Weekend .. and you know what that means! Time for a new roundup with the best design-related articles and tutorials of last week’s blogosphere, hand-picked for you. It’s all about webdesign, graphic design, SEO, tutorials, social media and more. A broad scale of topics, but never-the-less the underlying focus is on Design.
Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics. The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter.
Webdesign Coding: CSS, HTML, Javascript, PhP, APIs, etc.
13 Awesome Javascript Libraries for HTML5 - The growing popularity of HTML5 has created a boom in the development of JavaScript libraries that can integrate with HTML5. These libraries are easy to implement and can instantly provide a whole new level of power and ..
CSS3 Best Practices for designers - I’ll try to cover some of the important things to remember when dealing with these issues. Keep in mind that nothing here is set in stone but these should just be guidelines to help you write more effective, easier to maintain, and future-proof code.
Thoughts on upcoming CSS parent selector – I’m pretty sure that, once it will be supported, a lot of clever techniques will appear in the wild. The cool thing is that we won’t need to rely on JavaScript to select a parent element and this opens way to new opportunities.
Learning LESS: Nested Rules - We continue on our journey of Learning LESS today as we take a look at Nested Rules in LESS. Now we jump into Nested Rules, a topic that can be somewhat difficult to conceptualize, but we’ll break it down with great code examples and some diagrams.
The CSS Clip Property - You’ve probably heard of CSS’s clip property. It has some unique features and syntax, and in this post I’ll outline how it’s used. At the end of the post you’ll find a link to a demo page where some photos are used to animate the clip property
Code a Simple Folded Corner Effect With CSS - With the power of pseudo elements, we’ll create some CSS triangles that we can then push into place to create our page fold. Once we’re all finished, you’ll be able to simply apply a class to any div to add in the effect.
jQuery – The Little Things - »It works!« is a state any piece of code needs to achieve. It’s the goal most developers have in order to get the job done. But sadly »It works!« is more often than not, simply insufficient. It’s a state that’s only true for the moment.
How to Add Scalable Vector Graphics to Your Web Page - At some point, you’ll want to embed your finely-crafted SVG directly into a web page. There are no less than six ways to achieve that goal — but not all methods are created equally.
Creating Inline SVGs with HTML5 - With HTML5 you can embed SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) markup directly into your pages. In this tutorial we go through the process of including a simple SVG element in an HTML page.
Cross Browser Reflection of the Elements on CSS3 - Currently, there are box-reflect and mask-image, that allow to create the reflection of the elements, but these properties are accessible only in Safari and Chrome, and work not so as desirable.
Hot in web standards! CSSblending modes, Shadow DOM.. - May 2012 brought many exciting developments in web standards, across a number of different Working Groups. Here, in the first of a regular series of reports, I’ll sum up the hottest topics and emerging trends ..
Guide to using SASS - I agree that ‘pre-processors’ such as LESS, SASS, Compass etc are normally a bad idea because generally they are used badly by developers/designers who could do better without them.
What Every Developer Must Know About PHP 5.4 - While the much-anticipated full Unicode support has once again been kept on hold, v. 5.4 includes several changes that optimize runtime, remove deprecated features, and make code a little more graceful.
Understand the Power of Sass and Why You should use CSS Preprocessors - Getting started with a preprocessor is not rocket science. As I mentioned earlier, a CSS preprocessor will have its own set of syntax, which finally gets compiled into normal CSS, which in turn, the ..
Hiding visible content from screen readers with aria-hidden - Sometimes you need to hide parts of a web page, either permanently or temporarily. A common use case is content that becomes visible only after the user has interacted with a control on the page, for instance by ..
Usability, User Experience, Responsive Webdesign, Mobile, etc.
5 Patterns To Rearrange Responsive Layouts - Understanding how to create flexible and adaptable layouts will probably be the first problem you work to solve when moving to responsive design and a number of patterns have emerged for how designers are moving the large blocks of a design around.
Why your site graphics look crap on the iPhone - It is a problem that also applies to the new iPad and will soon encompass most phones, laptops and tablets. Its therefore important to understand the problem and some of the challenges involved in fixing it.
