I have a free FITC San Francisco to give away. To get it: you just need to enter a comment in this post before August 6, 2010 and the winner will be selected randomly. The event will take place in San Francisco between Aug 17th to 19th. If you are getting the tickets, use coupon code "wdwluv" to get 10% discount. For more information, visit the FITC website.

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For those of you who been reading my blog should be familiar with Zurb. They are the guys who created those fantastic web apps — Bounce, Notable, and Verify. If you read online tutorials a lot, you may have probably stumbled upon their Playground before where they post various CSS and Javascript tutorials. Today, I’m happy to have Zurb here at Web Designer Wall to talk about their team and work…

Some people hate it, some people love it, but undoubtedly it is preferred in a wide variety of situations, from banners and online videos to rich internet applications. I’m talking about Flash of course. Take the comic strip below as an example. It was animated with BannerSnack and output as a SWF file. Click to play it.

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Inspired by the CargoCollective and David DeSandro’s site, I asked my Twitter followers (@nickla) on how to do the scrollto posts with jQuery. Within a day, Ben Bodien of Neutron Creations sent back a quick demo on how to replicate the similar result with the ScrollTo plugin. The script finds your current view position and scroll to the next or previous post accordingly. Check out the demo to see what I’m talking about…

Guest Post by Lingo24

Web designers are a highly creative bunch. Whilst most will probably have a natural eye for what looks good and what doesn’t, experience is everything in the world of web design, and learning is a key part of the process en-route to the top. One of the fundamentals of any design – be it web or print – is that it’s the audience that counts, not you…

Typefaces are "top trumps"-style card pack contains 20 well known designers (yes, I’m included in the cards). For each designer, a typeface was selected to match their overall vibe. Each card is individually designed to reflect this vibe, supported typographically with the selected typeface. I have 10 sets to give away. For your chance to win a free set, simply enter a comment in this post before Jun 25th, 2010…

People mostly use either serif or sans-serif fonts and often miss out the handwritten fonts. They are as important as the main font classifications. I particularly like to use handwritten fonts to highlight significant items in screen captures. They add the personal touch in my design and also provide great typographic contrast. However, not all handwritten fonts are legible. I’ve put together a huge list of free handwritten and script fonts that work well…

Web Designer Wall is giving away 10,000 business cards sponsored by UPrinting. Uprinting has been in the industry for over 25 years. Check them out if you need printing services. Enter a comment in this post before June 18, 2010 for your chance to win 1,000 business card printing (full color both sides on quality card stock). This giveaway is limited to US residents only and you must be 18+ year old to enter…

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Lately I’ve been playing around with CSS3 and discovered some new CSS tricks. Did you know you can make a round circle with border-radius and create inner shadow effect with box-shadow inset? Check out this beautiful search form demo that I’ve created with CSS gradient, border-radius, and box-shadow. It displays perfect in CSS3 browsers and degrades gracefully in non-CSS3 browsers…

New Riders’ Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference, now in its fourth consecutive year, will take place June 28-29 in San Francisco and the timing couldn’t be better! Web design is undergoing an historic transformation: while the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript haven’t changed, the new and evolving functionality in the HTML5 and CSS3 specs, the number of new ways in which people access the Web, and the rise of social media mean that Web designers need to know more than ever…

On Thursday May 27th, web developers from all over Canada will be coming together to talk about the ever evolving web, discover new platforms, take part in a codefest & network with some of the best web developers in the country! With Keynote speaker Joel Perras, core developer of CakePHP and sessions including: SEO for dynamic websites, Building in HTML5, CoApp, Cross Platformed Solutions for Social Media & Cloudy with a Chance of Interoperability – this conference is one that should be of interest to all of you looking to build the ultimate web experience for your clients…

The Applied Arts Design & Advertising Awards Call For Entry is currently open. It will be judged by an panel of highly regarded industry professionals, in a rigorous process developed over our two decades of awards experience. All entries must be received by May 7, 2010. Eligible for entry are all forms of commissioned, published, unpublished and personal work created between May 2009 and May 2010…

The FITC Toronto 2009 officially ended yesterday. Congrats to the award winners. My overall experience was pretty good. I’ve attended FITC in the past four years and they are getting better and better. This year, I’ve learned a lot of new things about Flash, particularly the multitouch Flash content and mobile Flash. In this post, I’m going to share my thoughts on some of the presentations that I’ve attended…

