“In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure
The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed…
New apps and websites seem to appear on an almost-daily basis.
Trying to find the best ones each week or month can be tough, especially considering how many come out that aren’t that great.
Here we’ve compiled some of the best apps and websites that have come out in the past few months.
Some are apps closely tied to a web designer’s daily work, while others aren’t likely to be used as often, but are still useful…
For designers approaching a deadline, coffee is a delicious necessity. Lucky for us, having a coffee break is not really difficult. But it’s more than just a 3am fix. With every late-night run to the local coffee house, we contribute to a populous network of coffee trading, sales and experience.
And in fact, coffee houses and suppliers are quite a business, with online presences ranging from simple layouts with striking typography to advanced layouts with remarkable photography…
Although grunge is associated with something unclean, dirty or tainted, it also stands for a special theme which mostly focuses on making crooked, asymmetrical, irregular, uneven or worn-and-torn visual elements which are stilll beautiful and pleasant to see. You may find thousands of grunge wallpapers, but in this post we have tried to collected best ofthe best and extremely high quality grungy wallpapers that can spice up your desktop…
For the past week, we’ve been running Bundle Hunt’s giveaway of 5 licenses of premium products and services.
As you know Bundle Hunt is a premium resource pack aimed at empowering the creative community, offering more than $1,400 worth of outstanding apps, templates, icons, eBooks, hosting plans and premium memberships, all for less than $50. The bundle will be available only until August 16th…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
The Google AdSense blog announced they have updated the layout of some AdSense units. The main changes were to make the ads “more space-efficient and visually pleasing,” said Google.
Specifically:
Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one ad is showing)
Medium and […
We’re excited to announce a revamped design of three of our AdSense for content ad units! After analyzing publisher site layouts and reviewing requests around the world, we decided to make our formats more space-efficient and visually pleasing by changing the layout of the text. We spent a lot of time experimenting with different possibilities, and we’re starting with changes to the following ad units:
In certain cases, you’ll also see a few minor adjustments to the font size…
Photoshop needs no introduction; everyone knows it — even those who do not have any design background. Knowing your tools inside out really counts. If you really know Photoshop, you can do almost everything with it — be it photo retouching, photo manipulation, creating fantasy scenes or creating wild and wicked text effects. And in this post we have collected some fresh Photoshop tutorials that will help you learning it inside out…
Professionals in any field should always keep business cards on them because you never know when you’ll meet a potential client, partner or like-minded person. Despite their small size, business cards are one of the most powerful and handiest marketing tools. Not only do they create a link between you and your new contact, they’re also a quick way to give a great first impression…
Despite the somewhat provocative title, you shouldn’t really stop designing aesthetics.
Gradients and colors and contrast are all good, but there’s a more important side to web design that many people overlook most of the time: Designing emotions.
Discussing emotion in design is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, it seems to be popping up in more and more blog posts and speaker sessions…
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…
Two weeks ago we published a showcase of beautiful pinhole photography, and this weekend again we’ve got something unusual and creative to lift up your spirits and challenge your creativity. Illusions can be eye-catching and attractive and when you apply them to computer displays, the results can be quite interesting and deceptive.
Take transparent screen trick photos, for example…
There was a day when advertising was all you needed to push a product. You could buy a bunch of space on TV, the radio, and in magazines, and everybody would be talking about you in no time.
But not anymore.
Today, if you look at the brands that are doing really well — the ones that are really crushing it — you’ll see that many of them don’t stop at remarkable advertising…
At this stage, I’m sure not a single reader here needs a definition of Apple’s new revolutionary device; the iPad.
You all know what it is, and you all know what it does – whether you see a purpose for it or not. It hasn’t been around for all that long, in fact only a matter of weeks in some countries, yet iPad owners already have a huge selection of inspirational and beautiful backgrounds to choose from to brighten up their iPads, both digital and photographic ones…
Reinventing the wheel is rarely a good idea, and this is especially true when it comes to creative activities such as design. The less time you spend on tedious tasks, the more time you have for expressing your ideas and being original. Fortunatel,y the design community is very generous in this regard, huge amounts of resources are freely available online, from simple design templates to complex illustrations…
As a graphic designer, you are always searching for new inspirations and tools to improve your skills and speed up the design process. The online world now provides an array of design tools to improve your workflow and efficiency – putting more money in your pocket each month from satisfied clients. Here are the top 10 online design tools grouped by categories to improve your graphic design business…
Does beautiful design matter?
