Nearly every designer loves freshly-made, free Photoshop brushes that can be used in your designs as it is one of the most widely used graphics programs on the market. It is what some would call an incontrovertible truth. This is the reason why designers are constantly browsing the web in search of all the latest brushes to add them to their arsenal.

We have previously posted many collections of high quality Photoshop brush packs, and today we are bringing our readers another fine collection of over 50 fresh Photoshop brush sets that are sure to delight even the most discerning of designers…

Reviews continued to be a dominant theme in 2011. Ted Paff is the owner of CustomerLobby.com, a solution to help local businesses to get, manage and publish customer reviews. He is more familiar than most with all of the realities of SMBs and reviews as he lives and breathes them every day of his business life and most of the rest of his day as well. I know for a fact that he loses sleep pondering the many review related issues that affect him and his clients…

Many sites that require login credentials enforce a security setting often referred to as password complexity requirements. These requirements ensure that user passwords are sufficiently strong and cannot be easily broken.

What constitutes a strong password? Well, that depends on who you ask. However, traditional factors that contribute to a password’s strength include it’s length, complexity, and unpredictability…

We all have that one t-shirt that we love; we love the fit, we love the color and we absolutely adore the design. For some, the t-shirt design can be a form of expression or it can simply be a fashion statement. Then there are a few folks who wear t-shirts to show off their great taste in art and creativity. Regardless of the reason one wears a t-shirt, it goes without saying that without great designs, your t-shirt game is probably lacking…

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to…

When you already have a full plate of client work, it can be difficult to get into new technologies. Responsive design is a big buzz-phrase right now, but it’s unnecessary to force it on a client unless their users will see a benefit from it.

At 352 Media Group, we recently saw an opportunity to make a fully responsive site for a client, Purple Communications. They make software for people with hearing loss who would otherwise be unable to make a phone call…

We look in all kinds of places for inspiration, and today we are taking things inside. Interior design has hit so many new heights with the growth of 3D modeling generators, like 3Ds Max and others. With these highly advanced tools, concepts can come to life off of the page before they are fully constructed and arranged. Giving interior designers more power to showcase the power of their imaginations, and giving the rest of us some gorgeous interiors to marvel at…

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…

Welcome to our Salary Trend Review of UK advertised Web Jobs  – from Digital Marketing and Social Media to Web Development and Design.

Each month we gather information from advertised positions and graph and tabulate to help keep you in t

…

Back in 2009, the WebKit development team proposed a new extension to CSS that would allow Web page elements to be displayed and transformed on a three-dimensional plane. This proposal was called 3-D Transforms, and it was soon implemented in Safari for Mac and iOS…

For over three years, you have relied on Webdesigner Depot for quality articles, editorials, inspirational posts and an array of other cool stuff. Now, we’re adding a new layer to WDD by launching our own newsletter and you’re the first to know about it today!

Needless to say, we’re super thrilled and pumped about this!!… but you may wonder how’s this different to the WDD blog? The content! This is not your typical newsletter, with the same posts you’ll find on our site, or in our RSS feed…

One could argue that every year the WordPress platform gets better and better, and 2011 was no different with the release of three major updates: WordPress 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3. We have seen the addition of post formats, advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries, an improved import and export system, the introduction of an admin bar, distraction-free writing mode, revised dashboard interface, drag and drop uploader and much more…

Topics:
accessibilityjavascriptmobileresponsive design

People enjoy the ability to pinch and zoom websites on their iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. Unfortunately, a nasty usability bug exists on iOS that causes a user-zoomable page to scale beyond the width of the viewport when the device’s orientation changes from portrait to landscape. As a result, the page ends up cropped by the viewport, and users have to manually zoom the page back out again after changing orientation: annoying at best, confusing at worst…

Zurb has a long history of providing awesome web apps and resources for designers and developers. Their apps include Notable, Axe, Enroll, and Spur, among others.

Other resources from Zurb include everything from downloadable sketchsheets and grid paper, CSS buttons, CSS3 tools, visual effects & animation examples, and a lot more.

