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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 2010-12-10

  • 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 2010-10-22

  • March 2011 will mark the YouTube Symphony Orchestra's return – and once again, we invite you to be a part of it. There are two ways you can audition: submit your video audition for the orchestra or submit a solo improvisation to a piece composed specifically for the orchestra by American composer Mason Bates. The best and most creative performers will be selected to form the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 and invited to perform in March at the Sydney Opera House, under the direction of world-renowned conductor and YouTube Symphony Artistic Advisor, Michael Tilson Thomas.
  • SlideNote is a customizable, flexible jQuery plugin that makes it easy to display sliding notifications on your website or in your web application. For more information or to see a demo, scroll down.
  • In the past we’ve taken a look at several CSS grid systems. We’ve also gone over how LESS.js can add a lot of flexibility to the way you style web pages. Today we’re going to combine these two ideas and create a grid system that utilizes LESS. Read on to see why on Earth we would do such a thing. If you understand the concept, you can also skip the tutorial and go straight to the download. Let’s get started.
  • Image Optimization is one of the most important factors for your website run without any problems. As if the images embedded within your website wouldn’t be optimized, then they will grasp a huge bandwidth and will resulting into very heavy load laid on your website. This may let too much of traffic driven away from your website. And nobody will want that, well if you want to know that how you can get yourself away from these kind of problems by optimizing your image, then there is a simple solution to it… Just use any of the below given image optimization tools as per your desire. So, let us drive through the list.
  • Whenever one purchases a domain, one usually believes that the process of setting up a website is simple and doesn't require much. However as this article on Network Solutions domain forwarding will explain to you, there are plenty of things that come up in the process that will cause you to do one or two things that you had really not anticipated. Network Solutions domain forwarding refers to a process whereby you make it possible for someone to find a certain website under different domain names. This is pretty similar to what happens with telephone numbers. You can set your phone in such a way that if someone calls you on a certain number on which you are not available, they are able to find you on another number on which you are available.
  • There is a lot more water on the moon than previously believed, according to an analysis of NASA data being published Friday, a finding that may bolster the case for a manned base on the lunar surface. The discovery grew out of an audacious experiment last year, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration slammed a spent-fuel rocket into a lunar crater at 5,600 miles an hour, and then used a pair of orbiting satellites to analyze the debris thrown off by the impact. They discovered that the crater contained water in the form of ice, plus a host of other resources, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium and silver.
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    links for 2010-07-26

  • So you want to be a wedding photographer! Fantastic. Whether you’re looking to start a career or you just need to know enough to convince an ex-girlfriend you’re the type of professional she should hire, even though she specifically asked you not to attend her wedding three weeks ago in a private message on Facebook, this guide can help. A marriage is both the end of a life-chapter and the beginning of another chapter that isn’t quite as interesting and the characters aren’t as likable. Try to remember that. Remember all of that as you crouch in your suit before sunsets, immortalizing the day on film for you and your true love, and also that doctor guy she’s marrying.
  • Citizen Effect's CitizenGulf project will become a National Day of Action on August 25th, in alignment with the week of the fifth anniversary of Katrina. The benefit — to be promoted by Gulf Coast Benefit — seeks to help fishing families find a new, more sustainable future by providing education resources for their children. ??Make a direct impact on fishing families in the Gulf.?? Catholic Charities of New Orleans is the beneficiary of all CitizenGulf National Day of Action donations. Citizen Effect will send 100% of donations (less credit card fees) directly to Catholic Charities to support education programs for fishing families.
  • There’s a never ending supply of information out there for us web designers. If there’s something we need to learn, we can find it in one form or another. Sometimes it may be on a blog or it could be in a book. While you may have to shell our some money for a good web design book, there are a number of them out that have online versions that are totally free. Here are 10 you should find very useful.
  • In what will surely become a landmark case — or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA's clubbed, pygmy feet — a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal. The case itself ruled that General Electric, in using hacked security dongles to repair some uninterruptible power supplies produced by another company, did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Why? Because the end goal was legal. If the hacked dongles had been used for the forces of evil, the story would be different. While this doesn't sound immediately applicable to DRM-protected software, music and movies, bear in mind that the DMCA is the foundation for every spurious copyright claim made by RIAA, MPAA and the myriad of other digital rights groups. In essence, this ruling means that you're free to break DRM on media that you own. No longer is it illegal to rip your own DVDs or crippled audio CDs onto your hard d
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    links for 2010-04-23

