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links for 2010-12-29

  • CSS3 is truly amazing. It gives web designers the ability to create flexible and easily reusable design elements, and reduces our reliance on images and graphics editors. This is a guide shows you how to create stylish social media buttons using CSS3, HTML, and some freely available social media icons.
  • Although it’s common for agents to use social media platforms, very few actually leverage the technology to its full potential. With literally thousands of social networking sites to choose from, it can be a little overwhelming to choose the right one. The big three are obviously Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. To put things into perspective, Facebook houses half a billion members while Twitter holds 75 million and LinkedIn boasts 80 million. Each of the groups is growing at an astounding rate, but not every platform is suitable for business purposes. In a recent study conducted by NetProspex, it was found that 43 percent of employees at the largest companies in America use LinkedIn while 11 percent use Facebook and 3 percent use Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are generally geared for personal use while LinkedIn is 100 percent business. LinkedIn has proven to be a powerful resource for businesses, but even more so for channel partners.
  • FontsMadeEasy.com is a fonts download and view tool that helps people to choose and download a new font.
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    links for 2010-12-25

  • This morning I saw a couple of tweets from @seangaffney and @maxvoltar about the CSS text-rendering property, which is in the W3C Working Draft. Aesthetically Loyal has outlined the differences in kerning pairs and browser support for text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; quite nicely, and after seeing how well capital As, Vs, Ys and Ts display I had to test it for myself. Similar to Kyle Meyer’s experiment, I noticed a significant improvement and added the property to my body CSS for this site.  Overall, type looks much tighter and successive capital letters, like “CSS”, seem more evenly spaced.  Firefox uses optimizeLegibility by default for font sizes 20px or larger and I agree with Paul Irish’s thought that Webkit should do the same.
  • A lot of shit happens in comic books, and a lot of shit happens in real life, so every once in a while they're bound to coincide, right? That still doesn't explain some of the freaky stuff comics have gotten right. Like…
  • Sam Brown is an interface designing standardista from Edinburgh, Scotland who specialises in usability and web standards, is a geek and loves all things technology. Get in touch!
  • Transparency is one of those things that can really add depth and make a website design pop – when it’s done right of course! We’ve collected 40 websites that make great use of transparency. Some of them are using transparent PNGs and others are using the CSS opacity property. Enjoy!
  • Attracting customers to your website is the first concern for any business, and the initial step would be design the best website making it a grand one, but this may not always give you the desired results. Keeping today’s competition and creativity in mind, new ways are designed every where to keep the business on the move. One such new move is the E-mail Newsletter Designs. Newsletter, the word may sound boring or spam to you, but an attractive newsletter design is sure to give visitors a second thought for your website. But be careful, about choosing the right design since inbox is always flooded with e-mails and your mail could be the one among them. Your newsletter design should be able to convey the information at the first glance without forcing the visitor to read till the last and explain your discounts, updates or any information u want to convey.
  • Video.ME by Go Daddy is a growing video-sharing community where you can easily post videos to the Web and share them with your family and friends on Video.ME–or on your Web site or blog, via email, or through a variety of social networking sites.
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    links for 2010-12-14

  • Ladies and gentlemen, it is the second decade of the third millennium and we are still kicking around the same 2-D interface we got three decades ago. Sure, Apple debuted a few apps for OSX 10.7 that have a couple more 3-D flourishes, and Microsoft has had that Flip 3D for a while. But c’mon – 2011 is right around the corner. That’s Twenty Eleven, folks. Where is our 3-D virtual reality? By now, we should be zipping around the Metaverse on super-sonic motorbikes. Granted, the capability of rendering complex 3-D environments has been present for years. On the web, there are already several solutions: Flash; three.js in <canvas>; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms!
  • For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.
  • Yummygum designed 60 free vector Photoshop icons with care. Perfectly suitable for iPhone & iPad apps or your new web project!
  • Yummygum is back with another iconSweets; a huge FREE icon set containing over a 1,000+ icons, all in a vector-shaped Photoshop format. iconSweets2 will crunch your icon thirst for all of your iPhone, iPad & Android apps or new web projects!
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    links for 2010-12-13