Zurb has recently launched a new tool for designers, called Foundation, a free rapid prototyping framework…

WordPress 3 introduced custom taxonomies as a core feature. The following release of 3.1 included many features to enhance support of custom taxonomies. Better import and export handling, advanced queries with tax_query, hierarchical support, body classes and a bunch of wonderful functions to play with were all part of the package…

Tutorials are one of the best ways to learn and practice new tricks using Illustrator’s various tools. Learning through a step-by-step AI tutorial not only assists you in twisting the tools, but will also let you learn how to combine them in order to generate innovative and compound vector artwork, icons, and more.

In today’s post, we are presenting a collection of some valuable step by step Adobe Illustrator tutorials…

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs…

This week, we are giving away 5 copies of Keynotopia’s Super Bundle ($149 value), which contains over 7,000 user interface components (wireframe and high fidelity) and hundreds of royalty free icons for both Keynote and PowerPoint.

Thousands of designers are already using Keynotopia templates to create winning client proposals, deliver killer product demos, and finish projects on time and on budget, now you can be one too!

Recently a design agency landed a multimillion dollar contract with a demo that they created using Keynotopia in less than 1 hour…

This article is the fourth in our new series that introduces the latest, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus…

The discussion has raged for quite some time – is the traditional business card dead? Do people, in the age of the web and technology still need to kill trees (or use ores and petroleum by-products) for a silly little piece of card stock to hand out at events or when meeting someone else?

The first argument I had heard on the subject was at a new media group in New York where the speaker insisted that, with web sites and the ubiquitous “about me” section, why would anyone need a printed business card? Being the curious sort I am—some may say the pain-in-the-rear—I had to raise my hand and ask, “but how do people remember our URL without that little slip of paper?”

There was no answer as I remember—just some mumbling and hurt feelings…

Since their inception, video games have provided great inspiration for offline artists and digital artists alike. Video games generally adhere to a fantasy theme, which is perhaps what makes them so intriguing visually. Often characters are exaggerated human forms, with bulging bodies, enormous power, or great speed and agility. Many games include characters of another species, possessing magical powers and skills…

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…

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd…

Topics:

In responsive web design, one of the toughest design problems to solve is how format complex tabular data for display on smaller screens. In this post, we’ll explore an experimental approach to rendering a complex table, using progressive enhancement and responsive design methods, that displays comfortably at a wide range of screen sizes, provides quick access to the data, and preserves the table structure so that data can still be compared across columns…

Today’s freebie may be the last one for this year, but that doesn’t mean it will be the last of our freebies on Smashing Magazine — no siree! Before this year does come to an end, we are happy to present to you a fresh new Web UI set includig 91 icons created by August Interactive for the holiday season…

As I sat in my local co-working space, shoulder-deep in a design problem on my MacBook Air, I could hear him. He was on the phone, offering screen-by-screen design recommendations to his client for the project they were working on. When this acquaintance of mine arrived at the subject of a particularly hairy task flow, he said, “Well, these aren’t going to be very savvy users, so we should probably put some instructions there…

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, a lot of people and experts are crowning him one of the greatest innovators of our time, if not of all time. It’s rather hard to disagree, as he’s helped bring forth many innovations that have seriously changed the way we look at our future. And with all the talk about innovators, folks are starting to celebrate the lives of other creative geniuses at any level or platform before it’s too late…

Let’s share a dirty little secret that really isn’t so secret: the economy is bad and it’s impossible to make money ends meet.

Whether you freelance or have a full-time position, chances are you are not earning enough to live a comfortable lifestyle. Sure, maybe you manage to pay all of your bills each month.

But maybe you live in fear that the roof will need fixing or you’re driving on bald tires or you have no health insurance—you are not alone…

Some of the truest words I’ve heard to date are, “If you don’t plan on creating your own business, then you plan on being broke.”

While, there are many people out there who have made a nice living working for other companies, it shouldn’t be crazy to think about going into business for oneself, whether it be a full time job or a part time gig. With the changing economic climate things aren’t guaranteed and, quite frankly, the time spent helping someone else achieve their goals could be time well spent on chasing your own dreams…

Navigation menus are a very important part of every website design. First and foremost, they help direct visitors to the main areas of your website, regardless of what page they are viewing on your website. They also point search engine robots in the right direction (though some flashy navigation menus aren’t that SEO friendly).

Today we would like to show you 50 beautiful navigation menus; ranging from simple ones that hide discretely at the corner of the design to full blown menus that take up most of the header…