  • Starter kits are great timesavers for web designers and they are particularly useful for those who often create mock-ups for project pitching on daily basis. If you are a designer-cum-programmer think of it as your code snippets So what’s in a starter kit? We think it varies – depending on what each designer routinely worked with. For GUI designers, keeping a copy of form elements (buttons, checkboxes, tab, drop down menus, etc) helps speed up the process of creating screens and layouts; on the other hand, browser (IE, Firefox Safari) templates with web safe area keep web designers reminded how/where they should prioritize their contents. Experienced designers will usually customize and keep a personal version of starter kit, some might have few too! In today’s article, we attempt to show you some of the best design starter kit we’ve come to know. You can download (for free) and use them right away, or customize your own copy that will come in handy in future, your choice. Full list
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    links for 2010-02-20

  • Most of the time, L'Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the Vatican City, publishes news about the Vatican's day-to-day operations and rad new encyclicals (I wonder if they have a gossip section). But in an apparent effort to reach out to younger readers/parishioners/converts, they have listed their top ten albums of all time. It's a bit of a 180 from the establishment's previously staid stance on rock & roll (although Pope Benedict XVI's predecessor, John Paul II, was known to hang out with rock stars on occasion. And so we get a "semi-serious" look at the best of rock & roll, courtesy of the Vatican:
  • A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance by Dinty W. Moore First published in The Normal School, January 2010: http://thenormalschool.com/ . 17,051 views – Public Created on Jun 12, 2009 – Updated Jan 21
  • There’s good news and bad news about the state of public education in the United States. While the greatest gains have been made in Math and Science education from 1995 to 2003, most Americans still only give public schools a below-average grade. Take a graphic look at America’s Report Card on Education to see how public education in the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world.
  • In recent years Internet Explorer 6 has become the browser web designers love to hate. Security issues, JavaScript errors and inexplicable CSS rendering quirks have made it the brunt of many jokes. With IE6 in its twilight and big companies like Google dropping support, it seems like a good time to take a fond look back at our old foe. In this post we’re looking at what Internet Explorer 6 used to be and why its image changed over the years. You can also see the comic in a larger version. Do we need to review our projects in Internet Explorer 6? Can we stop supporting IE6? If not, how do we handle those users who are still using IE6? And if yes, how can we prompt IE6 users to upgrade? Or how do we convince those who don’t allow their employees to get rid of the legacy browser to upgrade? What do you think? We are looking forward to your opinions in the comments to this post!
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    links for 2010-01-19

