tripwire magazine » Design

45 Free Heart Vector Collection for Valentines

Ronalea — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:00:49 +0000

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner – few days from now, the world will be celebrating heart’s day. With this, a selection of free heart vector is in demand for web designs, cards, prints, posters, brochures, and the like. A heart vector is probably the most popular depiction of the season of love. Red is one of the colors which is commonly used by designers. But with their creativity and brilliant ideas, heart vectors also come in various colors, sizes, and style. Some are simple yet stunning, while others have ornamental designs.

Whether it is for a creative web design or Valentine’s day cards, heart vectors can add up to a more attractive design. With the use of your creativity, you can surely come up with an impressive heart vector for Valentines.

Looking for free heart vector for Valentines? Here is a collection of heart vectors done by different artists and designers. Take a look at them and enjoy!

1. Vector Floral Heart

2. Heart and pattern vector

3. Vectors of Heart

4. EPS vector flaming heart wings

5. Exquisite heart-shaped pattern

6. Burning Heart

7. WingLoveHeart

8. Vector Heart fluttering

9. Winged Heart

10. Gold Heart with Pink Wings

11. Flowered Hearts

12. Heart

13. Valentine’s Day Letter

14. Abstract Valentine Heart

15. Heart Design

16. Heart of Gold

17. Heart Painting Vector

18. Free Heart Vector Graphics

19. Angels Heart

20. Winged Heart Name Banner

21. Free Heart Vector Clip Art

22. Heart Banner Vector Graphics

23. Free Love Heart Vector Art Decoration

24. Free Valentine Heart Vector Graphics

25. Sunny Heart Vector Graphics

26. Vector Heart Valentine’s Day Background

27. Three-dimensional heart-shaped chocolate vector

28. Heart-shaped vector

29. Heart Vectors

30. Purple Heart Vectors

31. Free vector heart

32. Free Vector Wallpaper – Heart

33. Vector Heart Valentines Day

34. What Time Is Love

35. Love You Forever

36. Love Card Vector

37. Free Love Vector Art

38. Free Vector Hearts Graphics

39. Heart Vector Graphic

40. Heart with Wings

41. Romantic Love Card Vector

42. Lovely Heart Vector

43. Vector Heart Flowers

44. Heart Scribbles Vectors

45. Free Valentine Heart with Rays Vector Graphic

Author : Ronalea Talaboc
Rona is just a simple girl often lost in her daydreams in the days past. Now, she has found herself and discovered that she loves social media, gadgets, graphic design and anything creative. During her free time, you can find her taking pictures of cats and some surreal landscapes.

33 Unique Plastic Business Cards

Matt Payne — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:41:50 +0000

When it comes to business cards you need something that leaves a lasting impression and what better way achieve this than have a plastic business card that will survive the next 1000 years (unless responsibly recycled of course). Additionally plastic cards provide even more creative opportunities than regular cardboard cards, transparency allowing designers to create optical illusions and the extra durability making multi-purpose cards a reality. Below we have collected are just a few of the amazing plastic cards people have come up to promote their businesses.

Magnifying Glass

Stick two of these together and you don’t need to worry about new glasses.

Thick Card

Probably not one you would forget was in your wallet.

Fashion Card

Manliest business card ever.

2-Sided Transparent Card

Famine relief charities business card?

Airfix Style

If my childhood is anything to go on, I would get halfway through trying to contact them, give up and make my Dad do it.

Scratch Card

I wonder if it just leads to a phone call to a premium rate phone number.

Stationary Card

Oh yes the ability to draw a perfect circle often makes me think of fruit.

Motherboard Card

“We process your business needs” – oh dear

X-ray Card

Not sure this is an image I would want to continually be handing out.

Backstage Pass Card

“We only provide VIP services”

Comb/Music Card

I’m getting mixed messages about what this business actually does…

Tab Card

And again.

“Credit” Card

Probably a good start if you are having money problems.

Illusion Card

My only explanation for how this works is magic.

Reality Overlay

Is there one that makes me look like Brad Pitt?

Photography Card

What do you mean I can’t actually take photos with it!

Tape Card

What are these again?

USB Cards

Just don’t give out the one you have been storing client details on.

Vets Card

I really couldn’t say what that animal is.

