side border of the text, keeping it within that boundry, allowing for room for column two down the road.

Here is some junk text to use: Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printsdf sdsg and tycpsum has been the industry’s standdddard duasdfsdsdmmy textView my Resumen the industry’s standard duasdsdffmmy.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 17pt
• Tracking: 0
• Line height: 20pt
• Weight: Bold
• Color: #AFAFAF

Step 18

The icon is a bit more complicated but essentially just a circle with a Photoshop shape on the layer above.

Using the Photoshop vector tools, select the Ellipse Tool. Click and drag on your page while holding shift to draw a perfect circle. With the layer selected, press Control+T (Command+T Mac) to bring up the transformation settings. Set the Width (W) and Height (H) to 60px.

Double click on the layer thumbnail to set the color to #333333.

Step 19

Double click on the layer created above to bring up the Layer Style window.

Add a drop shadow, outer glow, gradient overlay and stroke using the settings seen below:

Step 20

The step above created the background for the three icons we will use; now it’s time to create the actual icon to place on top of the background.

The first icon is just a lowercase “i” in Georgia font, 49pt, color of #FFFFFF but it needs a couple layer styles.

Create the “i” on a layer above the circle we created earlier and double click the layer to bring up layer styles. Apply the following settings for outer glow and stroke:

Step 21

Center the “i” on the circle and place both in a folder to keep things organized.

Move the folder to align left with the 40px vertical guide alongside the headline and text created earlier so your page looks like this:

Place the icon folder, headline and text into a folder such as Home Story A to keep things organized.

Step 22

Duplicate the folder created above two times so you have three stories. Move the second and third stories down so they are all 40px apart.

Step 23

Draw a 1px line from the guide at 40px to 640px between the newly created stories. The line will end up being 600px wide, 1px tall and colored #AFAFAF. Since the stories are 40px apart, place the line approximately 20px under each story except the last one.

Step 24

In the image above, I show examples of other icons, all created using simple included shapes in the Photoshop vector shapes panel using the same layer effects as described in the steps above.

Step 25

For this design, we have a secondary column that is 300px wide with a 40px gutter between it and the main column to the left. Let’s start by adding a vertical guide at 680px which will help us align the blog posts and social media links.

Step 26

Starting 40px below the main promo text just like the stories in the main column, let’s add a title to the blog “widget” titled From the Blog. Align it left with the vertical guide we placed at 680px.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 15pt
• Tracking: 0
• Weight: Bold
• Color: #333333

Step 27

If you would like the RSS icon, download a free icon set by wefunction.com at: http://wefunction.com/2008/07/function-free-icon-set/

Size the icon to the same height as the “From the blog text” and slide it to the right, aligning with the vertical 980px guide.

Step 28

The blog posts are made up of simple lines and rectangles, the key is keeping everything evenly spaced.

Start by creating a 1px tall 300px wide line from the vertical guide at 680px to 980px, colored #C3C3C3.

Move the line 10px below the widget heading.

Leaving 1px of whitespace under the line, add a rectangle background for the post title, 300px wide and 28px tall with a color of #F0F0F0.

Add the post date and title inside the rectangle above.

• Font: Arial
• Size: 13pt
• Tracking: 0
• Color #333333

Place the line, rectangle and post title in a folder so we can easily duplicate and move.

Step 29

Duplicate the post folder above to create five separate posts. Move them down, leaving 1px space between each. Then, change the background on every other to #FFFFFF or remove the rectangle.

Add one last border to the bottom item to finish off the list of posts.

Step 30

The social media section is pretty straightforward since it is very clean and simple.

To get started, download the icons from: http://webtoolkit4.me/2008/09/05/webtoolkit4me-releases-the-first-icon-set/

Step 31

Starting 40px below the bottom of the blog posts, add a title “Social Media” the text is the same as the blog:

• Font: Arial
• Size: 13pt
• Tracking: 0
• Color: #333333

Step 32

Create a new folder for the social icons, it can be inside another folder but be sure this new one only contains the icons.

Set the blending mode on the folder to Luminosity, this will give us a simple black and white icon.

Step 33

Go to File > Place and choose an icon from the 32×32 folder of icons downloaded above, select place and once it is on your site, press enter to commit it to the page.

Step 34

Move your first icon 10px below the social media title and aligning left with the vertical guide at 680px.

Add additional icons and place them 10px apart aligning to the left.

Step 35

It’s time to finish up the site with a footer, credits and a simple menu. Begin by drawing a #F0F0F0 line all the way across the site 1px tall, 80px below the last item on the page, the third story in the main column.

Step 36

Next, draw a rectangle with the same #F0F0F0 color to fill in everything under that 1px line above. Move the rectangle down leaving a 1px gap between the line and the top of the rectangle for a nice double line effect.

