21 Best Icon Sets for Designing Web Apps | Web Design Ledger When designing a web application, it’s important to make sure the user interface is easy to use. Using icons along side navigation links is one key ingredient to achieving this. But Instead of creating icon sets from scratch, which can be very time consuming, why not use icons that have already been created for you. Jonas Rask Design Icons for Developers ASP.NET Icons Tango Icon Library Aesthetica Icons Diagona Icons by pinvoke Fugue Icons by pinvoke FAMFAMFAM – Silk Web Application Icons Set Coquette Icons Free web development icons #4 SE Developpers Icons Knob Buttons Toolbar icons Simplistica Icons Function Icon Set Milky Simplicio Fresh FAMFAMFAM – Mini Crystal Clear Monofactor Vector Icons IVista Icon Pack 2 About the Author Henry Jones is a web developer, designer, and entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience. Related Posts 142 shares 9 Free Icon Sets to Diversify your Library Every designer needs to be ready to go wherever their projects take them. Read More 464 shares
12 Useful Web Tools for Designers - Six Revisions When it comes to design, there’s a plethora of free web-based tools to help you accomplish tasks such as color palette selection, creating unique fonts, editing images, and testing typography. In this article, you’ll find a bunch of handy online utilities for designers. kuler Create kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes. You can peruse the user-submitted color themes or create your own color themes with the kuler Create web tool. pixlr pixlr is a web-based image editor with a Photoshop-like user interface; pixlr has similar features like layers, filters, and even a Clone Stamp tool. Wellstyled Color Scheme Generator Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator is a simple web tool that helps designers produce color themes. FontStruct FontStruct is a web-based tool created by font retailer FontShop for creating, editing, and sharing fonts. Typetester Typetester allows you to test, tweak, and compare screen typography. TypeNavigator Dummy Text Generator
8 Free Design Platforms To Build Your Own Site | Webdesigner Depot ... Website builders have been gaining more popularity and traction lately, thanks to services such as Wix and Webnode. These online website creators allow you to create a full website, free of charge, directly in your browser without any prior knowledge of website development. Many of these services also offer premium packages with additional features, for a small cost per month, if you desire additional tools. The biggest advantage in using these services is the unbeatable development speed, as it all happens in your browser with click-and-drag functionality. If you’re not a web designer or a creative person but need an easy and affordable solution to creating a website, try one of these free programs. Wix Wix offers a simple, yet powerful online platform to make Flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. The design interface is sleek and quick (on a high-speed connection). Weebly Webs (formerly FreeWebs) It’s worth noting the ability to integrate your site with Paypal or Google Checkout. Jimdo
» 10 Brilliant Multi Level Navigation Menu Techniques Web-developers can create user-friendly horizontal or vertical navigation menus using CSS. Javascript makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible navigation to any website. Today we wanted to highlight 10 brilliant Multi Level Navigation Menu Techniques built using different Javascript Libraries including jQuery, Mootools along with some CSS magic to give us what you see below. 1. Almost the same top navigation implemented on Vimeo.com is created by Janko. The base for this tutorial is simple CSS drop down menu based on unordered list. As you can see the UL has four items. Demo | Download source code 2. This menu does not only separate HTML from CSS, but even CSS definitions are categorized into structural and thematic types. Features Include: The code and files are well organized. Horizontal Menu Demo | Vertical Menu Demo | Download source code 3. This multi-level drop down menu script weighs in at only 1.2 KB. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. jQuery File Tree
9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To Advertisement By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. 1. Hyperlinks are designed to be clicked, so to make them usable, it makes sense to ensure that they’re easy to click. Here’s an example of the same interface element, the comments link, but this time with a much larger clickable area: Newspond comments link. Why would we want a larger clickable area? <a href=" style="padding: 5px;">Example Site<a> The CSS has been placed inline together with the markup to make the example simpler, but in real life you’ll likely want to add this styling to your CSS file by giving the link a class or id and targeting it with that. 2. Pagination refers to splitting up content onto several pages. 3. 4. The Basecamp landing page. 5.