If you look at the success of some of the most popular sites on the web, it seems to be a mixed verdict. Yes, many have had beautiful designs for years, but for some well-known sites, aesthetics promptly took a backseat to form and function… and stayed there.
And surprisingly, most of their visitors don’t seem to care.
There’s something comforting about a homely design…
With the recent release of WordPress 3.0 we’re entering a very exciting time.
For the first time in the history of the platform, nobody is working on the next version.
All development outside of essential bug fixing has been stopped… and 3.1 won’t even start development until the beginning of September.
The reason? Well, the core contributors aren’t taking a vacation to Hawaii, in fact they’re doing something much less relaxing: working on the WordPress community…
Over the past few months, the use of extreme textured images in web design is starting to die down. It was used so excessively that is was almost everywhere we looked when browsing the web. Other developments, such as the use of minimalism in web design and various other styles have slowly pushed the dramatic use of texture out of the window.
It does however still play a big part in the world of designing for the web, as this showcase presents…
Bundle Hunt is a premium resource pack aimed at empowering the creative community, offering more than $1,400 worth of outstanding apps, templates, icons, eBooks, hosting plans and premium memberships, all for less than $50.
The design bundle will only be available for 15 days, from Aug. 2-16 and includes some of the most prestigious brands in the business.
This is a premiere service within the design community, a project started by Noura Yehia, founder of Noupe…
Recently, Mashable published an article entitled “IE6 Finally Nearing Extinction”, announcing that IE6 usage in the United States and Europe has finally dropped below 5%.
That news probably warmed the cockles of the hearts of web designers everywhere. Thus, it seems designers and developers now have even more incentive to stop supporting IE6, following the pattern set by Google, notably with regards to YouTube…
Inserting posts
Do you remember back in 2008, when I created WP Vote? This site was the first (as far as I know) social voting site created 100% within WordPress. Users were able to submit a story, which was automatically published on the blog.
Inserting a post programmatically in WordPress is extremely easy. You have to use the wp_insert_post() function, which takes an array as a parameter…
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…
Eyetracking was number nine in our list of 108 tips for conversion rate optimization. It was perhaps the most expensive of the tips.
Yesterday, a budget-priced eyetracking service, called GazeHawk, was launched. GazeHawk is like UserTesting.com (our review of which is here) but with real eyetracking reports. It is disruptive in that it costs about 1/10th of the price of traditional eyetracking…
The tourism industry can be a major source of revenue for a country and in some cases, it can even be its main source or revenue.
That’s one of the main reasons why web design for this field plays such a vital role in promoting and attracting potential tourists from other parts of the world.
In this post, we’re showcasing some great official tourism websites from various countries and cities around the world…
Have you used KISSinsights yet? It’s a fantastic new tool from the people who created Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. It lets you easily add smart-looking surveys to the bottom corner of your website. Here are some of its features:
Adobe Photoshop CS5 is a new, but experienced kid on the block. With its new powerful features, it provides designers with a flexible tool for printing, making a video or designing for the Web. Some of the features added in Photoshop CS5 are Puppet Warp, 3D extrusions with Adobe Repoussé, smart radius feature, Content-Aware Fill and Raw Image Processing, to name a few…
Sometimes you finish a web design project and you’re really proud of the results. Maybe it’s a personal project, or the client gave you complete creative control.
Whatever the case, you know it’s some of the best work you’ve ever done, and you want the world to see it.
Besides adding it to your portfolio or sending out a Tweet about it, there are dozens of web design galleries out there for showing off your work…
As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love…
I thought for completeness I would throw out some quick notes on the creative commons and how it relates to both GPL and proprietary WordPress theme licenses.
I am not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, and I am trying to make this “non-specific” to any particular theme because it affects users of themes, not just the theme authors.
The Difference Between GPL & Creative Commons
The primary difference between the GPL & the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses (such as SA – share alike) is that the GPL is aimed at programmers, and the Creative Commons is intended for various forms of art…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
