hdesign blog&portfolio

Delicious bookmarks december 14 – december 16:

• Free Texture Tuesday: Ice | BittBox – Last weeks set of grunge frost textures went over really well and I received plenty of requests for more winter-themed textures…so here’s another set for you guys.
• Advanced Lightbox Clone: Clearbox 3 – Clearbox 3 is a Lightbox-like modal box script to display images, image galleries & various other contents including Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media formats, HTML, inner content, etc.
• Light Fonts Use in Web Design: Examples and Resources – Light/thin fonts are the fonts that are usually slim and slender than usually fonts.
• 7 Tools To Optimize The Speed of Your Website – Google recently announced that it’s algorithm will factor in page load speed in addition to the other 200 or so ranking factors currently employed. This move, broadly welcomed by web developers and users, means it is now more important than ever to optimize the speed of your websites.
• Five Tools To Help You Simplify Your Communication Process At Work @ SmashingApps –
• 2010 webdesign trendelőrejelzés – A 2009-es év végéhez közelítve elengedhetetlenül felmerül a kérdés: milyen webdesign trendek lesznek porondon 2010-ben?
• 20+ Tools for Quick and Clean Code Development | Web Design Ledger –
• 11 Useful jQuery Powered WordPress Plugins | Web Design Ledger –
• How To Display Author Photo and Bio in WordPress – woorkup.com –
• Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines – So, you have this amazing WordPress site, but for some reason the search engines just don’t show you much love. You post killer content, make it easy for users to share via their social networks, and people are subscribing to your RSS feed, indicating that they’re like what they’re reading. If you’ve tried everything to drive traffic to your website, and search engines still ignore your site, maybe you need to evaluate how search engine friendly your website is.

Delicious bookmarks december 12 – december 14:

• 33 Must Read CSS3 Tips, Tricks, Tutorial Sites and Articles | Graphic and Web Design Blog -Resources And Tutorials – Since previous article about CSS text effects got really big attention I decided to research and find more interesting articles and websites just focused on CSS3, teaching you how to use it, showing pros and cons and much more.
• Free Textures – 21 High-Res Texas Snow Textures | Think Design – For those of you that don’t know, I live in (normally sunny) Houston, Texas. Even in our Winters, it does not normally get very cold. Let alone snow. I’ve probably seen snow here a total of 3 times in my 16+ years in Texas.
• 35 CSS-based Layouts that Look Awesome – Nettuts+ – Dec 13th, 2009 in Web Roundups by Travis King
  Creattica continues to be a great source of inspiration. Whether you’re there to spark the creative fuse or just browse through some amazing work, it's well worth checking out what’s new over at Creattica.
• Inspiring Music Playlist for Web Designers n. 04 – woorkup.com –
• Girls Girls Girls 2 | Wallpaper Art –
• Weekly Web Design Inspiration #32 | D-Lists –
• Comment Design: Considerations, Best Practices and Examples | Inspiration – Comment styling is an often-overlooked part of blog design. After all, they’re at the bottom of the page, not seen until visitors already have an impression of your site, and they’re really there for function more than anything else. Why invest a lot of time in styling them and making them really stand out?
• Styling HTML Lists with CSS: Techniques and Resources – Smashing Magazine –

Delicious bookmarks december 7 – december 10:

• Free Smashing Christmas Icon Set – Smashing Magazine – Christmas is coming and, of course, it’s just the right time to provide you with some nice freebies to fresh up your designs. To celebrate the holidays, our friends from IconEden designed “Smashing Christmas”, a free icon set, dedicated to the design community and released especially for Smashing Magazine’s readers.
• 45 Useful Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials for Christmas Season | Naldz Graphics – The holiday spirit is once again here. Santas, Christmas trees and Christmas balls are once again in fashion… We are once again in search of items that would uplift the season. For sure most of you will look for some Christmas Concept tutorials maybe to create various of Christmas cards, wallpapers or posters. As our respond to this clamor, we have collected 45 Useful Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials for Christmas Season.
• Freebie Release: 45 High Quality Fruits Stock Photos | Graphics – Today for the very first time in hongkiat.com, we are releasing stock photos. The collection is made up of 45 high quality fruit photos and they are all free to download with no strings attached.
• Free Texture Tuesday: Grunge Frost | BittBox – I want to do some winter-themed textures in the weeks leading up to Christmas and I thought I’d start off with something a little out of the box: grungy frost.
• 25 Awesome Gift Ideas for Designers & Developers – The holiday season of 2009 is upon us and if you’re not sure what to get your designer or developer friend, family member, and/or significant other, we’re here to help.
• Create an Animated “Call to Action” Button – In this web design and development tutorial, you’ll get a walkthrough for creating a "Call to Action" button sprite in Photoshop as well as how to use jQuery to animate it. This tutorial is broken up into three sections: Photoshop, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript.
• CMS For Flash Websites: FlashMoto CMS – When we hear about a Flash CMS, there is mostly a prejudice that it may not be that functional.