Violin Card

I would love to see a full orchestra of instrument themed business cards.

Card with Filling

I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be paint or blood.

Entertainers Card

This isn’t a car freshener?

Designer Cards

I wonder if these are more of a cheat card than a neat design.

Stationary Card 2

Oddly this is a Helix the consultants and not Helix the stationary maker.

Animated Card

Where can I buy this (in action)

Octopus Bottle Opener

A traumatised octopus is certainly one way to be memorable.

Moustache Card

I moustache you a question about your services.

Shoe Horn

Is that supposed to look like a face?

Bottle Opener

I guess that’s a yes.

Recycled Travel Card

Just don’t stick it on your credit card and then give it away.

Credit Card

I can easily imagine spending 10 minutes to withdraw cash with this before realizing my mistake.

So that ends our list of the most unique plastic business cards on the planet. Are there any imaginative plastic cards missing from our set? Please let us know in the comments!

Author : Matt Payne

This post was written by Matt Payne the owner of Oomph, a creative and passionate plastic cards printer like no other. You can visit them online at http://www.madebyoomph.co.uk or follow them on Twitter @madebyoomph.

40 Amazingly Hot Free Retro Fonts You Must Have

Sonny M. Day — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:00:16 +0000

Fonts are very important resources for web designers and graphic artists. If you are one of them, it is necessary that you have a sizable collection of fonts, so that when the need arises, you can easily pullout a nice typography to give a distinctive style to your designs. For today, we have come up with samples of some of the hottest retro fonts out there in the web now. For the sake of illustration, we downloaded all the fonts and placed them on old paper texture to see how they look like when implemented on a design.

To say the least, these fonts are gorgeous in their own typographic flavor which is obviously reminiscent of the 60s, the 70s, the 80s and other bygone eras. Having downloaded all these fonts for presentation purposes, it thus confirmed that all of these work in actual designing environment.

By the way, these fonts are all free for personal use and some even for commercial purposes. If you intend to use them for commercial purposes we urge you to take an extra step to read the restrictions set forth by their authors. If you have doubts, you can contact them directly on their respective websites.

If you have any comment, or addition to these retro font collection, we are inviting you to please write them down below. We hope that you will find this article useful and if it does, please help us spread it by sharing it to your friends and foes alike.Enjoy!

Author : Sonny Day

Sonny M. Day is a passionate SEO and web design enthusiast who loves photography, mountain climbing, snorkeling and dirt bike riding.

101 Cool Backgrounds and Photoshop Tutorials for Designers

Dustin Betonio — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:00:00 +0000

A background is cool, if it is something that creates upon the mind of the audience, a sense of appreciation or adoration to its unique and beautiful appearance. Cool background may appear in different forms and designs but as a whole, they are things that titillates the viewer. It can be a repetition of simple stripes or polka-dots, complex combination of images and colors, or some ornate design. For web designers, background patterns are useful because they can be used in different elements of the design. This is aside from its common use as website background that gives a look and feel on the web page.

In using website backgrounds, web designers should take care that patterns must go with the overall style of the website. Using too “busy” patterns as backgrounds could make the website distractive and annoying. Here in In this article, we have collected 101 cool backgrounds and tutorials that you can use in more ways than one. You can use this as a website background, inspiration or as a base for an artwork. If by chance you don’t like one of the cool backgrounds included here, you can make your own by following one of the Photoshop tutorials below.

Photoshop Tutorials About Making Cool Backgrounds

There are many tutorials available in the web now and here are some that teach step by step procedure on how to make cool website backgrounds

