useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design Free Icon Fonts for Web User Interfaces By Jacob Gube This roundup features 18 free icon fonts that can be used in your commercial projects. The icon fonts in this post are perfect for your app user interfaces (UIs). What are Icon Fonts? Icon fonts are font files that have symbols and glyphs (e.g. arrows, folders, magnifying glasses) instead of standard alphanumeric characters. Icon fonts are like dingbat fonts, but are designed specifically for UIs. And because they’re treated like web fonts, icon fonts: Have great cross-browser support (even IE6, for example, can render web fonts using the @font-face rule)Can be scaled on-the-fly if the user adjusts their web browser settingsCan be rendered with different colorsCan embody font- and text-related CSS properties (like text-shadow and gradient) See icon fonts in action by visiting my friend Chris Coyier’s icon fonts demo page. To learn how to use icon fonts, read this tutorial on CSS-Tricks: HTML for Icon Font Usage. Free Icon Fonts 1. Number of icons: 137. 2. Number of icons: 121. 3.
Massive Collection of Elegant Thin Fonts Typography is one of the most crucial design elements, and as such, finding the most appropriate fonts for your project can be a challenging task. Today we’re making it easy for you, with a collection of 70 free thin fonts that we gathered from the web and that you can download to use right now. Most of them are sans-serif although there are a few serif options as well. Thin fonts are becoming extremely popular these days; their clean lines are perfect for logos and headers. They look great, especially at larger sizes, although they can sometimes also be successfully used for body text, provided there’s enough contrast. All the fonts featured in this compilation are free to use, however some restrictions may apply. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 17. 18. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.
20 More Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know Back in October we wowed you with 20 Excellent Ajax Effects You Should Know. The post went on to become one of the most popular ever published at Nettuts+. This time around we have twenty more equally excellent Ajax effects for you to know and love. 1. The Image Menu is a simple piece of JavaScript that uses images to make a horizontal image menu. 2. ImageFlow is an unobtrusive and "user friendly" JavaScript image gallery script. 3. If you're looking to add some interesting backgrounds, rotations and other effects to images, Instant.js might be just what you're looking for. 4. We've all heard of Lightboxes and even Greyboxes, but how about GlassBoxes? 5. Auto-completing search fields are highly valuable when it comes user interaction. CSSGlobe has a very nice tutorial on how to enhance your site's searchfield (unobtrusively, no less) with a bit of CSS and Ajax. 6. Loading images and fields are important to modern web applications that use Ajax. 7. jwysiwyg 8. jquery.biggerlink 2 10. 11.
9 Free Icon Sets to Diversify your Library Every designer needs to be ready to go wherever their projects take them. This is why you need to have a diverse library to count on. To help you with this task, we have some very stylish free icon sets to share. From weather to food and much more, you will have some fresh and beautiful icons to count on for your next project. 61 Outlined Weather Icons Collection In The Kitchen – Free Icon Set Line icon set for UI & more Cooking icons set Weather icons pack Flatty Icon Pack Free Set Colorful Ficons Icons 42+ Flat Icons Set Free Icons for the Weather Situations About the Author Gisele Muller loves communication, technology, web, design, movies, gastronomy and creativity. Related Posts shares 10 Super Useful jQuery Plugins for Better Typography No one ever said that web typography is easy, but it has gotten easier in recent years with the wide spread adoption of web fonts, the introduction of helpful typography tools, and as we see in this post, super useful jQuery plugins. Read More
Mastering Typography in Web Design with Inspirations & Tools Typography is one of the most difficult trends to tackle which is why it will remain fresh in 2010. With all the cries for usability, web designers are afraid of using new and different fonts. We realize that nowadays, knowledge in typography can be applied into various forms in almost all of media fields, including graphic design and the publishing world. To apply typography effectively in a media, we need to understand how it was developed and how people around made it possible. In the past, websites used a wide variety of fonts or images for headers. Most Common Web Typography Mistakes The abundant resources today allow us to use various fonts to enhance our websites. Image credit: Lee | Quoteskine There are a huge number of fonts available on the web, but that doesn’t mean all of them are suitable to be applied to a certain design. Choice of Font Type Will Affect First Impression to Visitors The first impression you want your visitors to have when they view it is so crucial. Webstock
A Showcase of Popular Web Design Trends | My Ink Blog I was wanting to put together a showcase that featured some design trends, and began to wonder which ones I felt would have longevity. I poured through the different rising and pervading trends, struggling to don my prognosticating perspective and choose a few that I just knew would be sticking around. I realized in this feeble attempt to foresee the days to come, that it was just that…feeble, and also, fruitless. So I decided instead, to showcase four of my favorite web design trends. Personalization and Hand Drawn Elements It is no wonder that this first one has caught on, and taken off the way that it has, especially when it comes to blog designs, and it is because of the way that the website surfers have responded to it. Suie Paparude Paul Wallas The Official Gary Nock Website Sarah Hayland talesSimon Richard Stelemach Keven John Gomez PixelMind Shawn Johnston Dave Barnes Clean Illustrations I am not saying the death of the grunge is nigh or upon us, or anything to that effect. Owltastic eAnka