  FlashMoto CMS is a totally different one which is quite impressive & really works for managing Flash-based websites.

• 30 Amazingly Creative Photo Manipulated Wallpaper to Tune Up Your Desktop | PSD Vault – Extra Unique Adobe Photoshop Tutorial – In this post, I will show you 30 amazingly beautiful, ultra-creative Photo Manipulated wallpaper I collected and stored in my browser favourites. They’re some of the best ones I have come across and I have to say the skills used in making those wallpaper are simply first-class. Really Really good.
• Vintage Magazine Covers with a “Wow Factor” | Webdesigner Depot – Back in the day, it was considered to be very prestigious to have your artwork or photograph featured on a magazine cover, and some of the greatest artists of our time designed magazine covers.
• Guide to Low-cost Usability Tools – As someone who works with start-ups and SMBs, finding low-cost, high-impact tools is an absolute necessity. Fortunately, the usability world has been blessed by dozens of new tools over the last couple of years. While many excellent blog posts have been written about these tools, I decided that it was time to take a deeper dive. Most importantly, I wanted to test these tools on User Effect and try to provide real data and screenshots.
• 15 Clean Style Wallpapers Done with Selective Coloring | Blaberize – Today I want to show you some clean style wallpapers that uses selective coloring. The meaning of an selective coloring is listed in Wikipedia as: “a post-processing technique where most of a photo is converted to black and white, but some parts are left in color.” Color is very powerful when it comes to drawing attention and expressing the emotion. That power is magnified when color is used as an accent in an otherwise colorless image. Selective coloring of one area of an image is cool technique to make it standout. It’s an simple effect to apply, but it can take a lot of time to get stunning results. Here now some stunning clean style wallpaper done with selective color effect.
• 100+ Photoshop Actions for Amazing Color Enhancements | Web Design Ledger – Color plays a major role in the story that a photograph has to tell, but sometimes the color that the camera captures isn’t exactly what we have in mind. This is where Photoshop can be a big help, and more specifically Photoshop actions. With the click of a button an action can help us achieve time consuming effects in no time. Here are over 100 Photoshop actions that will add amazing color enhancements to your photos.
• A Showcase of Clever Negative Space in Logo Design | Web Design Ledger – Negative space is the space around and between the main objects in a design. This space often goes unnoticed, unless a creative designer is able to turn the negative space into a key element of the design. Logo designers often use negative space in a way that it becomes just as important as the positive space in conveying the meaning of the logo. Here is a showcase of logos that all possess creative use of negative space.
• Designing With Fonts: 30 Useful & Free Dingbats –
• Easy: A Front-End (CSS/JS/HTML) Framework For Developing Faster – Easy is a front-end (CSS/JS/HTML) framework, by Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe, for converting design into HTML faster & providing a solid base for future development.

Delicious bookmarks december 7.

