TypeChart

Posted September 2nd, 2009 | Published in design

Typechart lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.

The Smashing Book available for pre-order with 20% off

Posted August 5th, 2009 | Published in design

Although The Smashing Book from www.smashingmagazine.com won’t be published until late September, you can secure your copy today. Now, why would you do that? For one reason, you will get the huge discount: 20% off the regular price. If you pre-order now, you’ll pay just $23.90 USD. And, of course you will be among the first to get The Smashing Book fresh off the press.

What Will You Get?

The book has 300 pages in all, full of practical and useful knowledge for designers and Web developers. It contains 10 chapters and is printed in full color. The book is a paperback and is 8.27 × 5.5 inches (21 × 14 cm).

The book is available exclusively from Smashing Magazine and nowhere else. This first and only Smashing Book looks at Web design rules of thumb, color theory, usability guidelines, user interface design, best coding and optimization practices, as well as typography, marketing, branding and exclusive insights from top designers across the globe.

It was written by Jacob Gube (SixRevisions), Dmitry Fadeev (UsabilityPost), Chris Spooner (Spoongraphics), Darius A Monsef IV (COLOURlovers.com), Alessandro Cattaneo (with co-editing by Jon Tan), Steven Snell (VandelayDesign), David Leggett (UXBooth), Andrew Maier (UXBooth), Kayla Knight (regular writer on SM), René Schmidt (system administrator of our servers) and the Smashing Magazine editorial team, Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.

Two great sites for free icons and vectors

Posted July 22nd, 2009 | Published in design

Two great sites that are stuffed full of awesome free icons and vector images:

http://www.vectorstock.com/

http://www.freeiconsdownload.com/index.html

ProFolio – PHP based Porfolio for Artists

Posted April 23rd, 2009 | Published in PHP, design

ProFolio is an elegantly designed portfolio for artists, designers, photographers, or anyone that has creative visual pieces to share. It was designed to be professional, elegant, clean & simple. You will see the background of the page with the unobtrusive portfolio navigation to the left. Simple click on portfolio to view the artist’s work, and the other items will fade as small previews of the artwork fades into focus.

ProFolio is built with HTML instead of Flash so that search engines can add your portfolio to their indexes. It works in Firefox 2+, Internet Explorer 7+, Safari. ProFolio is also easily customized, extremely simple to install. However, it’s free for a limited time only.

Bringing out the designer in all of us.

Posted April 2nd, 2009 | Published in design

Before & After magazine has been sharing its practical approach to graphic design since 1990. Because our modern world has made designers of us all (ready or not), Before & After is dedicated to making graphic design understandable, useful and even fun for everyone.

Most of Before and After’s content is paid for, but it’s cheap and, judging by the free samples, well worth it.

Checkout out the free sample article on making letter-based logos.

Manifest: One column wordpress theme

Posted March 31st, 2009 | Published in Wordpress, design

Manifest is a one-column wordpress theme – it’s simple, uncluttered, easy on the eye and allows a blog’s content to take centre stage.

manifest

I’m thinking of switching this blog to use it – only problem with that is that Vince will be all, “that’s pony” and “looks like My First Blog”.

50 sites to find free stock images

Posted March 21st, 2009 | Published in design

FreeFoto.com : Lots of images, orgnized in different galleries.

Dexhaus : Good site with excellent photos.
Kavewall : images and textures.
Digital Dreamers : Different galleries.
StockVault : Very well-known, and very good of course.
FreePhotosBank : Good choice.

FreeDigitalPhotos : Lots of photos.
Cepolina : Many free images availables in different formats.
TurboPhoto : Simple and efficient!
FreeStockImages : Beautiful website, awesome content.

DeviantArt : Another well-known site with images, photo and Photoshop brushes.

DreamsTime : Hi-Res pictures.
Unprofound : Many, many, many, images!
VintagePixel : Old-School style images.
OpenStockPhotography : More than a million images.

ImageAfter : Images and textures.
FreePhotosIndex : Good but hard to navigate.
EveryStockPhoto : Nice site, nice content.
Photocase : Same
Stock.xchg : Simply great.

MorgueFile : A site everyone should have in his bookmarks!.
Flickr : You already know it, right?
GraphicsArena : Stunning pics to donwload.
PixelPerfectDigital : If you like digital photography, you’ll love this site.
FreeRange : Another well known site.

AnimationFactory : If you like animations, you’ll be happy with that one!
Fotogenika : Very nice galleries.
Woophy : To find pictures of the world.
MayangFreeTextures : Lots of free textures to download.

FromOldBooks : If you like old books!

TextureWarehouse : Only top quality textures.
FreeStockPhotos : Ugly site but cool pictures.
MajesticImagery : Very nice.
BurningWell : Same here, very nice site.

DesignPack : Themed images packs to download
ZurbPhotos : Download Bryan Zmijewski pictures.
AmazingTextures : The name says it all
ImageBase : Lots of gorgeous photos.
DiwieDesign : Images are free but you’re encouraged to make a donation.

Tofz : Free stock urban photography.

LightMatter : Download Aaron Logan’s pictures.
InsectImages : Only insects images. Bzzz…
Afflict : Great site.
ArtFavor : Images, fonts and wallpapers on the same site.

FreeImages : Another nice one..
CreatingOnline : Good resource.
GeekPhilosopher : Pictures from GeekPhilosopher.
Creativity103 : Lots of images.

PhotoshopSupport : If you like Photoshop, you’ll love that site!.
FreeMediaGoo : Very complete resource.

Une Image au Hasard : Gallery from an amateur photographer.

Aaaaaaarrggghhh! MY EYES!

Posted February 9th, 2009 | Published in design

http://havenworks.com/

Fluid 960 Grid System Templates

Posted January 31st, 2009 | Published in design

Stephen Bau has been looking for a means of rapidly developing interactive prototypes for his site designs. He has been building a library of commonly used HTML elements, combining these with CSS for typography and layout.

He finally created Fluid 960 Grid System Templates (960 pixel fixed width, 12-column fluid width and 16-column fluid width) which have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the Mootools JavaScript library.

These templates are offered free of charge in accordance with the applicable licenses for 960 Grid System and Mootools.

960 grid system

Posted November 10th, 2008 | Published in design

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements.

All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with. You can download a Zip file which contains PDF grid paper, templates for Fireworks, OmniGraffle, Photoshop & Visio, and CSS framework with demo HTML.