  • Create a simple CSS folded-corner effect without images or extra markup. It works well in all modern browsers and is best suited to designs with simple colour backgrounds.
  • I know you may not like Wikileaks and view what they did as irresponsible and harmful. I want to take the time to give you all a second opinion on the situation. I want to express why I feel the media is horribly misrepresenting this issue. I have heard in news reports the accusations of Wikileaks being a hacker organization or indiscriminately leaking 250,000 diplomatic cables. They have been blatantly lying about leaks themselves, Wikileaks, and Julian Assange. Let's get the facts straight before jumping to conclusions or forming opinions. Wikileaks is a journalist organization who's mission is to help whistleblowers remain anonymous. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, is the site's public figure. Here's a short list of previous publishings that wikileaks has been lauded for: * Systematic killings and disappearances by the Kenyan Government; this leak changed the Kenyan election. * Illegal Cayman Island activities of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer.
  • Your browser of choice may have changed a lot in the past year, but luckily the best extensions for making your browser better have kept up with all the most popular browsers. Here are our cross-platform, must-have favorites. Last time we looked at our favorite browser extensions, we only looked at Firefox. A lot has changed in a year, and now our favorite-extension pool has expanded to several other browsers.
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    links for 2010-12-10

  • It’s no secret that we love textures and patterns here at WDL. They’re great for easily adding lots of interest and depth to a design, whether it be a huge background pattern or just some subtle textures here and there. So to continue our “Best of 2010? series, this week we’re covering textures and patterns. We’ve seen a lot of them this year, but some really stood out. So here’s our picks for best textures and patterns of 2010. We picked our favorites, but tried to include a mixture of styles.
  • The Web Design Ledger is a publication by web designers for web designers. We cover a wide range of topics such as Photoshop, web design, photography, programming, and more.
  • "Tron: Legacy" is a high-tech 3D adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn , the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the digital world of Tron more »where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin's loyal confidant Quorra, father and son embark on a life-and-death journey of escape across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.
  • The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs. A little over two years ago, I started reflecting on the web as a design medium. Coming from a print design background, most of what I knew about design was still applicable; but the things that weren’t made a huge difference. What came of this was a presentation I gave at a few conferences (the abbreviated 10-minute version of which you can see on Vimeo). The discussions that followed prompted me to look closely at how the creative process—and the tools we use—affect designing for the screen. The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design.
  • I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow. Why use Photoshop? It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app.
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    links for 2010-11-29

  • This best web 2.0 stripe generator on the net! Generate seamless stripe patterns and textures of any two colors, harnessing the power of AJAX. Generate beautiful transparencies too.
  • As designers, we are used to having quite a bit of control over how things are displayed in a browser. Sure, differing rendering engines don’t always agree on everything, but for the most part we can at least find ways to mitigate variance through workarounds, or by writing for the lowest common denominator. By far, one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with browser inconsistencies has got to be forms. There are two distinctively differing schools of thought regarding (not) styling form elements. For the longest time, we’ve had people on both sides of the proverbial fence, neither group being particularly pragmatic. Some designers advocate styling form elements to match the brand of a site. Others would tell you to leave them alone entirely, so that they adhere to the native look and feel of a given operating system.
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    links for 2010-11-23

  • It is known that website creation requires a lot of means, skills and energy. And if you are unfamiliar with HTML and CSS or just wish to save your time, our website templates are the perfect solution for you. TemplateMonster has created this collection of free web templates for you and regardless whether you are a newbie or a professional webmaster or designer you will still find them useful. They will also help you to evaluate the quality of our products, get a feel for things and try your skills before purchasing. So don’t hesitate to view and download these high quality templates free of charge for your education and use, but please note there are conditions and limitations associated with using these free website templates. For example you are not allowed to use these free sample templates with commercial purposes (including but not limited to selling them, using them as your online stores or including them into your portfolios).
  • Enhance your shopping cart appearance with professional ecommerce templates and graphics.
  • Website Templates.bz would like to present you a great collection of Free osCommerce Templates. They are absolutely free that`s why it is the best solution if you want to try your forces in web design or do not have any finance for developing your online business. All Free osCommerce Templates are stylish and unique. The style of every Template differs so you have a great chance to choose the most proper design to the area of your business. If after viewing this selection you will not find suitable Free osCommerce Template we are always ready to create a unique Template just for you or to do some changes in design as for your wishes and requests.
  • With nearly four times the crime than the average American city the dubious honor goes to… St. Louis as the most dangerous city in America. Annual rankings, based on FBI crime statistics and population statistics, offered up the most dangerous cities in handy list form. St. Louis beat out last year's chart topper, Camden, NJ, though Camden is still pretty crime-y at number two. The top 10 most dangerous cities are: 1. St. Louis, MO
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    links for 2010-11-05