  • The presence or lack of good stock imagery can make or break a design. My best advice is to use custom photography/artwork whenever possible. However, I’m a big fan of stack art because there are tons of scenarios when it makes good sense to purchase someone else’s work over taking the time to create your own. To keep it classy, here are ten things to avoid when you’re working with stock images.
  • With the progression of the Web, hundreds of web design tools have been established around the world to serve the growing demand for such work.Many of this tools are available and widely used by Web Designers and Webmasters. These tools help Them to explore, learn, design and build their projects from scratch.If you’re also a beginner Web designer, these simple tools can help you create the Layout,StyleSheet,Favicons,Buttons,Wordpress Theme and much more quick easy.If you found this post useful please Retweet it.
  • For web developers and designers, it can be difficult to memorize the syntax for multiple programming languages and frameworks, especially since they are always evolving and growing. This is where cheat sheets come in handy. Most cheat sheets are designed to be printer friendly, so you can have them laying around on your desk as quick reference cards. Here is a collection of useful cheat sheets specifically for front end web development that will help you with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
  • Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology.
  • Now imagine you are an agency with 12 designers who all need (want!) to move to the latest version of Creative Suite. Even more expense. Now imagine you are a looking to learn web design and don’t have pots of cash to spend on the industry standard software. How can you get your hands on a suite of software tools that will help you plan, design, build, debug and deliver a website without spending a penny? Here’s how. We’ve compiled a list of free software, mostly for the Mac, but with a few exceptions where absolutely necessary! We’ll take you through the process of planning, completing and delivering a project, and what free software is available to you at those stages. Be sure to add your comments below and let us know of anything we have missed.
  • CodeRun Studio: A free, cross-platform browser-based IDE CodeRun Studio is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE), designed for the cloud. It enables you to easily develop, debug and deploy web applications using your browser. CodeRun Studio can be used instead or alongside your existing desktop IDE. You can upload existing code in order to test it in the cloud or for sharing with your peers. CodeRun Studio also enables you to instantly compile, package and deploy your code to the CodeRun Cloud. CodeRun Studio is a free service. Try It Now!
  • Instructions: Slide the orb Find comfort zone Enjoy auditory zen Uses of White Noise: Aid Sleep Enhance Privacy Block Distractions Mask Tinnitus Configure Audio Equipment Soothe Migraines and more…
  • Having a say in what Google says about you is extremely important these days, especially for professionals such as freelancers, for whom a Google search result of their name is a first impression for potential employers. You definitely want your blog or professional web site to show up before your non-professional social networking profiles. Kirkpatrick discovered a small HTML tag that was missing from his own blog, yet present in Twitter, that could make all the difference: So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel="me" to a relevant link on your blog. I've added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that's a good page for me. It's as simple as making the link text read a href="http://marshallk.com/feedback" rel="me". It's not necessarily a foolproof solution, but it should help (and certainly shouldn't hurt). If
  • Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found. The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army. U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents. One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light o
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    links for 2010-01-12

  • After almost 19 years of performing together, The Gas House Gang is currently retired and will no longer be performing. After losing baritone Rob Henry to cancer in 2003, the GHG decided that it would not be the same without him. The gang was able to sing on all shows booked through 2005 thanks to the help of some very talented men who filled in for Rob. A huge THANK YOU goes out to: Michael Slamka / Brandon Guyton / Tony DeRosa DJ Hiner / Jonny Moroni and Kevin Keller for their help and support. The GHG has performed in all 50 states and 15 different countries. They have five recordings to their credit that have been top sellers in a cappella catalogs such as Primarily A Cappella and Mainely A Cappella. They have also received awards and nominations from CASA (Contemporary A Cappella Society). See our CARA (Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards) Nominations and Awards HERE. Having shared the stage with such distinguished performers as The Four Freshmen, The Swingle Singers, Ro
  • It’s a fact of life that when people hire a web designer, they don’t just want a website, they want a website that does something! There can be a world of difference between these two things. The "action" they need the website to take for them can be one of several common things: selling products for their business (an e-commerce site), generating sales leads, and/or providing free information in the hope that the visitor will make a purchase from the company at a later date. An Introduction to Website Split Testing These aims differ slightly for some sites, like non-profits, blogs and communities; however business sites in general aim to generate revenue by one of the above methods. Sometimes the client will split up these functions between two separate businesses – the website development will be taken care of by "Best Ever Web Designers Incorporated", while the marketing is done by "Your Ad Here Pty Ltd". However, if the push towards action (marketing) is created at the web desig
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    links for 2010-01-08

