As good as you think you might be, there is also room for improvement and learning new techniques is vital in a technological domain like web design where everything changes very fast. I’ve been researching for this article for some time and it is the time to publish it, now that I’ve collected a relatively large set of interesting and useful tutorials.
In this tutorial, we will be writing a jQuery plugin that will help you draw users’ attention to a specific part of the page, in the form of a small arrow that is displayed next to their mouse cursor. This can be useful for pointing to missed form fields, buttons that need to be pressed, or validation errors that need to be scrolled into view.
Placeholder text can be very helpful and can save a lot of page space while also being aesthetically pleasing. With this great feature, however, comes a problem: If the placeholder text is being used in place of a label, it can become very confusing when you focus on the field and the ‘label’ disappears. Continue reading
I’ve stated that being up-to-date is essential no matter what you do for a living, so here are new resources for web designers and web developers, things that could help you on your projects. You will find in this article slideshow plugins, CSS frameworks, HTML5 and CSS3 resources, a few GUI PSDs and various jQuery plugins. I’m sure you’ll enjoy them.
If you are interested in these types of resources, they are posted on the WebDev section of Design Resource Box. There are 6 new resources every week.
Mosaiqy is a jQuery plugin for viewing and zooming photo working on Opera 9+, Firefox 3.6+, Safari 3.2+, Chrome and IE7+. Photos are retrieved from a JSON/JSONP data structure and randomly moved inside the grid. All expensive animations are taken over by your GPU on recent browsers using CSS3 transitions, minimizing the CPU overhead.
Set column and gutter widths, choose the number of columns, and switch between pixels and percentages. All without any ugly .grid_x classes in your markup. Oh, and did we mention it’s responsive? Continue reading
Plenty of people are interested in the art of typography, so guides and written instructions are a dime a dozen. But as with most design and creative ventures, there is something more explanatory in movement. Watching someone making typography or using programs such as Photoshop to make new fonts is a great way to learn in a more direct way.
With the introduction of YouTube and other online video upload sites, it is easier than ever to make, browse and share these typography movies. If you are looking for a basic introduction to this craft, you will love these 10 clips.
London College of Printing Professor David Dabner talks about typography and the process of font creation in this short film by Omair Barkatulla.
It is made in the style of an old wartime propaganda or health film, and it shows how letterface is handled in a traditional printing press. Very informative, and a great introduction to classic styles of typography.
Magazine WordPress themes have been the topic of interest for a lot of people, because of the way they can present content in a beautiful, clean way and also blend advertisements pretty well into the design. Though they have changed a lot in the last years, magazine themes preserve the same key features through which they have to deliver the content to the visitor, give him the information that he needs so that he can find it easily like he would do it in a newspaper.
In this article there are 41 free and premium WordPress magazine themes, approximately half free, half premium. I’ve selected only the free themes that a regular person would actually use and ignored the ones that are outdated and ugly looking and besides them I’ve also put in the article premium themes because of their superior quality. If you consider they are worth the money, you can buy them. I’m using premium themes for some time and I’ve never been disappointed cause they give you a very detailed documentation and support.
Music has the power to move us to tears, make us smile and even make us angry.
Expressions born of sound, such as dance, have the same powers. But they also inspire art, and one art is typeface.
These 15 fonts were inspired in some way by music.
1. Tut.tut
Tut.tut is a font that has a rather beautiful flowing look and was created with the movement of hands in motion in mind. It was based off of an abstract street dance known as Tutting. Similar to many other free forms you see in modern offshoots of breakdancing, the dance itself was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics, the name derived from Tutankhamun.