  • Limited Edition – Star Wars T-Shirts – Marc Ecko Enterprises
  • So you learned the base id, class, and descendant selectors – and then called it a day? If so, you’re missing out on an enormous level of flexibility. While many of the selectors mentioned in this article are part of the CSS3 spec, and are, consequently, only available in modern browsers, you owe it to yourself to commit these to memory.
  • Officially a neutral world, Alderaan has become the focus of Republic and Imperial political maneuvering. Even as conflict between Alderaan’s noble houses threatens to turn into civil war, Republic and Imperial forces engage in a secret battle that could decide the planet’s fate. High in the mountains, both sides fight for control of Alderaan’s massive planetary defense cannon—a weapon powerful enough to devastate an enemy’s fleet and ensure domination over the planet’s skies.
  • If you provide status reports for the tasks assigned to you then this feature of Outlook may be right up your alley. Did you know that you can use Outlook to send status reports? And I don’t mean creating a new email and attaching a document containing your status report. Outlook can actually generate a status report to an email message. Here’s how to do it in Outlook 2007: Within Outlook, open the task for which you want to send a status report. On the Task tab, in the Manage Task group, click Send Status Report. Enter recipient names in the To, Cc, and Bcc boxes. If the task was assigned to you, the names of people on the update list are automatically added. Add any other information you want in the email message. Click Send.
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    links for 2010-09-16

  • Your searchable source for FREEBIES
    (tags: free)
  • The other day my fellow co-worker, Cameron, and I were discussing what the best way to style the hr tag? I usually try to use a div if I just need a line for presentation. But what if I need to style an hr that is used on an existing site. It is certainly easier to apply a simple style to the hr tag in the style sheet to make the change. However, each browser, as you can guess has a different way to render them. At first I thought it was Mozilla and the rest of its crew that was rendering the styles incorrectly. However, surprise surprise, it turned out to be IE that did it incorrectly in the end. Here are my solutions and examples on how to get the hr tag to render the same in the popular browsers. By default the hr tag is center-aligned. To align it left follow the example.
  • What I learned at work:  During an interview about green design for our Climate Desk podcast, Dwell magazine editor Aaron Britt dropped a word on me I hadn’t heard before: Retronym.  It means, “a word or phrase for something that now has to be specified because it is no longer identifiable in its original state.”  For example, the retronym “acoustic guitar” exists only because there are now electric guitars. Other retronyms include digital clock, sit-down restaurant, black-and-white photo. You get the idea.  Britt believes green design is a retronym because once upon a time homes were built with the environment in mind as opposed to how they are built now.  The invention of the word has been attributed to former NPR president and Robert Kennedy press aid,  Frank Mankiewicz, circa 1980.  Thinking of retronyms is a good time killer and I believe a great Scrabble word if you get lucky.
  • Eric Schmidt has confirmed that we could be getting “Google Me” sometime this Fall. This Google Me service will introduce what Google calls “a social layer” into online search, video and Google Maps. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters quote Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying the company will integrate social networking elements to its services. What’s interesting to me is that this doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a stand-alone product — it appears the plan is to weave some social goodness into Google’s existing product base. Squeezing social stuff into their already successful products is probably Google’s best shot at getting widespread adoption — as I imagine it would be extremely difficult to get 500 million users to see the value in a competing service, and then decide to switch. I am looking forward to see what Google’s got up it’s sleeve — and I’m hoping it’s going to knock my socks off. What do you think “Google Me” will look like?
  • There are many ways to play Super Mario Bros. 3.  This… is not one of them.  With Mario's 25th birthday just passed, it's nice to see some retro funniness coming out of the internet woodwork.  This new video from YouTube's Master0fHyrule shows exactly how not to get to the secret area in the clouds of level 1-3:
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