  • This is a little trick that you can apply to your forms to enhance user experience. We'll display editable form data (indented to be edited, updated) as regular tabular data intended for reading. We're using pure CSS for this one… Actually we WOULD use pure CSS if it wasn't for IE7's lack of support for :focus pseudo-class. 🙁 Take a look at the demo Overview This trick can be useful when you have, let's say, a profile page where your users can view and edit the data on the same page. When users first open the page they see values for various options. You need to make sure that the data as readable as possible so we want to avoid the usual form elements styling. You'll agree that reading content inside input fields is somewhat difficult. This is what you'd want them to have:
  • Pricing a website design can seem impossible. A good website design can cost anywhere between thousands of dollars and under fifty dollars, depending on the type of site, how you build it and a hundred other numbers. Those numbers can make it difficult to decide where the right price point for your own work is: how do you know what your work is worth when other designers’ prices are all over the place? All prices are not created equal: while it may seem to the lay person that all websites are similar, differences like the framework the site is built upon and the process the website designer uses can require drastically different prices. A website design that doesn’t require you to do much more than design a new theme for WordPress probably shouldn’t be priced the same way that an e-commerce site that expects to see plenty of traffic should be. It comes down to the question of what’s in your price. In this article, we’ll look at how four web designers set their prices — and how you can
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    links for 2009-12-11

  • Web design is an increasingly important aspect of media and business. Because the Internet has become essential to the way we do business, find information and accomplish a number of other tasks, Web design truly is vital. And someone who understands Web design and can do a good job with it is valuable in a number of ways. If you are interested in improving your web design skills, here are 50 great open courseware classes for web designers: Computers and Computing 3484270250_0786d08606Understanding computers and computing is your first order of business. Here are some open courseware classes that can help give you a handle on computers:
  • Look, this may not be palatable, Gareth, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this: George R.R. Martin is not your bitch. This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now. People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines. You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you. No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next. It seems to me that the bi
  • moosebutter is a four-man comedy a cappella group. They have won awards from the Contemporary A Cappella Society(Best Comedy Song, 2004), The Harmony Sweepstakes (2003 International Finals runners-up), had their music included on compilation albums (Doctor Demento Basement Tapes 2005, Sing II 2005) and played live shows in front of audiences around the United States. Their tight harmony and eclectic humor have charmed audiences through two albums and countless live performances. To handle all the performance requests they receive, moosebutter has several casts of performers. They perform with three, four, or five singers, depending on the show, and have done just about every kind of show you can imagine (Punk rock show? Check. National television? Check. Wedding reception? Check.).
  • Web Apps are hitting the internet by storm. There are so many around on the internet, running on many different frameworks. I have compiled a list of the top 10 web apps for web designers in 2009. They are ranked descending, so its saving the best until last. Remember that this is WebDesignDev’s opinion about what apps are the top 10. If you think another app should be number one, then we would love to hear it in a comment. Also, you may want to check out my very own web app called lushcloud that is currently being built for freelancers and small businesses. Anyway, enjoy the list and let me know what you think of our number one.
  • Our last top 10 list, titled “The Top 10 Web Applications For Web Designers In 2009” proved to be very successful, with over 450 retweets! So I have compiled another 2009 top 10 list. This time though, its Icon packs in the spotlight. Here is WebDesignDev’s top 10 free icon sets for web designers in 2009 list. Of course this is our own opinion, and not what web designers have voted on. If you think a different icon set deserves to be number 1, then feel free to drop us a comment telling us why. Anyway, enjoy the list!
  • Picture a world famous surgeon. Absolutely everybody has heard of this talented individual. She's performed countless surgeries, saved so many lives. She's renowned the world over for being a miracle worker. Now imagine she achieved this notable status while constantly making obvious mistakes with the scalpel. Would that happen? The equivalent of that happens in the world of web design every second. Spelling is one of the most crucial parts of writing, in fact it's one of the most crucial parts of any job that involves words! Thousands of web designers, in particular, make unforgivable spelling mistakes constantly. You can be the greatest designer on the planet, have the most intriguing concepts out there, create wonderfully thought provoking experiences for your users, but if you type something like 'I've been freelancing for a number off years', you honestly look like a five year old. To take that to an even further level of embarrassment, many of these same individuals can also
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