1. How to Make a Dark Backgound with Luminescent Lines

2. How to Create an Energetic, Vibrant, Colorful Wallpaper

3. How to Make a Windows Vista Aurora Effect in Photoshop

4. How to Create an Abstract Signature

5. Abstract Summer Illustration Tutorial in Photoshop

Cool Website Backgrounds

6. Pipes

7. Colorful Rainbow Marble Patterns

8. Weaved Reed

9. Geometric Flowers

10. Colored Glass

11. Floral Background

12. Autumn Leaves

13. Smudged Green

14. Dancing Dolphins

15. Graffiti Wall

16. Graffiti Background

17. Colored Little Balls

18. Rainbow Licks WP

Rainbow Licks WP" width="552" height="442" border="0" />

19. Waterdrops

20. Purple Waterdrops

21. Creeping Vine Background

22. Rope Background

23. Plastic Buttons Background

24. Pink Carpet Texture

25. Zebra Background

26. Net Background

27. Dark Fibers Up Close

28. Various

29. Close up view, light fibers

30. Moons and Stars

31. Hand Drawn Seamless Hand Patterns

32. Playful Seamless Retro Patterns

33. Pink Pattern Pack

34. Retro Pattern

35. Paper

36. Paper Background

37. Floral Paper

38. Checkered Background

39. Floral Paper Background

40. Curly Floral Pattern

41. Grungy Curls

42. Design Inspiration

43. Insurrectionx

44. Psychedelic

45. Finding a Cure by dinpattern

46. The Inspiration Gallery

47. Red-eyed owl

48. Navaho

49. Hollyhock

50. Twitter Patterns

51. BG Patterns/a>

52. Squid Fingers

53. The Inspiration Gallery

54. Pattern Cooler

55. Patterrific

56. Portfelia

57. By maxcdn.thedesigninspiration

58. Red Tie by sunb1rd

59. Tileable Basket Weave Textures by WebTreats

60. Urban Strokes

61. Citrus Moon

62. Fractured Sanity

63. Color Editor by patterncooler

64. Antionette by dinpattern

65. Blue Pacific Blues

66. Everyday Icons

67. Koller Media

68. Ava7

69. Tickle

70. GypsyGarden

71. 700 miles by jimjim421

72. Tartanmaker

73. Appendix Squared

74. Hybrid-genesis

75. Shizoo

76. Don Barnett

77. Alice Grafixx

78. WebTreats

79. Din Pattern

80. Supah plaid

81. Danda Luna

82. Noqta

83. Squidfingers

84. Old Posy Gold

85. PatternCooler

86. The Design Inspiration

87. Blooming Pink

88. Modern Day Romance

89. Esticate random by panchicore

90. Noqta

91. Kerim Karaman

92. Lady Manderley

93. Logochic

94. Itseh

95. Pattern 8

96. Dinpattern

97. Afrodusa

98. Alessandro

99. Highwireart

100. Dc larien

101. Pattern Textures by ~princess-RxY

Author : Dustin Betonio

Dustin Betonio is a Translation Management graduate at University of Mindanao. His earlier career was devoted on customer service outside the information highway. Currently studying Law in the same University.

40 Superb Anime Wallpapers

Dustin Betonio — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:00:29 +0000

A lot of people loves anime, both children and adults with a child at heart. If you are one of them you will probably like some cool anime wallpapers to spice up for you desktop. Having an anime wallpaper is cool, because anime characters are stylish, loving , fun, and very charming. The definition of anime sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons.

Animes are very common today, even if you are not a fan, chances are you will have friends that are or your siblings may have an anime posters somewhere. There are lots of Anime series out there that are really very fun to watch, some are action packed, some are funny. Anime animators are really skilled and it can be quite inspiring to watch the series and to use one of these wallpapers.

In this article, I present to you some really great anime wallpapers for your desktop. These wallpapers are personally handpicked by me to give you a wide variety of choices. Enjoy!

1. Chun Li

2. Dragon Ball

3. Dragon Ball Team

4. Deidara

5. D-Grayman

6. Sephiroth

7. Sharingan Wallpapers

8. Gin Ichimaru

9. Lineage 2

10. One Piece

11. Kanda Yuu

12. Umbreon

13. BLUE MATRIX

14. Chen ‘n Keiko

15. Gilbert Nightray

16. Strawberry panic

17. Lelouch and Suzaku Code Geass

18. NightWalker: Tatsuhiko Shido

19. Stand Alone Complex

20. Rozen Maiden

21. Genesis Rhapsodos

22. Grey nite

23. Hitokiri Battousai

24. High School of the Dead cap

25. Trinity Blood-Abel Nightroad

26. Shukaku

27. Nine Tailed Fox

28. The mechas of anime

29. Kisame Hoshigaki

30. Kakuzu

31. Shukaku with Gaara

32. Nibi – 2 Tails

33. Sanbi

34. Yonbi

35. Gobi

36. Rokubi

37. Shichibi

38. Hachibi

39. Kyuubi

40. Vash Crazy Fireball

Author : Dustin Betonio

A lot of people loves anime, both children and adults with a child at heart. Its definite that you wish for a place that you can always find an anime wallpaper for you desktop or laptop.

