2008 Most Popular Design posts, Tutorials and Resources
2008 was a busy year, we have been watching great news, articles, tutorials, scripts, tips and lot of inspiration for web designers popping around everyday. Today we thought it would be a great idea to wrap all those resources in one package where you can check to fuel your energy for creativity. Hopefully you will find some creative ideas that you can develop further in your future projects.
In the showcase below, you’ll find a variety of articles and posts from the most interesting web-design/development-related web-sites published in 2008.
Most Popular Design Posts & Tutorials
1. 42 Unusually Brilliant Business Card Designs
“Organized by category here are 42 extremely creative business card designs. Some of these are old, some new, but all are still amazing examples of out-of-the-box thinking in business card design.”
2. 20 Beautiful HDR Pictures
“here are some photography techniques that really give me the goose bumps, but the good ones. HDR is one of those techniques… and you’ll probably love these as much as I do.”
3. 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box
“In the showcase below we present 40 creative out-of-the-box layouts that break the boring 2- and 3-columned, boxed layouts. We have collected pure CSS -designs, CSS+JavaScript -layouts as well as Flash -designs.”
4. 30 Brilliant Vector Logo Designs, Deconstructed
“In this post we look at 30 contemporary examples of great vector logo design and find out what makes them work.”
5. 50+ Kick Ass Logos for Inspiration
“I looked at over 2000 logos on various inspiration sites to grab the 50+ best logos (in my opinion) to fuel your logo design inspiration.”
6. 33 Exceptional Logo Rebranding In 2008 For Your Inspiration
“This list is not long in numbers, but I promise you that when you start watching them in detail it will must boost your creative logo design ideas professionally and motivate you to design your new logo in a way that people will never forget that you have made it.”
7. 40+ Creative, Courageous, and Campy Buttons
“In this post, we look at over 40 button designs driven from a variety of sources: modern illustrators, campy old cartoons, political badges, close up textures, positive causes, and more.”
8. Design a Logo – The Ultimate Guide
“A quality logo design combined with the branding of an organization or company can become one of the most powerful forces in today’s society. If you love logo design as much as I do, then I am sure you will enjoy these logo design tips and resources.”
9. 50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus
“In this post I’d like to take a look at more than 50 stellar examples of navigation menus that positively impact the design of a website. The list includes a great deal of variety.”
10. 25 Super Cool Paper Inspired Website Designs
“Here are 25 good examples of this super cool paper based effect put into practice.”
11. Video Game Design Between 1990-2008
“So, let’s look at how the graphics and design evolved starting from 1990.”
12. Best of CSS Design 2008
“This year, more designers are using the large background technique and utilizing Javascript frameworks (such as jQuery and MooTools) to enchance the user experience.”
Best of Photoshop Posts & Tutorials
13. 25 Photoshop Tutorials for Web Designers
“In this collection, you’ll find 25 excellent Photoshop tutorials geared towards web designers. You’ll find a variety of tutorials that include creating full web page templates, navigation menus, headers, and content boxes.”
14. Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – Best Of
“This article provides professional Adobe Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works.”
15. Handy Web 2.0 Icons In Photoshop
“In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a really easy and very nice 3D effect to be used in either buttons and icons or elements that need some depth.”
16. Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – Best Of
“In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers.”
17. How to Create Intense Light Streaks in Photoshop
“I did a little research and picked up a couple of tips from similar tutorials to present a walkthrough on how to create intense light streaks flowing around an object or person.”
18. Photoshop’s Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide
“This guide will give you a comprehensive basis for working with the Pen Tool in Photoshop.”
19. 48 Mind-blowing Examples of Photo Manipulation Art
“Here we showcase ten masters of this technique and 48 examples of their stunning artwork, blending real photos with synthetic elements for a surreal result.”
20. Photoshop Toolbox
“Most web and graphic designers use Photoshop on a daily basis, and due to Photoshop’s popularity there are countless resources online for users. In effort to make your life as a designer a bit easier, here is a guide to some of the best resources.”
21. How To Master Photoshop In Just One Week
“So you want to master Photoshop huh? You’ve come to the right place. This is the first part of a three part series that will help you to master Photoshop in and out in just one week.”
Best of Illustrator Posts & Tutorials
22. 20 Exceptional Websites for Learning Adobe Illustrator
“In this collection, you’ll find 20 excellent websites and blogs that provide high-quality tutorials and information on vector illustration and Adobe Illustrator.”