Design Process In The Responsive Age - You cannot plan for and design a responsive, content-focused, mobile-first website the same way you’ve been creating websites for years—you just can’t. If your goal is to produce something that is ..
Personality : The fourth essential of a customer-centric business - We use web browsers every day and don’t really think about them until something goes wrong. Google Chrome crashed on me the other day and I got the iconic “Aw, Snap!” page with the unhappy ..
5 Reasons Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It - Responsive design is seemingly universally accepted as the way forward, but I am far from convinced. Today I am going to explain why I believe that responsive design is not always the optimal solution for web design.
Putting media queries in their place - This means that each element on a page has CSS that is unreliant on its position in the DOM. You could take that element and place it elsewhere on the page and it would appear the same.
Responsive workflow - Workflow in short: Starts from the content out and encourages to spend time to really think it through. After the first content drafts are done I convert them to HTML prototypes, open them up in a mobile browser, and look how the order of the content works there.
Webdesign in Common, Web Typography, jQuery, Tools, etc.
35 Useful jQuery Filter and Sort Plugins - By using jQuery Filter and jQuery Sort Plugins you will be able to have a great control over the order, placement and organization of your page / or table elements. Further some of these plugins include drag-able controls making it ..
Increase Event Attendance by Improving Your Call To Action - If you’ve been neglecting your call to action, here are 4 simple steps you can take to increase attendance to your event simply by improving your call to action.
The ultimate guide to web type - We all know that type on the web is vastly different from printed matter, but how and why it differs, and how this affects the ways in which a website is designed as well as viewed is often misunderstood.
6 Rules Every Minimalist Web Designer Should Live By - It’s important to remember that adding more elements to your design doesn’t equate to adding more value. Elements omitted from your design are just as important as what is kept. Just as in any discipline, design shouldn’t be superfluous.
50 New Resources and Tools for Web Developers - In this web developer round-up we have chosen 50 recently released resources and tools that offer time-saving solutions to many of the development issues you may come across.
8 Useful Websites for Testing Code Snippets - As a web developer, having a place to quickly test code can be extremely handy. For this post, we’ve gathered some very useful websites that allow you to do just that.
Useful jQuery Function Demos For Your Projects - Every aspiring Web developer should know about the power of JavaScript. Fortunately, to help us be more productive, we can use the power of JavaScript libraries, and in this article we will take a good look at jQuery in action.
Give Your Website Soul With Emotionally Intelligent Interactions - What is it that makes us loyal fans of the websites and apps we love? When we sat down to answer this question for ourselves, we found that the websites and apps we truly love have one thing in common: soul.
Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, Print Design, Icons, etc.
Why Brand Building Is Important - Brands are psychology and science brought together as a promise mark as opposed to a trademark. Products have life cycles. Brands outlive products. Brands convey a uniform quality, credibility and experience. Brands are valuable.
40 Most Useful And Fresh Photoshop Tutorials - Adobe Photoshop is the most commonly and most widely used designing software in the designing world. It has been used equally by the professionals as well as by the novices. This is the reason why Photoshop tutorials are always in demand.
Developing Brand Imagery - The process of creating a strong brand* involves a lot of behind-the-scenes efforts that go unnoticed by clients, customers, and other key stakeholders. When an organization decides to get serious about defining who they are, it is ..
Offline Portfolio, Winning Clients the Traditional Way - offline portfolios are clearly ignored these days whereas they are equally important as other design portfolios. Although online portfolios are getting quite popular, still nothing can replace the effect of a nice offline portfolio which an employer can go through while interviewing you.
11 reasons your infographic isn’t an infographic - A colored background, a few stick drawings and bizarre font choices don’t make something an infographic. You’re hunting the word into extinction. Please, stop.
Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Content Strategy, etc.
Get More Fans: 5 Tips To Promote Your Facebook Page - Starting out can be pretty tough but if you play your cards right and keep these few tips in mind, you will be able to see the numbers go up month after month.
Convert 10% of Visitors from Your Guest Post with These 10 Landing Page Tricks - Over the years I’ve seen some terrible landing pages and I’ve seen some really great ones. For those really great ones they always shared some common traits…ten in fact.