How to Create a Blog Layout Part 2 [PSD to HTML]

sanjay — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:48:12 +0000

One of the most painful process (if you see it that way) of web design, is the stage where you have to convert PSD to HTML. The whole quality of your project lies on this stage.

Although there are thousands of services available online that converts your PSD to HTML, the fulfillment that you will get when you’re the one who worked on the entire project is priceless.

Advertisement
For today, you will learn how to use:

@font-face
CSS3 animation
CSS3 gradient; and
how to validate the code

Today we will convert our Blog Layout from the last tutorial. If you haven’t seen it, you need to check that out (I’ll wait). One of the things that I will show you is the proper way to convert your PSD to HTML, considering that we will also convert this into a WordPress Theme.

You can download the HTML file here.

We will start by breaking our layout into sections where you can see the:

-header
-content
-post on content
-sidebar on content; and
-footer.

Now we have a clear view on where our div’s should be. We will start with the slicing the image, then HTML structure, and move on to CSS.

Slice the PSD

Now, we will slice the logo, sidebar ads, and background. Open your PSD file and let’s start!

Grab the Cropping Tool (C) and crop the logo, save it as logo.png then press CTRL + Z to revert back to the original layout.

Next one is the ads, just crop one image and then save it. (Was trying to screenshot the cropped image but PS won’t let me, so I ended up using Marquee Tool. But please use Crop Tool )

I also cropped the background, under random post there is some space so crop that and save. Or you can just save this image right click > save image as.

Now save those images on your image folder and let’s move on!

We will use @font-face, so go to Font Squirrell and download Bebas @font-face kit. Open the zip folder, copy these (BebasNeue-webfont.eot, BebasNeue-webfont, and BebasNeue-webfont) then paste these file on CSS folder.

PSD To HTML Conversion

First thing that we will do is create these files index.html, image folder, and CSS folder. Or we can use these handy tool Instant Blue Print, this tool will generate those files for you. We just saved 5 minutes of our time

Open you index.html on your editor in notepad++ or if you’re using Dreamweaver that’s fine. Put this at the very top of your editor.


Tripwire Magazine

Here is the HTML for header.







	Home
	Blog
	About
	Contact

Here is the HTML for the whole content







 
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

  Posted in Wordpress
  Sanjay
   4 Comments
  Wordpress, Tutorials





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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

	
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

	
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Here is the HTML for the footer





 Powered by: Wordpress


 Tripwire Magazine

As you can see all of our div’s are well commented. This might take some time getting used to, but trust me that commenting your div’s will save you a ton of time in the future.

Right now the page has no styling and if you checked it, it’s really messed up. We will use CSS to style our page, open style.css on your CSS folder and paste this code below.

The CSS below is for the head and navigation.


body {
 background: url(../images/bg.png);
 color:#000;
 font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
 font-size: 14px;
}
header{
	background:#404040;
	width:100%;
}
.head{
	width:980px;
	margin:0 auto;
	overflow:hidden;
}
nav{
	float:right;
}
nav ul{
    list-style: none outside none;
    overflow: hidden;
}
nav li{
	display:inline;
}
nav li a{
    margin-left:2px;
    background:#404040;
    border-top-left-radius: 4px;
    border-top-right-radius: 4px;
    color:#fff;
    display: block;
    float: left;
    font-size: 14px;
    font-weight: bold;
    padding: 10px 0;
    text-align: center;
    text-decoration: none;
    width: 94px;
}
nav ul li.active a {
    background:#f9f6f5;
    border-top-left-radius: 4px;
    border-top-right-radius: 4px;
    color:#3a3a3a;
    display: block;
    float: left;
    font-size: 14px;
    font-weight: bold;
    padding: 10px 0;
    text-align: center;
    text-decoration: none;
    width: 94px;
}
nav li a:hover{
    -moz-transition: background 200ms ease-in-out 0s;
    -webkit-transition: background 200ms ease-in-out 0s;
    background:#f9f6f5;
    border-top-left-radius: 4px;
    border-top-right-radius: 4px;
    color:#3a3a3a;
    display: block;
    float: left;
    font-size: 14px;
    font-weight: bold;
    padding: 10px 0;
    text-align: center;
    text-decoration: none;
    width: 94px;
}

These line does some animation to our navigation, on hover the background animates by 200ms. Feel free to change the time to whatever you want.