Last week I talked about Cross-Browser CSS Gradient. Today I’m going to show you how to put the CSS gradient feature in a good practical use. Check out my demo to see a set of gradient buttons that I have created with just CSS (no image or Javascript). The buttons are scalable based on the font-size. The button size can be easily adjusted by changing the padding and font-size values…

Guest Post by Fonts2U

Being a specific form of art, typography has always been coherent with the general progress of art and cultural growth of humanity. This is why the history of western typography reflects the development of art in Europe to a considerable degree. The epoch of Roman Empire, Renaissance, Baroque, and the art of Industrialization period – we can track the traces of each stage of art development in the design of particular typefaces, born during a respective period of time…

The CSS gradient feature was introduced by Webkit for about two years but was rarely used due to incompatibility with most browers. But now with the Firefox 3.6+, which supports gradient, we can style create gradient without having to create an image. This post will show you how to code for the CSS gradient to be supported by the major browsers: IE, Firefox 3.6+, Safari, and Chrome. Also, check out my updated dropdown menu (demo) using CSS gradient…

Guest Post by Webcopyplus

Website design, development and copywriting can be done faster, more accurately and creatively with the help of Lean manufacturing techniques, which help companies around the globe accomplish industry-leading results. Lean is a production practice that helps identify resource use that’s not directly tied to creating value for customers, so it can be eliminated…

Adobe is hosting a CS5 launch event on Monday (Apr 12) at 11am EST/8am PST. Personally, I’m very excited for this event. If you haven’t signed up yet, hurry! Adobe’s team will be sharing a first look at the top five killer features of CS5 for design, web, video, and photography. I have five CS5 tshirts (from Adobe) to giveaway. To join the contest, simply post a comment in this post about your favorite new feature demonstrated in the launch event…

This year I have one FITC Toronto 2010 ticket to giveaway. For those who don’t know about FITC, it is a 3-day design conference which takes place in Toronto between April 25-27, 2010. There will be over a thousand attendees and 70 presenters from around the world. As usual, enter a comment in this post before Apr 16, 2010 for your chance to win a free ticket. For more details about the event, please visit the FITC website…

Check out my latest new WordPress theme called Koi (view demo). The design is based on my current theme at N.Design Studio. It has threaded comments, multi-level drop down menus, social media buttons, one sidebar widget and three footer widgets. The theme also includes an option where you can config the menu, favicon, social media buttons, and footer tracking code. (more…)

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Today I’m going to talk about a rarely used but extremely useful CSS property, the word-wrap. You can force long (unbroken) text to wrap in a new line by specifying break-word with the word-wrap property. For example, you can use it to prevent text extending out the box and breaking the layout. This commonly happens when you have a long URL in the sidebar or comment list. Word-wrap is supported in IE 5…

Weebly is an online site builder (with visual editor) for anyone to create a website without having to know any coding. They are hosting a theme design contest with $13,000 in prizes: first prize = $10,000, second = $2,000, and third = $1,000. The contest will be judged by Andrew Wilkinson, Dustin Curtis, Jason Putorti, Michael Cronan, Rob Martin and Scott Thomas. The theme submission deadline is April 30th, 2010…

As you may probably know mobile design is getting more and more popular, particularly the iPhone design. Almost every popular website or web app offers a mobile version now. In this post, I’ve collected a list of 38 nicely designed sites (ranging from personal, blog, portoflio, editoral, web app, etc.) that are optimized for iPhone. I hope this list will come in handy when you need to design a mobile site for yourself or clients…

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Guest Post by Font2U

We all know picking the right font is important when working on your creative projects. There are so many fonts out there, and it litarally may take hours until we find the ONE. To save you some time, here is a collection of 30 quality fonts hand-picked by Font2U. Enjoy!

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Thanks to everyone who has participated the hosting giveaway contest. InMotion Hosting would like to thank you by doubling the prizes. As a result, six winners will be getting a free one-year hosting account. The winners are: 56, 71, 103, 192, 198, and 244 (winners will be contacted by InMotion). For those who didn’t win, InMotion is also offering a $45 discount. To redeem the discount, email contests@inmotionhosting…

Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.

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First of all, thank you for all the great feedbacks and suggestions on the Vector Social Media Icons I released on IconDock. I updated the set with the new Google Buzz, Microsoft Bing, Picasa, Meetup, Feedburner, Ebay, Drupal, Gowalla, ICQ, Metacafe, Yelp, Xing, Paypal, Podcast, and various color buttons. Head over to IconDock to download the latest zip.

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