An Introduction To A Process For More Productive Blogging - It seemed like a good time to talk again about my blogging process. I’ve mentioned it before, but this time I’ll turn everything into a series and try to go a little more in-depth about each part of my process.
WordPress
Writing Custom Queries in WordPress - The basic functionalities in WordPress are fine for most simple needs, but what would you do if you want to implement some specific needs? Then you should learn how you can use SQL queries in WordPress right now!
Secure Your WordPress Blog Without Touching Any Code - The cases where a blog owner loses complete access to their site are not uncommon. Actually, sometimes even whole domains get hijacked, and I honestly have no idea on how that’s done.
Customise the WordPress Admin & Hand your Client a Custom CMS - Many WordPress developers would agree that WordPress is the most easy to use and powerful CMS. “I asked you for a business website and you handed me a blog” is a common complaint.
Create a Professional Restaurant Website in Minutes Using WP Plugins and PHP Scripts - Creating a restaurant website can be very challenging for a developer because there is not a single product to sell or show and they have to promote the real feeling of the restaurant’s environment as well.
Function Examination: wp_nav_menu - In this tutorial, we’ll dive deep into everything that the wp_nav_menu function can do, use the Walker Class to add a sub description, and touch on some of its related functions.
10+ WordPress page templates for all needs - WordPress is indeed one of the fastest way to build blogs and websites. Page templates allows you to create a page with a different layout in order to fill a specific need. In this article, I have compiled over 10 super useful tutorials ..
Data Sanitization and Validation With WordPress - Proper security is critical to keeping your site or that of your theme or plug-in users safe. Part of that means appropriate data validation and sanitization. Why this is important, what needs to be done, and what functions WP ..
How to make a WordPress demo site - This can be done by any user of WordPress 3.0 (or higher) more than a single extra plugin. All it requires is enabling one of the new WordPress “sleeper” features that goes unnoticed, and unused, by all but the most advance WordPress customers.
7 Tips To Improve Your WordPress RSS Feed - Here is a list of 7 tips you can use to help improve your WordPress RSS feed.
Search Engine Optimalization, Conversions, Analytics, etc.
How To Use Analytics To Make Smart Decisions About A Web Redesign - Forward thinking web site owners and developers are racing to provide an experience that caters for phones and tablets and their high-resolution ‘retina’ variants. Meanwhile screen sizes and ..
Penguin, Penguin, Who’s Got the Penguin? Let’s Throw a Link At It… - It’s only been a few short weeks since Google dropped the Penguin on search. Funnily enough, many of the ones squealing were the same people who ignored the warnings
A/B Testing: What it is and How Your Site Can Benefit - That said, how can you make sure your landing pages are giving a visitor the right amount of information? What about if just moving your form to a different part of the page made all the difference?
SEO Isn’t Magic – So Stop Doing SEO Tricks - We want that magic bullet to get our sites to the top of the SERPs, the one “secret trick” to get the edge on our competitors. And just like fad diets, a lot of secret/sneaky SEO tricks do work for a while.
Recovering from an Over Optimization Penalty – A True Story - As almost anyone reading this post already knows, April 24, 2012 marked a big day in the search industry. Once the initial Penguin update was rolled out (please believe me this is only the beginning and there ..
Top 20 Essential SEO Tips and Techniques - There is a need to implement basic as well as advanced SEO techniques to achieve desired results when looking to build traffic to your blog or website. It is therefore important that you understand the different SEO tips and techniques ..
Tutorials
Favicons Next To External Links - They were wanting to insert a favicon next to links and use only CSS to do it. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to do exactly that, but using some jQuery we can do it pretty easily.
Creating a Modern Lightbox with CSS3 and JavaScript - Since CSS animation first started to be used a few years ago, coders have enjoyed creating their own CSS-only Lightbox versions. Indeed, there is a real craze for CSS-only animation experimentation.
15+ Intriguing Brochure Designs With Some Expert Tutorials - Today’s post is about brochure designs and it is basically due to their undeniable importance and significance from both client and designer’s perspective. Most of the clients really judge the capabilities of ..