-moz-transition: background 200ms ease-in-out 0s;
-webkit-transition: background 200ms ease-in-out 0s;

Now for our content.

#content{
width:980px;
margin:40px auto 20px auto;
padding:5px;
overflow:hidden;
min-height: 100%;
height: auto !important;
height: 100%;
}
.content-left{
float:left;
width:615px;
background:#fff;
border:1px solid #dddddd;
-moz-border-radius:6px;
-webkit-border-raduis:3px;
border-radius:3px;
padding:20px;
}
.content-left-main{
margin-bottom:20px;
}
.content-left img{
background:#fff;
padding:5px;
border:1px solid #d6d6d6;
}
.content-left-main-info{
font:normal 10px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color:#ccc;
float:right;
margin:20px 0;
}
.content-left-main-info a{
color:#ccc;
text-decoration:none;
}
.content-left-main-info a:hover{
color:#999;
text-decration:none;
}
.content-left-main-info img{
vertical-align:top;
border:0;
padding:0;
margin-left:5px;
}
.content-right{
float:right;
width:310px;
overflow:hidden;
}
.content-right h2{
background:#f6f4f4;
font-family: 'BebasNeueRegular';
font-size:22px;
text-align:center;
padding:10px;
margin-bottom:10px;
border:1px solid #bbbbbb;
background: #ffffff; /* Old browsers */
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%, #e5e5e5 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#ffffff), color-stop(100%,#e5e5e5)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* Opera 11.10+ */
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* IE10+ */
background: linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* W3C */
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#ffffff', endColorstr='#e5e5e5',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
-moz-border-radius:5px;
-webkit-border-radius:5px;
border-radius:5px;
-moz-box-shadow:0 0 4px #c5c5c3;
-webkit-box-shadow:0 0 4px #8f8f8f;
color:#8f8f8f;
text-shadow:0 1px #fff;
}
.content-right ul{
list-style-type:none;
padding:0;
margin-left:20px;
}
.content-right li img{
display:block;
margin:5px;
float:left;
}
.post ul{
list-style-type:none;
}
.post ul li{

}
.post h3 {
margin-bottom:5px;
}
.ads{
overflow:hidden;
}

On .content-right h2, to achieve the gradient effect I use this Gradient Generator Tool by Colorzilla. Pretty nifty tool!

Our last part is the footer


footer{
background:#404040;
width:100%;
clear:both;
}
.foot{
padding:20px 0;
width:980px;
margin:0 auto;
overflow:hidden;
color:#8f8f8f;
text-shadow:0 1px 1px #000;
}
.foot a{
color:#8f8f8f;
text-decoration:none;
text-shadow:0 1px 1px #000;
}
.foot a:hover{
text-decoration:underline;
}
.foot-left{
float:left;
}
.foot-right{
float:right;
}

Now go and check the page in your browser, the CSS3 will work on Mozilla, Chrome and Safari latest version IE doesn’t
support it. After checking and everything works, it’s time to validate our code. Go to http://validator.w3.org/ and select validate by direct input.

It’s valid!

We are done! Feel free to use this on your projects, you can also use this to hone your HTML skills You can also visit different web gallery and try to code different lay out. The harder the layout, the more you’ll learn. Happy Coding!

You can download the HTML file here and see a working demo here.

How to Create a Blog Layout in Photoshop

sanjay — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:11:49 +0000

Creating a blog layout isn’t that hard, the only thing you need is what kind of layout do you want. It maybe two column, three column and the list goes on. Keep in mind however that most themes have multiple page templates today e.g. blog index, archive page, contact page, front page (for CMS style sites where the blog is just an element). Today we will create a blog layout (the blog index page) in Photoshop, and convert it onto HTML / CSS (on the next series) and finally on a convert it again on a WordPress Theme. I hope you are ready because everything will be from scratch.