Cheat Sheets for Web Designers By Jacob Gube Cheat sheets (also known as reference cards, reference sheets, etc.) not only helps you remember things quickly, but can also serve as wall decoration for your workspace. In this post, you’ll find 28 excellent, useful cheat sheets in various file formats for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, colors, typography, and other web-design related topics all in one page with pictures of each cheat sheet. If you’re looking for front-end web developer cheat sheets (more CSS, HTML, and JavaScript) check out Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers. Photoshop Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet Downloads: PDF (Windows), PDF (Mac) Keys for using the Layers palette (HTML) Photoshop Toolbox Reference (HTML) Photoshop Lasso Tool Cheatsheet Download: PDF Photoshop Brush Tool Cheatsheet Download: PDF Color RGB Hex Colour Chart Downloads: PDF, PNG Color Reference Guide (PDF) Web Designer Color Reference Hexagon Mouse Pad Download: GIF Web Safe Color Chart (HTML) Hexidecimal Color Chart (HTML) Typography Browsers
Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch - Nettuts+ Have you ever wanted to design a beautiful website but just didn't know how? To be honest, a few years ago, that happened to me too. While browsing the web, I saw so many nice looking websites and wished I had the skills to create such designs. The designs I create are nearly all based on the 960 Grid System. Before we open our PSD grid template and begin drawing, we first need to define the structure of our site. After we've defined our site structure we're ready to move on. Now pick the Rectangle Tool and draw in a rectangle the full canvas width and about 80px high. Create a new layer above the rectangle and set Layer mode to Overlay. New layer. With the Rectangle tool selected, draw in a big box around 500px underneath the top rectangle. Now we are going to create the same light effect as described in Step 5. Create a new layer above all the current layers. Create a new layer and draw in a big rectangle about 400px high. See how subtle the color change is? Apply a Drop shadow.
How To Build Your Own Single Page Portfolio Website This post was originally published in 2009 The tips and techniques explained may be outdated. A great looking portfolio site is crucial for any designer to instantly present their work to potential clients or employers. A simple, single page site can do this effectively by displaying three key features of large header with short introduction, examples of your work and methods of contact all in one, extremely browsable page. Let’s take a look at producing a single page portfolio concept in Photoshop, constructing the page in XHTML/CSS and adding some fancy functionality with jQuery. Last month, I had the pleasure of writing an article for internationally renown NET Magazine, also known as Practical Web Design in the US. Your online portfolio is your place to introduce yourself to the world and showcase your work and skillset. Prepare The Document Start work by opening Adobe Photoshop, create a new document at 1680x1050px. Add Some Texture Introduce Yourself Present The Goods Copy The Files
Create a Clean Modern Website Design in Photoshop Build a complete website design mockup for a fictional design studio, starting with the creation of the initial layout then moving on to designing the individual page elements. The result is a modern, crisp and clean webpage layout ready for coding. Taking inspiration from various modern website designs, we’ll produce this clean and crisp website layout. Key features include horizontal bands to separate the content into specific areas; a colourful header area introducing the site; a friendly welcome message with examples of work; two-column main layout and a resource filled footer. A good start with any design is to sketch out the plans on paper, the free reign of the pencil helps flesh out the rough layout with ease. Planning out a wireframe also helps develop a hierarchy and gives an insight into the best positions for key elements of the design. Place guides at a 960px width in the centre of the document and create a basic grid to place the page items against.
The Codeless Website: Four Awesome Tools for Creating Cool, No-Tech Sites Sometimes, even HTML is just too hard. In this postmodern world, we're all professionally fragmented jacks of all trades, and few of us have the patience (read: OCD) for learning enough CSS and Flash to allow us to keep up with the Jonses in terms of functional, sexy web design. Here are some cheat sheets, the Cliff Notes of site creation, if you will. Read on to discover four awesome, in-browser resources for creating your own beautiful corner of the web without the horror of code. Edicy: Sites in Seconds Edicy is a resource we just found out about recently. YourOwn.com: Edicy offers free vanity.edicy.com domains and publishing to any domain the user chooses for about $8.50 a month. Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users can only pop the hood, so to speak, on HTML for sections of text. SEO-riffic: Edicy lets users add keywords and descriptions, but not other metadata or tags for images or other media. Zimplit: Fully Simple, Fully Editable SEO-riffic: Sorry, Charlie.
The Most 10 Common Mistakes Web Designers Make | Noupe Aug 03 2009 There are plenty of mistakes web designers (especially new ones) make when designing websites. Everything from poor design to simple oversight happen every day. But with a little diligence, they can easily be avoided. Below are ten of the most common mistakes web designers make, along with examples of sites who do things right. 1. “White space” or “negative space”, space that is empty of elements other than your background design, is an incredibly important design element. In addition to white space, don’t try to put too much on a single page. 2. Unless the sites you’re designing are completely static, somehow showcasing new information and content is vital to good design. There are a few ways to approach this. 3. Links are one of the most important parts of a website. There are two things to keep in mind here. 4. Using the correct image format for the different images on your site is vital. GIF format is great for images that use a limited color palette. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.