Step 37

The footer text is centered on the page and placed 20px below the top of the footer. The first line, used for copyright information is as follows:

• Arial
• Size: 13pt
• Tracking: 0
• Color #AFAFAF
• Color: # B86443 (Highlighted)

The second line, used for a secondary menu is a bit smaller at 11pt but otherwise uses the same settings as above.

Final Product

Why It Works So Well

The Minimal template works so well because it keeps things simple. By removing any barriers and distractions from the design, each small element that remains in the design becomes heightened in terms of importance. The visual hierarchy that is developed becomes just about as straight forward as it gets – within moments, the visitor of the site can immediately answer the main questions:

1. Logo: Where am I?
2. Mission Statement: What is this all about?
3. Navigation: Where can I go?
4. Content Column: What can I learn here?
5. Sidebar Column: How can I find out more?

The order in which the reader discovers this hierarchy doesn’t really even matter. Because everything is presented on a single page in a clean and orderly manner, the visitor is free to explore the design without any obstacles or confusion. This is why using a barebones template like this can often be a fantastic place to start a design if you’re at a loss for inspiration. It’s always easy to add extra elements… what’s hard is nailing a successful framework.

Create Your Own Custom Versions!

A template like Minimal just wouldn’t be fun to use if everyone had the same exact version. Brandon, the site editor here, decided to make a couple “custom variations” of the Minimal template to show just how versatile it can become without ever losing the minimalist spirit of the design. Check them out below:

In this version, we’re using the font Gotham, dotted lines for the HR elements, and a bright green for that fresh, minty taste!

In this version, we’re using the font Museo, dotted lines for the HR elements, and a deep blue accent color.

In this version, we’re using the font Ziggurat, dotted lines for the HR elements, and we’ve inverted the color scheme for a dark, serious style.

Conclusion

That’s it! I tried to keep everything as simple as possible to keep a clean, professional minimal look. If you are interested in the final HTML or WordPress versions stop over to my ThemeForest portfolio! Thanks for reading, now go leave some comments below if you liked it!

Webdesigntuts+

Today we’re going to walk through the creation of your very own vector-based Buddy Icons with a nice bonus – a free set of Envato™ Marketplace icons to use on your own website!

About the Author: Orman Clark is a UK based Web Designer specializing in pretty pixels and front-end development. He spends most of his time designing WordPress themes and other free resources for designers at PremiumPixels.com. Keep up to date with Orman and PremiumPixels on Twitter, Dribbble and Forrst.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Adobe Illustrator CS3+
• Difficulty: Beginner
• Estimated Completion Time: Under 1 Hour

Step 1 Organizing Your Layers

Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document with the following settings: 800×600 pixels, 72dpi, RGB color, units in pixels and a white background

With your new document created, open your Layers palette by going to Window > Layers if it is not already visible and create 4 new layers. Call them “base”, “icon”, “light” and “overlay”

Step 2 Creating the Base

Working on the “base” layer you just created, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool, choose a light grey color, and click anywhere on your canvas. In the dialogue box that appears select the following: Width “42px”, Height “42px”, Corner Radius “10px” and click OK.

Step 3 Creating the Inner Light

Ensuring that you are on the “light” layer, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool once again, select a darker grey, and click on the canvas. This time choose: Width “38px”, Height “38px”, Corner Radius “8px” and click OK.

Step 4 Creating the Inner Light Cont…

Keeping on the “light” layer, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool one final time, select an even darker grey, and click on the canvas. This time choose: Width “34px”, Height “34px”, Corner Radius “6px” and click OK.

Step 5 Creating the Inner Light Cont…

Hold down Shift and click the two innermost rectangles to select them both. With them both selected open your Pathfinder palette by going to Window > Pathfinder if it is not already visible and click the “Minus Front” icon. This will leave you with a hollow rectangle.

Step 6 Creating the Inner Light Cont…

With the hollow rectangle selected, head over to the Gradient palette (Window > Gradient) and select a linear gradient, from white to white, set at 90 degrees, with the left gradient anchor set to 0% opacity, the right gradient anchor set to 80% opacity and the gradient location at 80%

Open the Transparency palette (Window > Transparency) and set the Blending Mode to “Soft Light”.

Step 7 Creating the Overlay

Switch to the “overlay” layer, choose any color, and create yet another rounded rectangle using: Width “38px”, Height “38px”, Corner Radius “8px”. Using the Elipse tool, create an elipse and position it over the rectangle as shown.

Step 8 Creating the Overlay Cont…

Hold down Shift and click the elipse and rectangle to select them both. Using the Pathfinder palette as before, click the “Minus Front” icon. This will leave you with the shape of the overlay.

Step 9 Creating the Overlay Cont…

With the overlay shape selected, head over to the Gradient palette and select a linear gradient, f