17 Fresh New HTML5 Tutorials - To help you get started with the various aspects of HTML5 design and development, I’ve compiled a list of some of the latest and most helpful tutorials and how-to articles.
25 CSS3 Animated Button and Menu Tutorials - In this round up, we are presenting a very useful collection of CSS3 Animated Button and Menu Tutorials and experiments for you. With this collection, we aim to help you improve your CSS3 skills.
Growing Thumbnails Portfolio - In this tutorial we will be making a portfolio with HTML5, jQuery and CSS3 that features an interesting growing effect.
Design a Prettier Table with Pure CSS3 - Lets design a HTML table element with Pure CSS3 tags without adding any classes to the table. Before I begin I pretend that all of you have the basic knowledge of HTML/HTML5 and CSS.
100+Best CSS3 Tutorials and Tricks for Design Beautiful Websites ~ In my post today, you will find many informative tutorials CSS3, each of you develop something new and different from the previous one.
Client Testimonials Powered by PHP, XML and jQuery - In this tutorial we are going to build a XML backed testimonial viewer, which, along with jQuery, can display the set on your product pages.
Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff
How to Get More Freelancing Visibility - If your prospective clients can’t find you, then they can’t hire you. That’s a fact. In this post, I’ll discuss why freelancing visibility is important. I’ll also explain how you can make your freelancing business more visible.
Designers: 9 Mistakes To Avoid For Successful Pitches! - So you’ve done the hard work. You’ve crafted a wicked resume, you networked incessantly and you finally get called in for an interview. You thought it went pretty well, so you waited.
25 Ideas to Promote Yourself Online as a Freelance Designer - It’s all about getting your work out there, about knowing the community, getting in touch with potential clients and about giving a little back to the community to get yourself known.
7 Tips for Closing the Sale - there are some simple things you can do to increase your effectiveness at closing the deal and securing the work. It’s really all about communication, which is a much more pleasant way of thinking about it as opposed to sales. In this article we’ll take a look ..
F*cking Brilliant, a great Read or just magnificent Tips!
Friction - The lower the expectations set by the medium, the less friction there is for ideas to be transmitted to it.
Discontent - Have you ever had to fit three lead stories onto a web page that was designed for only one? Ever needed to hastily rework a design because nobody realized that a product description might run to more than 200 characters until after you delivered the templates?
Has adaptive design failed? Of course not - Yesterday morning I read Peter Yared’s provocative article, ‘What’s next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?’ which is based entirely on the misassumption that mobile users don’t scroll. If that were true, the reasoning might be valid, but it’s not. It’s utter nonsense.
(Re)consider the Source - People turn more often to digital content but don’t necessarily trust it. Why? One reason is that people judge the credibility of content by the credibility of its source. Let’s take a closer look at the role of source in perceived credibility.
Think About Images and Text Together - Good design centers on good content. Good content needs good design to survive and stand out among all the other choices out there. The most successful design projects come together because of content-driven design.
MUD: Minimum Usable Design - No matter what stage of a design I am in, I am always halfway there. This is why you might find yourself always saying that you need two more weeks to finish up all the details. It will always be two more weeks no matter what, because all you did was get ..
Sweep the Sleaze - The user doesn’t come out of nowhere. We don’t land on your page and then head happily to those social networks to promote you, just because you have a button on your site. We find content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc., not the other way around.
10 pro tips for updatingyour web designs - The need for a designer to be well versed in the constraints and powers of the platform for which they are designing has never been more important. These are new challenges for any designer diving ..
Collaboration - One constant I’ve experienced over the years is that it isn’t a particular technology or design style that determines the success of a project, but how well the collaborators—clients, web designers and developers—understand each other.
How to Get Your Inbox Down to Zero and Keep it There - Your inbox can hinder your ability to get things done in two ways. The first are notifications. Even if you don’t have your email open on your desktop, you likely have alerts for new email ..
Why Cheap Customers Cost More - when you offer multiple plans for a service, the cheapest plan’s customers tends to requirethe most support. Now at first this seems counter-intuitive. You’d expect the opposite: that the people who pay the most feel more entitled to support, and thus ask for more of it.
I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know .. To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow me @gonzodesign