23. Free Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
24. Using the Pathfinder and Align tool in Illustrator
“With a bit of creative thinking and some simple aligning in combination with Pathfinder’s powerful tools you might just achieve the perfect drawing in no time. Here is another Illustrator tutorial where I show you to draw a simple icon without the use of the Pen tool…”
25. 21 New Trend Illustrations in Web design
“Well, right now I won’t talk, but show you many sites that use illustrated elements in their design. It’s really great how they turn out to be… the results are pretty sweet! I hope you all enjoy my selection! Cheers.”
26. Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days
“This FREE 30 days Illustrator crash course is created for beginners interested in learning Illustrator. Each lesson will take around 20 mins to complete and you will be able to learn the basic fundamental techniques before the 30 days trial ends.”
Photoshop and Illustrator Brushes & Vector Collection
27. 81 Amazing Argyle Illustrator Brushes
28. The largest collection of free vectors ever assembled
“This free vector resource list was made over time using quite a few search engines and resource websites.”
29. Oriental Photoshop Brushes And Vector Images For Mysterious Designs
“This is a collection of oriental Photoshop brushes & vector images for more mysterious designs. The collection includes Chinese dragons, Japanese, Chinese & Arabic texts, people, houses, mosques & various figures.”
30. 500+ Space Brushes for Photoshop
“Graphic designers love free Photoshop brushes, so I decided to put together a collection of the best brushes for creating space scenes. This includes brushes for stars, planets, moon, galaxies, nebulae, and more.”
31. Freebie Seamless Swirls
Best of Javascript Posts
32. 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
“Here’s my collection of 10 that I think you’ll find useful in your work. They’re not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects.”
33. 10 JavaScript Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor
“Here’s a collection of 10 powerful – yet easy-to-implement — JavaScript effects to supplement your web page’s interface. These were picked using a “bang for your buck” methodology; meaning that these effects were chosen specifically because they provide high-impact effects with very little effort in installing and using them.”
34. 75 Useful JavaScript Techniques
“Sometimes we need JavaScript solutions that are a little more involved or specific. Here are 75 more handy JavaScript techniques that have made websites much sleeker and more interesting.”
35. 20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know
“There are a few special techniques or effects that can spice up just about any web page. These are the top 20 Ajax effects that every web developer should know.”
36. Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips
“I’d call myself an “intermediate” jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I’ve learned over the past year.”
37. DD_belatedPNG
“You can use 24-bit alpha-translucent PNG images for the background-image CSS property in Internet Explorer 6 with support for background-position and background-repeat.”
38. 10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks
“We all have them – little coding tricks and snippets of knowledge that we’ve picked up over years of experimentation and evolution of our processes, that are now part of our regular routine and save us time, gnashing of teeth and allow us to work quickly and efficiently.”
39. 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site
“Tackle these quick fixes over time, and you’ll be able to improve your Web site with minimal pain.”
40. 14 Ways to Learn From Creative Coders
“Programmers are a great example of thinking outside the box because, well… programmers can actually create the box. Here are some of the ways that we can learn from programmers on how to boost our creativity.”
41. Best Ever 65 mooTools Plugins and Demos
“The Best Ever 65 mooTools Plugins and Demos, is it Better than jQuery? Quite, possibly.”
Best of WordPress Posts & Tutorials
42. 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
“WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.”
43. 30+ (More) Most Wanted Wordpress Tips, Tricks and Hacks
“If you are wondering how some bloggers add those cool functions, mods or displays on their Wordpress blog, be sure to run through our list.”
44. How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch
“I’m going to show you how to create a wordpress theme from scratch in these 3 parts of tutorial series. I will cover from Structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully css based html, and finally wordpress implementation.”
45. 100+ Wordpress Video Tutorials, from Basic to Advanced
“All of these tutorials range from basic learning for the beginner, to advanced for the expert who wants to learn new techniques. Basically everyone can take something from these tuts.”
46. Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers
“In this post we’ll take a look at a number of things you can do with WordPress coding that involve categories in one way or another. Hopefully this will be a helpful guide that you can refer to whenever you’re developing a new theme.”
47. Complete WordPress Theme Guide
“A complete WordPress guide on how to install WordPress and customize theme.”
48. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox
“With all of the WordPress development that is going on, there is a need for an organized collection of resources to educate, inspire and equip developers to improve the quality and efficiency of their work. This post provides all kinds of WordPress-related resources to do just that.”
Best of CSS Posts & Tutorials
49. 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean
“Let’s take a look at some poorly written HTML, discuss its problems, and then whip it into shape! Bear in mind, we are not passing any judgment on the content or design of this page, only the markup that builds it.”
