Link To Full Story: www.webm.ag
Today I’m going to show you a pretty clever technique for changing the Cascading Style Sheet by time using PHP, this can be a quirky addon for region/country specific sites, and will allow you to experiment and perhaps alter the code to use for different purposes.
I have coded this so it uses 4 stylesheets and changes at 6am, 12pm, 7pm and 11pm.
The whole project is available to download and demo below, here I will break it down and explain its elements.
Link To Full Story: carsonified.com
Lead gen page design is not only short, sweet, and mostly self-contained. It’s also a perplexing balancing act between designing for conversion “the dough” and employing some conventions (e.g. not hyperlinking logos back to the app’s main home page, stock photography, microcopy, offers, etc.) that feel more trickster-like “the spam.”
I’ve divided this post into two parts, 3 tips to follow when designing a lead generation page, and a 3-part redesign of an actual lead generation page that’s currently out in the wild.
Link To Full Story: www.onextrapixel.com
When working on large projects, with many mock-ups and style-sheets, even the smallest change on a re-occurring component can take quite some time. Going through the many mock-ups and adjusting a color or font on that re-occurring component can be a grueling task. If you have an intern that does those things for you, you are in luck, but what about us freelancers?
Do we just sit there and endure the pain? Well, not anymore! A while back, I discovered a system that enables designers to say goodbye to opening 23 PSD files just to change the header color. Instead, we can work smart, like our counter parts the developers, and import external files with something called - “Variables”.
This allows us to put the re-occurring component into one external file and simply import that file into all of our mock-ups. When a change is required, we can just change it in one place.
Link To Full Story: vandelaydesign.com
Design Instruct has launched today with a tutorial, How to Make a Vibrant Portfolio Web Design in Photoshop.
If you’re interested in design tutorials and articles I recommend that you subscribe to the Design Instruct RSS feed or follow them on Twitter. I’m sure Isaac and Jacob will turn Design Instruct into an excellent resource for designers. They’re also looking for writers, so if you are interested see their writing guidelines.
Link To Full Story: www.reencoded.com
Link To Full Story: www.smashingmagazine.com
Dirk Ollmann: Before you design, you need an idea. I think this is the most difficult thing. A lot of designers use the Internet to try to come up with a unique idea, but that’s the last place to find it. I try to keep my eyes open for things that happen in real life… keep my eyes open and record. After a while, you have a database of ideas waiting for implementation. Stop working, get inspired! Ideas will come by doing something completely different. Try something! I use to pet my cat, kite-surf, play bass, etc. Nevertheless, there are some websites I check regularly: Behance for random searching (those are some cool guys from Eastern Europe); for style, The Cool Hunter is one of my favourite websites; and The FWA for state-of-the-art Flash design.
Link To Full Story: www.onextrapixel.com
Invest in a good sized tablet. It will help you to do illustrations with precision and also give you a variety of contours, pressures, and strokes while painting. Changing these attributes randomly and repeatedly while painting the illustration will help to create the hand-drawn look. In some cases, stretching some of the points in the strokes can also help create the desired look.
The gradient tool gives the image an unnatural look because it is nowhere close to what you can get with hand painted illustrations. Instead, to add shades to an object, simply use the pencil tool, with hairline thickness, to draw the desired shape of the shade and fill it with a slightly darker color. Remember to delete the strokes after the shading is done.
In an illustration, don’t add other mediums like photographs or fonts into the mix. Unless it is a part of the site which is specifically meant for it, like in a portfolio or a company logo, and must appear in its original style, do not mix mediums in your illustration. Even when you need text in buttons or titles, consider drawing it by hand and avoid duplicating letters where possible. Randomness and detail adds character to the illustration.
To help make drawing fonts easier, write the text in a font of your choosing and trace it by hand. This will also help keep to the natural hand-drawn look of the illustration. You can also try your hand at creating your own font.
Link To Full Story: www.noupe.com
JQuery Pager | Demo
jQuery Pager is a simple JQuery plugin to provide paging functionality for data-driven web applications.