Our first part is to create the layout in Photoshop, and we are using a two column layout for our blog.

I suggest you subscribe to our RSS because this will be a series of tutorials and you don’t want to be left behind!

Blog Layout

Let’s begin!

Create a new file as shown below.

Open your canvas and set the sizes to 1000px for width and 1300 for height.

Fill your background with #f9faf9 and go to filter > noise > add noise, set the amount to 1%.

Create a new layer name header, grab your Marquee Tool (M) and select 100px on top, fill it with #404040.

We will now create a logo, select the color #ff6f17 and use the font Eras Bold ITC 53PT.

Select Blending Options > Drop Shadow and set the color to #dbdbdb, the rest is default.

On Inner Glow, set the color to #fbfbfb and size to 1px.

In Gradient, follow this colors and hit OK.

Follow the Gradient Settings above.

In Stroke, set the color to #fcc19f and size to 1px.

You should have something like this.

For the “Magazine” word, select drop shadow color #000000, size and distance to 1px.

Here is your logo.

We will create the navigation, use Arial Regular 28pt color #fff except on “Home” which is color #000000.

Grab your Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) radius 8px, and create the shape under home layer.

Select Marquee Tool (M) and delete the lower part of the current layer.

Your navigation should look like this.

Now on the content. Grab your Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) raduis 3px and select the left side of the canvas.

Still on content layer, go to blending options > drop shadow, use the color #dfdfdf. Blending Mode to normal, and the rest are defaults.

In stroke, color is #dcdcdc and set the size to 1px.

Grab Marquee Tool (M) and select a rectangular shape inside content layer.

Drag ‘n drop the image and right click > create clipping mask. The image will be inside the selected box.

On our image layer, select inner glow and set the blending mode to normal, the rest are defaults.

Stroke color is #959595 and set the size to 1px, Opacity to 40%.

Check out the border of the image. I also added some text, for the title I use Bebas 32pt color #505050 and the exceprt is Arial 28pt color is #888888 Regular.

Duplicate the layers and post different pictures so it’ll look more alive.

Now we will work on the sidebar, grab Rounded Rectangular Tool (U) and set the radius to 3px.

Blending Option > Drop Shadow, set your foreground to #818181 and distance to 1px.

Inner Glow, change blending mode to normal and size to 1px.

Copy the gradient color settings above.

In stroke, color is #b1b1b1 size is 1px, Opacity 100%.

You should have the same image as above, I also added some text. I use Bebas 28pt color #8f8f8f. Next is to sunken the text!

For our sunken text, in drop shadow color #ffffff, blending mode normal and distance & size are 1px.

Inner shadow color is #f2f2f2 and distance and size is 1px.

This is our title sidebar, compare the one you have above

Now we will create an advertisement holder, select Marquee Tool (M) and draw a 125px by 125px on the sidebar. Fill with #5f5f5f.

In gradient, follow the settings above.

Now we have these ads holder. Next is to add some text.

I added some text, I use Arial 19pt Regular color is #fffff. And then I added some dropshadow set the color to #00000, size and distance to 1px. Duplicate the layer and display 2 in a row.

For sidebar title just duplicate the one that we created above. Create some text for random post section, I use Bebas 24pt color #505050.

Grab your Elliptical Marquee Tool (M) and draw a line under the title of the post. Create a new layer and fill the first one with #d9d5d7, create a new layer again (for the second one) and fill it with #ffffff. I use brush for filling the lines with colors

Now, press your down arrow keys once to drop 1px and show the first layer of line. See the sunken line effect on close up.

Duplicate the layer and fill in those left titles. You can compare your work now

For footer, select Marquee Tool (M) and fill it with #404040. For the text I use Arial 12pt color #8f8f8f with a little bit of drop shadow.

There you have it! You see creating a blog layout on Photoshop isn’t that hard, and we are just getting started. The next part is converting this into HTML and CSS, remember we will convert this into a full working WordPress Theme so I suggest to subscribe on RSS so you’ll know when will be the next part. See you on the next series

Download the free PSD file here.

Author : Sanjay Khemlani

Sanjay is a Web Designer from Philippines, he is dedicated to clean coding and effective design. He also writes tutorials about Web IU and Web Design on his blog.