Download Free Fonts for Mac, Android, Windows | Font Cubes Exploiter n'importe quelle police dans vos pages HTML avec FLIR - Alsacréations FLIR est une solution axée sur une combinaison PHP/Javascript. Elle génère dynamiquement une image à partir d'un texte contenu dans votre page web dans une police de caractère déposée sur votre serveur et qui, autrement, ne pourrait pas être vue par vos visiteurs. L'image générée sera automatiquement insérée dans votre page à l'aide de Javascript et visible sur tous les navigateurs modernes. Avant de vous jeter les yeux fermés dans l'éxecution de ce tutoriel, sachez que désormais CSS offre la possibilité - beaucoup plus souple et accessible - d'inclure une police "exotique" dans une page web grâce à la propriété @font-face. Et voilà ce que vous devriez obtenir : Etape 1 - Mise en place de Facelift Avant toute chose, téléchargez Facelift v1.2 (dernière version stable) sur A l'intérieur du répertoire "facelift/" se trouve un fichier Javascript nommé "flir.js". Ouvrez "flir.js" dans un éditeur de code et rendez vous ligne 28. ,path: '' mode: ''
Game Sites Design Survey: Examples and Current Practices | Design Showcase Advertisement Game websites are a little bit of a mystery. You won’t find them in the popular CSS-showcases since they are seldom fully CSS-based; however, they also rarely show up in sites that collect best Flash sites. The FWA, for example, has added only a few game sites this year. This is odd, because there are usually roughly hundred quality titles released each month, each with their own website. During the research I’ve found out that there are a lot of creative game designs. This article is the first of a two-part-series where Smashing Magazine takes a critical look at web design in the video game industry. Please note: for this article I’ve confined myself to sites of actual games as much as possible and not drawn conclusions from developer or publisher websites. 1. Sites for games differ greatly in many aspects. Diablo 3‘s lore is so vast that a single monster entry has more text than the average game has in total. Shelf life A lot of factors decide the shelf life of a game. 2.
Serif vs. Sans: the final battle First it was the Capulets versus the Montagues; then it was Coke versus Pepsi; and the latest epic battle? Serif versus sans-serif, of course. Lucky for us, the crew at UrbanFonts has produced a nifty infographic to help clarify the age-old rivalry between serif and sans. Brief, yet information-packed, it covers everything from DPI to classification, and expertly explains why serif is better for print and sans serif is best suited for web. This clever infographic — that smartly draws upon humor to drive home its points — offers a simple, insightful conclusion that designers should bear in mind: “The best font choices are ones where readers do not notice the font … but the message.” For free fonts and dingbats, check UrbanFonts.com Do you tend to use serif or sans-serif most? Stacey Kole is a freelance writer and former magazine editor.
50 Helpful Typography Tools And Resources - Smashing Magazine Advertisement We love beautiful typography, and we appreciate the efforts of designers who come up with great typographic techniques and tools or who just share their knowledge with fellow designers. We are always looking for such resources. To help you improve the typography in your designs, we’re presenting here useful new articles, tools and resources related to typography. You may be interested in the following related posts: Typography: References and Useful Resources The Taxonomy of TypeThis article’s purpose is to help us as designers to distinguish basic properties of types. Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of TypefacesTypedia is a resource to classify, categorize, and connect typefaces. Typeface Anatomy and GlossaryMany fonts have abbreviations in their names. Typographic Marks UnknownThere are many typographic marks which are familiar to most, but understood by few. Periodic Table of TypefacesA reference table for most popular typefaces and their classifications. Combining Type
65 Excellent Flash Designs | Design Showcase Advertisement With Flash you can do more than just displaying videos. You can create stunning visual experience and offer your visitors incredible user interaction. Although Flash is definitely not the favourite medium for usability and accessibility advocates, it has its advantages and it empowers the Web with functionalities which make it an incredibly interactive medium. With Flash designers can achieve results which simply aren’t possible with (X)HTML and CSS. The results can be creative, impressive, beautiful and fascinating. However, since there is a number of things that can go wrong in Flash, it’s easy to get it wrong. In this post we present 65 examples of outstanding Flash designs with excellent use of graphics, visual elements, interface design and graphics motion. Mistake #1: Use Of Flash To Imitate (X)HTML/CSS Flash shouldn’t be used if the designer tries to imitate (X)HTML/CSS-presentation. Mistake #2: Navigation Is Unintuitive Mistake #3: Pop-Ups Are Still Used Gallery