50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run.
And this is where we come in. Back in old days, Smashing Magazine used to publish lists after lists, with plethora of links that covered different topics all somehow related to web design and development. Below you’ll find 50 useful tools and time-savers for web designers and developers. You may be interested in the following related posts: Typography Web Font Specimen This template lets you check the typography by analyzing the HTML-specimen in your browser. Bookmarklets CSS, HTML and JavaScript Tools. 50 Fantastically Clever Logos. I know everybody and their brother does logo roundups so you’re probably sick of them, but I don’t believe I’ve ever done one and there is a particularly impressive brand of logo design that I wanted to point out. Today we’ll look at 50 logos that are the result of going beyond the typical thought process and injecting a little wit and hidden symbolism into the design process.
What Makes a Logo Clever? To explain what I mean by “clever” logo design, let’s take a look at a typical logo, (i.e. one that isn’t clever). The logo above is a nice piece of work. The colors are perfect, the lettering is masculine, the overall feel is athletic and the glossy effect works well. It’s everything that it needs to be. However, my favorite type of logo design is that which takes the assignment one step further. These types of logos make you smile at the brilliance of both the idea and the execution and have several layers of meaning that can hit you in waves. Visual Double Entendres Lion Bird Chad 2010 Mr. 100 Greatest Abstract and Grunge Fonts (Free) | Graphics. 27 Must-Have Starter Kits For Web Designers | Design. Starter kits are great timesavers for web designers and they are particularly useful for those who often create mock-ups for project pitching on daily basis.
If you are a designer-cum-programmer think of it as your code snippets So what’s in a starter kit? We think it varies – depending on what each designer routinely worked with. For GUI designers, keeping a copy of form elements (buttons, checkboxes, tab, drop down menus, etc) helps speed up the process of creating screens and layouts; on the other hand, browser (IE, Firefox Safari) templates with web safe area keep web designers reminded how/where they should prioritize their contents. Experienced designers will usually customize and keep a personal version of starter kit, some might have few too!
In today’s article, we attempt to show you some of the best design starter kit we’ve come to know. GUI, Form Elements and Web Components Yahoo’s Design Stencil Kit Probably one of the most complete kit for designers. Browser Screens Templates. 30 Useful Web-Based Applications for Designers | Most Inspired: A web application is an application that is accessed via a web browser over a network. They may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment or coded in a browser-supported language (such as JavaScript, combined with a browser-rendered markup language like HTML) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.
With the help of these free web-based online applications you can make your work even easier than before. Web based applications are good alternatives to costly software for sure. Instead of buying costly software , you can make use of these online tools to do your design and development work. Nothing can be more useful than handy tools you can use in your design process. Whether you’d like diagramming application, photo editing, format or optimize CSS code, generate patterns- you can use dozens of tools to make your life easier. Color palette Colorschemedesigner Colorspire Adobe Kuler Colorjack Colortoy Csstxt Menu. Drupal Tutorial Sites | Makak Media | Bromley - London.
Drupal is our Content Management System (CMS) of choice and with its' popularity growing ever stronger here's a list of tutorial sites we've put together for you. The flexibility of Drupal is one of its' greatest assets and with modules galore to extend it there are many tutorials out there to help you along the way. You'll find below a list of websites and blogs chock full of Drupal tutorials, videos and tips to help you get the most out of the CMS. Drupal.org - HandbooksLullabotDrupal SchoolWim Mostrey - Engaging Drupal blogThingy-Ma-JigDavid Burns writes about THISorTHATLearn Drupal CMSPrimal Media blogaPaddedCell There should be something for everyone from beginners to advanced Drupalers, I hope you enjoy the list.
You can also check out our blog posts on Drupal. Ten CSS tricks you may not know. 1. CSS font shorthand rule When styling fonts with CSS you may be doing this: font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; font-variant: small-caps; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.5em; font-family: verdana,sans-serif There's no need though as you can use this CSS shorthand property: font: bold italic small-caps 1em/1.5em verdana,sans-serif Much better! 2. Usually attributes are assigned just one class, but this doesn't mean that that's all you're allowed. <p class="text side">... Using these two classes together (separated by a space, not with a comma) means that the paragraph calls up the rules assigned to both text and side. 3. When writing a border rule you'll usually specify the color, width and style (in any order). If you were to write just border: solid then the defaults for that border will be used. 4. Lots of web pages have a link to a print-friendly version.
So, your page header should contains links to two CSS documents, one for the screen, and one for printing: 5. <h1>Buy widgets</h1> Lightbox (JavaScript) A typical lightbox image display Lightbox is a JavaScript technique used to display images and other web content using modal dialogs. Lightbox was originally the name of a specific JavaScript plugin, written by Lokesh Dhakar.[1] However, common usage of the term has evolved to encompass Lightbox-style JavaScript plugins and effects in general.
10 jQuery Plugins to Help with Web Page Layouts. Every now and then a web project will come up that has special and unique layout requirements, and the current capabilities of CSS just aren’t enough. With projects such as these, jQuery can be your best friend. So here are 10 jQuery plugins to help you out with page layouts. UI.Layout The UI.Layout plug-in can create any UI look you want – from simple headers or sidebars, to a complex application with toolbars, menus, help-panels, status bars, sub-forms, etc. mb.containerPlus This plugin let’s you build full featured and fully skinnable containers.
Css-template-layout The project aims at providing web designers with a way to use the W3′s CSS Template Layout Module today. Masonry Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Columnizer Columnizer will automatically layout your content in newspaper column format. jQSlickWrap jQSlickWrap forces text to wrap around the contents of an image, not just its bounding box as it does when you use a float with CSS. Equal Heights js-columns Columnize jLayout.