35 Useful and Free E-books for Web Designers

Dustin Betonio — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 07:00:46 +0000

I have been looking for free e-books for web designers since it is a medium that can be a good way to pick up inspiration and new techniques. While buying new and fresh books from the large publishers may give you the latest releases free e-books still can be a great and completely free resource. With a tablet or e-book reader it actually works quite well and it also give you some time away from the computer to more easily focus on learning.

Sound too good to be true? Well its not, there are actually a lot of e-books available on the internet. In this post, I am showcasing a useful collection of free e-books that every designer and developer should consider reading. I hope that you will learn some new techniques and get help in mastering your own expertise and skills. Feel free to comment if I missed out some interesting free e-books. Enjoy!

1. The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design

Stephen Hay – explains how there is a process that can help you get into the mind of the clients and figure out what exactly they want their designs to look like, even if what they tell you is not so clear for you.

2. Why Design?

The “Why design?” booklet outlines the role of design in business strategy. It seeks a common framework for why design adds value to clients’ interests. It defines the power of Designing, a larger concept that includes strategy as well as artifacts across a variety of disciplines.

3. Time Management for Creative People

Delivering time management training and coaching for hundreds of creative people has taught the author a lot about what it takes to get original work done in the midst of the demands and distractions of the 21st century workplace.

4. Introduction to Good Usability

An accessible guide to good usability and design for beginners and intermediates. These 21 pages include some classic problems of usability that you might encounter and the solutions to handle them.

5. Head first HTML with CSS & XHTML

A learner’s guide to creating standards-based Web pages.

6. Design Your Imagination

The book has been written by some of WebGuru India’s most seasoned professionals and is divided into 28 comprehensive chapters. Each chapter is on a specific topic with a number of examples for better understanding. The language is lucid, to-the-point and easy to understand.

7. How To Be Creative

MacLeod, an advertising executive and popular blogger with a flair for the creative, gives his 26 tried-and-true tips for being truly creative. Each point illustrated by a cartoon drawn by the author himself.

8. Integrating Accessibility Through Design

Find out how to improve the design of your website by keeping an eye on accessibility. What makes this resource great is the fact that the author, Shawn Henry, is a promoter of web accessibility for users with disabilities.Also, this book helps you improve your products—websites, software, hardware, and consumer products—to remove accessibility barriers and avoid adding new barriers. One guiding principle is: just ask people with disabilities.

9. HTML & XHTML

The definitive guide to HTML & XHTML.

10. HTML5 WTF?

Another overview of the changes introduced by HTML5.

11. A Practical Guide To Web Typography

A must-have for any web designer that respects himself. It’s a classic! It walks you through all the web design principles and the available techniques that can help you design a better website.

12. Access by Design Online

Being a web designer means to create thinking of users at all times. The goal is to make the site as accessible and easy to use as possible. This e-book explains the process of usability and the principles of a web that works for all users.

13. Type Classification eBook

This book has been made to help you learn the 10 broad classifications of type. These are the basic foundations of what you need to learn to learn typography and it is essential for any designer to know how to classify type.

14. JavaScript Programming for the Absolute Beginner

This book not only teachers JavaScript – a great programming ‘gateway’ language – it also teaches readers the fundamental programming concepts they need to grasp in order to learn any computer language.

15. Using XHTML

Using XHTML, including comprehensive information that will help web professionals to get the most from XHTML. The book starts by explaining how XHTML differs from HTML, and why its necessary. It then covers the meat of XHTML, including syntax and document creation.

16. Pro Drupal Development

Widely praised for its in-depth coverage of Drupal internals, bestsellingPro Drupal Developmenthas been updated for Drupal 6 in this edition, and provides are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer.

17. Web Style Guide: 3rd Edition (HTML)

Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites

18. Taking Your Talent To The Web

The author wrote this book in 2001 for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding. Rated 5 stars in amazon, it is now downloadable for free.

19. Web design in a Nutshell

“Web Design in a Nutshell,” is one of the first books to capture this new web landscape with an edition that’s been completely rewritten and expanded to reflect the state of the art. In addition to being an authoritative reference for (X)HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, this book also provides an overview of the unique requirements of designing for the Web and gets to the nitty-gritty of JavaScript and DOM Scripting, web graphics optimization, and multimedia production. It is an indispensable tool for web designers and developers of all levels.