50. The Highly Extensible CSS Interface ~ The Series
“Introducing “The Highly Extensible CSS Interface,” a four-part series of how-to’s and savvy conversation.”
51. CSS coding: semantic approach in naming convention
“In this post I want to illustrate some suggests and guidelines to use a semantic approach instead of a structural approach in naming CSS classes, analyzing the essential elements of a popular 3 column layout.”
52. How To: Resizeable Background Image
“A pretty good solution to create resizeable background images. “Go ahead and resize your browser window around and notice how the image will resize to fit.”
53. 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned
“Today, we will review 20 excellent css techniques to keep in mind when developing your theme.”
54. 10 Challenging But Awesome CSS Techniques
“In this post we’re going to outline 10 awesome CSS techniques for web developers who know their stuff.”
55. A parallax illusion with CSS: The Horse in Motion
“I wanted to recreate the effect of the illusion with the help of parallax and CSS.”
56. IE CSS Bugs That’ll Get You Every Time
“Here are that major bugs in IE that’ll get you every time”
57. Starting with CSS and bug fixing tips
“So the first tip here is, learn about Web Standards and learn about coding with CSS for layout.”
58. 3 ways to compress CSS files using PHP
“When you’re using a sophisticated design, CSS files can quickly become very long, and takes time to load. I have compiled 3 interresting ways of compressing CSS files by using PHP.”
Freelancers Posts
59. 70 Tools Freelancers Rely on Most
“As freelancers, we belong to a broad group of people: writers, designers, programmers, consultants, etc. Despite our variety, though, we all use similar tools on a regular basis…I decided to compile a list of the most used tools”
60. 21 Factors that Influence the First Impression of Your Website’s Visitors
“This list looks at 21 factors that will influence your visitor’s impression within moments of arriving at your site. ”
61. How to: Save Time While Building a Website
“As a freelance web developer, time is money. I use many different tricks to increase my productivity and these are my top selections for saving time.”
62. 15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have
“There are a lot of details to consider when designing and developing a web site…here are the 15 elements that should always be included on any top web site.”
63. 9 Tips for Brand New Freelancers
“With the way the economy has been, it wouldn’t be too surprising if the freelancer ranks grow in the next few months. Here are a few tips to get you started.”
Fonts & Typographic Posts
64. 30 Fonts That ALL Designers Must Know & Should Own
“When you’re using a sophisticated design, CSS files can quickly become very long, and takes time to load. I have compiled 3 interresting ways of compressing CSS files by using PHP.”
65. 45 Beautiful Free Fonts for Modern Design Trends
“There are a lot of free fonts on the web – created by talented designers and type foundries. In this collection, you’ll find 45 first-class, downloadable fonts for your use.”
66. Advanced Typography techniques using CSS
“This is an example of what you can do by combining and tweaking type using css.”
67. 8 fonts you probably don’t use in css, but should
“So here is a quick and dirty list of fonts you should and could use in your desgns and stylesheets.”
Tools & Resources
68. 400+ High Quality Patterns
“When you’re using a sophisticated design, CSS files can quickly become very long, and takes time to load. I have compiled 3 interresting ways of compressing CSS files by using PHP.”
69. Free High-Res Texture Pack: The Anatomy of a *Really* Old Book
“It took a while, but I have a very cool free high resolution texture pack for everyone to download. There are 12 textures, all over 3000px.”
70. 29 Most Useful Texture Packs of 2008
71. Freebie Roundup: 12 Places To Download Free Textures
“I’ve only been making textures for a while now, but everyone seems to love them. I know I can’t ever get enough textures either. So I’ve been surfing and made a list of sites that offer free textures to download.”
72. 27 Indispensable Web Design and Development Firefox Extensions
“A collection of extensions for your every Design and Development need, from Editing CSS and Database Management to Image Capture and Color Pickers.”
73. 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools
“We present 50 extremely useful CSS tools, generators, templates and resources. We did not include “traditional” CSS tools, such as Firebug or the Web Developer extension, but tried to focus on rather unknown tools that are definitely worth a look.”
74. 100+ Essential Resources for Web Developers
“We’ve put together a list of over 100 resources to help make your life as a developer easier; where to find snippets of code, sites that automate processes, cheat sheets, lessons, useful tools and a couple of silly videos to give your brain a break if you make it through to the end.”
75. 55 Free High Quality Icon Sets
“In the overview below we present 55 more excellent, free and professional icons for desktop and web design.”