• The Best jQuery Plugins of 2009 | Web Design Ledger – During the past few weeks we’ve been publishing our “Best of 2009″ series in which we’ve shown you the best WordPress themes, fonts, icons, and Photoshop Tutorials. In this article, our focus is on jQuery. Over the past couple of years jQuery has been growing in popularity, which means more and more plugins are being created to make web designers’ lives easier. Here are our favorites from 2009.
• 10 Essential WordPress Plugins For New WordPress Installation – WordPress has a lot of powerful plugins that will add extra functionality to your blog. There are more than 6k plugins available in WordPress Plugin Directory when this article is written.
• Weekly Web Design Inspiration #31 | D-Lists – Week 31 highlighted loads and loads of great websites. I had far too many to showcase here so I had to be especially harsh with my choices. I hope you like them.
• 25 Funny T-Shirts for Designers and Developers | Webdesigner Depot – Everyone loves an original and unique t-shirt.Fashion statements aside, they do give a slight insight into your personality, your current mood and sets you apart from the crowd.This article is not a collection of the best designed t-shirts by the best designers, this is a collection of t-shirts especially for designers and developers.
• WordPress 2.7 Cookbook + Free E-Books! – Nettuts+ – Packt Publishing recently sent me a review copy of “WordPress 2.7 Cookbook.” I’m a huge fan of the cookbook line; they’re similar to a huge string of quick tips. So if you don’t have time to read for an hour straight, you can always pick up a web dev cookbook and learn a few neat techniques within minutes.
• 108 Beautiful, Minimal And Free Mono Icons – Tutorial9 is sharing a beautiful set of free mono icons that has 108 items.Icons are in transparent PNG format, black color & 32*32px in siz
• 22 Advanced CSS Text Effects And Web Typography Tips | Graphic and Web Design Blog -Resources And Tutorials – You definitely should have seen those advanced CSS text effects for now already, they are rapidly getting popular as upcoming and current trend in good webdesign.

Delicious bookmarks december 4 – 09:21 – 17:48:

• Best of the Web: November 2009 | designrfix.com – Today we are showcasing “Best of the Web”. We have scoured the internet in search of other design driven blogs and websites to showcase what they have to offer for the month of November 2009. There is plenty of great stuff out there such as tutorials, freebies, resources and lots of inspirational pieces. I am confident that your designs will benefit from these hot new finds.
• 40+ Excellent Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Tutorials | Graphics – Back when Mickey Mouse was drawn by Walt Disney in 1928, it was all pencil and paper, and the frequent use of the ever dependable eraser. More than 80 years has passed and yet we still see Mickey Mouse cartoons all around the world.
• Inspiration in Spectrum: The FYC Edition | Fuel Your Creativity – After taking last week off because of the holiday, we are back this week with the final installment of our colorful inspirational inquisitions here on FYC.
• Portfolio Design Trends: vCard Websites | WebDesignFan.com – A vCard websites contain minimal content, usually just basic information about the individual (i.e. job title) and contact information (i.e. mailing addresses and links to social media profiles). Most of them are having a same features – they are all using javascript animation like sliding, fading and tab navigation.
• 77+ Outstanding WordPress Template Designs / JRB – WordPress has become the go-to system for bloggers, new and experienced alike. I am running my blog on WordPress, and so are some of the most popular blogs on the web, not only because of it’s ease of customization but also because of the vast amount of support, plug-ins, and templates available.
• Minimalist Web Design: When Less is More | Webdesigner Depot – As designers, we all know that a minimalist design can achieve beautiful results.
• Use Sprites to Create an Awesomeness-Filled Navigation Menu – Nettuts+ – CSS sprites can dramatically increase a website's performance, and with jQuery, we can implement awesome transition effects easily. Let's get started.
• CSS Variables with PHP | CSS-Tricks – When people are asked about features they would like to CSS, “variables” always seems to come up. Whether or not this is a good idea is still something I personally haven’t decided on, but I’d lean toward yes. Regardless, using PHP, it is trivially easy to use variables in CSS. This is certainly not a new trick, but I’ve never specifically covered it so I thought I ought to.
• 10 Free Apps for Managing Your Fonts – If you’re a typical designer or web developer, you probably have a large font collection.
• 10 Simple Web Accessibility Tips You Can Do Today – One of the most overlooked aspects in designing a website that we often brush off is web accessibility.
• Holiday Christmas Pattern – Free Vector Art – Download Free Vector Graphics and Vector Art at Vecteezy! – Holiday Christmas Pattern
  by Andy Law Design
  Category: Patterns
  Type: Adobe Illustrator (.ai)
  Added: Dec 04, 2009
• christmas balls – Free Vector Art – Download Free Vector Graphics and Vector Art at Vecteezy! – christmas balls
  by addicted to coffee
  Category: Holiday
  Type: Adobe Illustrator (.ai)
  Added: Nov 27, 2009
• Snowflakes brush set – Free Photoshop Brushes at Brusheezy! – Snowflakes brush set
  by LorineArt
  Photoshop Brush (15 in set)
  Added: Dec 04, 2009
  Category: Shapes