Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.

The goal of a “regular” text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar…

Responsive design is the hottest topic in front-end Web development right now. It’s going to transform the Web into an all-singing, all-dancing, all-devices party, where we can access any information located anywhere in the world. But does responsive design translate well from the text-heavy Web design blogosphere to the cold hard reality of commercial systems?

Rumors came through our office grapevine that management was looking to revamp our mobile presence…

We’re back with another great exclusive freebie for you.

This one is a Photoshop pattern file (.PAT) which contains 40 beautiful textures that you can apply to your designs.

A detailed step by step instruction is provided inside the file to help you use them. You can use these as textures for your websites or any background.

Thanks to Rayz Ong from LemonGraphic for creating this awesome freebie for WDD readers…

In this article, we take a break from some of the more advanced ways to customize WordPress, and share some super-easy customization techniques for the WordPress Admin area.

If you’re just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend…

This week’s infographic explores who looks and clicks on banner ads. Continuing the theme of consumer fears about privacy, it’s not just lack of interest that causes users to shun banner ads. Consumers believe banner ads will prove to haunt them long after the click:

• 31% are worried that their internet behavior will be tracked
• 54% don’t trust most online banner ads they see
• 55% are worried about getting a virus
• 57% are afraid of receiving spam from advertisers

Click image to enlarge

Nevertheless, ad spend is expected to grow by 23% this year, and Facebook will pull in $5B in ad revenues…

Well, its official: social media is here to stay. While it can be difficult to keep up with the ever-changing social landscape, a basic understanding and implementation of the different platforms available can get big results. Companies of all sizes are taking advantage of the free publicity and word-of-mouth that social media can offer them.

One of the most logical ways for companies to capitalize on this trend is to integrate their social media campaigns with their websites…

After 114,000 submissions and millions of your votes, second grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisc. is this year’s U.S. Doodle 4 Google National Winner. His doodle “Pirate Times” will be featured on the U.S. Google homepage tomorrow, May 18.

Hoffman, who attends the Prairie School in Racine, Wisc., responded to this year’s theme “If I could travel in time I’d visit…” with a colorful depiction of his dream visit to an era filled with swashbucklers…

A St. Louis design group announced a special gathering at a local design studio for a program entitled, “Educational Night: The Business of Design.” The evening’s program was hosted by a local design studio that is making leaps and bounds in the local and national scene, so it didn’t take long for the reservations to pour in until there were no more spaces to be had.

The studio, Atomicdust, certainly seemed to have the inside information on success, having been recognized by the One Show, Step, Print, and Create Magazine as well as local and regional Addy awards, so getting some inside information was highly coveted by members of the design group…

Making the design to be responsive is very easy as shown in my Responsive Design in 3 Steps tutorial, but maintaining the elements to look aesthetically balanced on all breakpoint layouts is an art. Today I’m going to share 5 of my commonly used CSS tricks along with sample cases for coding responsive designs. They [...]

Advertise here with BSA

…

In my nearly two decades as an information architect, I’ve seen my clients flush away millions upon millions of dollars on worthless, pointless, “fix it once and for all” website redesigns. All types of organizations are guilty: large government agencies, Fortune 500s, not-for-profits and (especially) institutions of higher education.

Worst of all, these offending organizations are prone to repeating the redesign process every few years like spendthrift amnesiacs…

Websites are incredibly versatile as a medium, to be used to display information and other content, and if well designed they can do this in an enjoyable way that’s easy for the reader to digest.

This can be done through combining a site persona with an ongoing narrative, consistent throughout, which will all come together to create a ‘story’ through which you can deliver relevant content…

I see more and more devices that have a pixel ratio bigger than 1.5, even 2. My Galaxy Nexus for example has a pixel ratio of 2 and so do the latest versions of the iPhone and iPad. Retina display seems to be the next evolution and next challenge for us as designers.

Native mobile app designers have already learned how to take advantage of those devices with high pixel ratios to display bigger images with better quality, so as to enhance user experience…

Have you ever collected frequent flyer miles, taken pictures of your record MPG in your Toyota Prius, or filled out a complete profile on LinkedIn (because you wanted to reach that 100% on the profile completeness)? If so, you’ve been gamified.

Gamification is the concept of using game design elements in non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. And it’s growing – M2 research predicts that the gamification market will reach 2…

Google was granted three different design patents for augmented reality glasses today, showing slightly different looks from one to the other. The first one includes lenses, while the second and third show variations of the glasses without lenses. A fourth granted patent describes how augmented reality glasses could be used with IR reflective painted [...]…

The idea behind this project was to produce a consistent set of buttons that could be used for the range of social actions frequently taken in Web applications. These actions are often important goals for users, such as connecting third-party accounts or sharing content to third-party platforms, so their appearance has to be attractive and clear.

