March 17, 2009 — If you haven’t heard of Twitter by now, you must be living under a rock! It is everywhere, and everyone is using it. To say that the rise of Twitter has been explosive would be an understatement. As a result of this growth, the number of Twitter apps and tools available has become extensive. So, in this post we have filtered them down to a respectable 99. Read more…

March 16, 2009 — As you may or may not know, we love to smash freebies around. Today we are glad to release the Web Developer icons set, designed by Pedja Rusic, a WP Smashing WordPress theme, designed by Greg Johnson and a Cafe icon set, designed by Enk. All icons and the theme are available for free download and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. Please feel free to suggest ideas for next icon sets or single icons in the comments to this post. We have noticed Pedja Rusic from Serbia over a year ago, when we presented his icon sets in our free icons round-up. A while ago we contacted him and commissioned the design of icons dedicated to designers and developers. The icons should pay close attention to the smallest details, look original, cool and still remain recognizable. Read more…

March 16, 2009 — We love beautiful photography. In photos, the beauty isn’t necessarily reflected in an eye-catching combination of colors; perspectives, angle, composition and, most importantly, the idea behind the shot or the situation in which the shot was taken, are particularly important when it comes for our showcases. Read more…

March 12, 2009 — Some say that web design without typography is like an orange without its peel, it just isn’t complete. Typography encompasses the reality of effective web design and achieves success in creating web page identity, eye-catching sites, and the enhancement of visual appearance. Typography is much more than the “art of text”, it’s the evolution of creativity within simple to intricate web designs. One can say that a good architecture needs great support, the same concept can be applied to web design in the sense that a good blog could do without the use of typography, but an astounding one could use the creative support. Typography leaves you with the option of bringing together simple creativity with unique and effective communication in order to get your blog or sites main focus across. Now, with all of this information at hand here are 40 fantastic blogs that will allow you to expand your knowledge base of what typography really is. You may want to take a look at the following related posts: * Useful Design Tools For Web Typography * Useful Type Setting Principles * Free Fonts For Professional Design * Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design Read more…

March 12, 2009 — From a web designer’s perspective, it can be very interesting to look at the top websites from a particular industry to see how they relate to their target audience, the different approaches that are used, and how they compare to websites in other industries. Read more…

March 11, 2009 — Craigslist is obviously one of the most popular websites in the world, and each month it serves millions of users who post and view classified ads on the website. At the time this article was written, Craigslist was ranked as the 28th most-visited English-language website in the world by Alexa. Despite the fact that Craigslist receives such a huge amount of traffic each month, it is also criticized for its design, which seems to be at least 10 years out-of-date. Read more…

March 10, 2009 — Subversion is a version control system that many Web developers and designers use to back up their work. Subversion was started in 2000 and is quite popular in the open-source community; major repositories such as Google Code use it to distribute source code. Read more…

March 9, 2009 — The key to smart strategic Web design is finding an appropriate and interactive way to display information. One comes upon endless possibilities when searching for ways to display information. One solution, slideshows and sliders, is an excellent way to display information such as images in an organized and compact manner. Slider galleries are excellent for organizing content into a nice clean module. Read more…

March 8, 2009 — As the Web grows and becomes more dynamic, more and more websites have user-generated content and tools that greatly improve the user experience in terms of usability and accessibility. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, upload, auto-complete, image cropping, slideshows, tool tips, sliders and tables are being developed that use nifty JavaScript and AJAX scripts. Read more…

March 5, 2009 — Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS? Read more…