The standard buttons provided by third parties (such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud) vary in size, style and interactivity…

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what’s going on in the industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that were published recently and present them in a nice compact overview…

Despite the consumer-focused nature of the WordPress content management software, an increasing number of larger organizations and even businesses are adopting WordPress to manage their site’s content — especially corporate blogs and customer outreach programs that take advantage of social media and interaction humanize a company’s brand.

These larger organizations aren’t content to let their backend user interface be branded using WordPress logos and design cues; instead, they prefer to customize the software and ensure that all of their employees know that they’re working within the company’s structure and purview…

I had thought terms like “intellectual property” and “intellectual theft” were of fairly recent provenance, so my eye was caught by the latter’s use in a headline of a 1930 edition of the US trade journal The American Printer.

The article it headed proved to be equally intriguing, a response by the president of American Type Founders (ATF) to a June 1929 article in the German journal Gebrauchsgraphik by the designer Rudolf Koch, calling the ATF a “highway robber of German intellectual property…

The May edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins, grid tools, CSS tools, WordPress resources, productivity and business tools, responsive design resources, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments…

In the following Adobe Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to create a semi-realistic lifebuoy graphic. We’ll start with a bunch of concentric circles and some basic vector shape building techniques. Once we create the starting shapes we’ll continue with some Pathfinder options, several Warp and Gaussian Blur effects plus some basic masking techniques…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Myths have developed around and researchers have studied how the human brain juggles creativity and organization. Popular theory tells us that the left brain is structured and logical, while the right brain is artistic and imaginative, and that all human beings use predominantly one side of the other.

Working in a creative field means challenging that theory, or else challenging the schedules and deadlines that managers impose on writers, designers and other creatives…

What does the new Facebook mean for brands and how can the Timeline be best utilised in the online conversation?

Facebook’s now obligatory changes to its layout have meant that brands have had to alter their marketing approach to the world’s biggest social media network to maintain and attract the attention of their existing and prospective audiences.

The introduction of the Timeline means that ‘brand stories’ are the main focus of the new-look Facebook – the whole layout means that profiles can now be much more engaging and, indeed, aesthetically pleasing, but that is only true for brands if the new features are used to their full potential…

Today we have another great freebie for you created exclusively for WDD by Grafpedia.

This one is called the Media Black UI Kit and contains graphic elements suitable for any sort of media elements, such as video and audio players, along typical navigational items.It’s provided as a layered PSD file.

If you want more items like these, head over to Grafpedia, which hosts over 70,000 great files and where you can download more graphic resources like these along with icons, vectors, brushes and more…

Poster design is a true art form. Often the best posters will be bold, eye catching and visually intense, yet minimal and elegant at the same time. As with logo design, often a great poster will be great for what it omits, as well as what it features.

Really the effectiveness of a poster’s design depends upon it’s purpose. Whilst some posters require a basic typographic treatment, others may suit an elaborate visual design…

Interaction designers create wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. Originally, these wireframes were primitive shapes drawn to represent various UI elements. Many of us cannot imagine life without them.

There are, however, reasons to consider moving to the cloud to do interaction design. In short, today’s cloud-based tools are:

• Optimized for collaboration,
• Editable anywhere,
• Interactive,
• Published in real time,
• Self-maintaing (the user doesn’t need to update software),
• Payable monthly,

Emailing your old static designs will feel old fashioned once you see what these tools can do…

Over 500 million people use Facebook worldwide. It’s no wonder companies and brands are keen to make an impact using the social networking site with their respective pages.

The new Facebook Timeline feature has been rolled out over the last few months for both profiles and pages. New features include space for a large photo at the top of the profile and a new layout for the ‘wall’…

The new Smashing Books have finally arrived—freshly printed, neatly packed and ready to be shipped to you, our dear reader. We believe this is by far the best book we’ve produced so far. We are very proud and excited, and the initial verdict has been thoroughly positive, yet in the end it’s up to you to decide how valuable and useful they really are…

When I first saw a web site designer who had posted a laundry list of prices on his site, I gasped in horror. It created some buzz in the design circles in which I traveled. No one agreed with the concept. Then, a well-respected design firm owner announced he was going to try it.

He said that he thought by posting his prices, using a basic, bottom line cost, he would weed out the people who wanted bargain basement prices and he would save time of not having to deal with them for initial meetings and creative briefs, only to be told that the $10,000 he stated at for web sites was $9,750 too high…