20. Things I learned about Browsers and the Web

A very useful ebook about browsers and the web.

21. Forty’s Pocket Guide to SEO

Quick reference for SEO terms and phrases.

22. The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web (HTML)

A practical guide to web typography.

23. Design Patterns

‘Essential JavaScript & jQuery Design Patterns For Beginners’. Design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software development and are a very useful tool to have at your disposal.

24. jQuery Fundamentals

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the jQuery JavaScript library; when you’re done with the book, you should be able to complete basic tasks using jQuery, and have a solid basis from which to continue your learning. This book was designed as material to be used in a classroom setting, but you may find it useful for individual study.

25. Dive Into HTML5

Dive Into HTML 5 is an ongoing book that seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. The final manuscript will be eventually published on paper by O’Reilly, under the Google Press imprint.

26. The Woork Handbook

The Woork Handbook is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other topics about web design.This book is a miscellanea of articles written by Antonio Lupetti on his web design blogr. During the period form January to December 2008 “Woork” has been visited from over 4 millions visitors and has received a lot of requests to distribute a printable version of its contents.

27. HTML5 Quick Learning Guide

This guide introduces you to just the main elements of HTML5 that you’ll probably want to use right away. This guide is for those who want to get the basics figured out first, and worry about the finer details later on.

28. Eloquent JavaScript

A concise and balanced mix of principles and pragmatics. You will surely love the tutorial-style game-like program development. This book rekindled my earliest joys of programming. Plus, JavaScript!

29. Practical PHP Programming

In this eBook you’re about to learn to use the most powerful web development language that can be found, and, what’s more, you will do so with the minimum of fuss.

30. Knock Knock

Knock Knock is now available for you to read for free. It’s a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively.

31. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running

Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter of days. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. If you’re like a lot of web developers, you’ve probably considered kicking the tires on Rails – the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers.

32. Ajax Design Patterns

“Ajax Design Patterns” shows you best practices that can dramatically improve your web development projects. It investigates how others have successfully dealt with conflicting design principles in the past and then relays that information directly to you.

33. Foundations of Ajax

If you are an experienced web developer ready for a concise yet quality introduction to Ajax, then you have found your book. Written in a friendly conversational tone by experienced web developers for experienced web developers, it would be hard to imagine a better introduction to XMLHttp Request and the related technologies needed to leverage its benefits.

34. Essential ActionScript 3.0

Essential Actionscript 3.0 is a great book for beginners as well as intermediates with Actionscript 2.0 experiance. This book was completely re-hauled from the previous Essential Actionscript 2.0 book. It breaks down the very basics and leads programmers down the path to good effective.

35. Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are the modern standard for website presentation. When combined with a structural markup language such as HTML, XHTML, or XML (though not limited to these), cascading style sheets provide Internet browsers with the information that enables them to present all the visual aspects of a web document. Cascading style sheets apply things such as borders, spacing between paragraphs, headings or images, control of font faces or font colors, background colors and images, textual effects such as underlined or strike-through text, layering, positioning, and a number of other presentational effects..

Author : Dustin Betonio

40+ Incredible Samsung Galaxy Wallpaper Collection

Dustin Betonio — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:40:54 +0000

Samsung Galaxy is a series of mobile computing devices produced by Samsung Electronics, all of which use the Android operating system. They help you keep in touch with the rest of the world and connect to almost anything with style. Samsung brings mobile phones to those who share a passion for innovation whether you prefer conventional or connectivity wise. Having a Galaxy device from Samsung whether it may be a tablet or smartphone really stands out compared to other smart phones. Especially when having an incredible samsung galaxy wallpaper to show off your galaxy device.

As you know Apple and Samsung were involved in a legal tussle with the fruity company managing to successfully block the sales of selected Samsung devices in some parts of the world. This fight has not prevented Samsung from selling millions of units of galaxy S devices and galaxy tablets worldwide while the faster and better galaxy s2 have passed 30 million sales worldwide. Simply amazing right?

In this post, I present to you an incredible Samsung Galaxy Wallpaper collection personally handpicked by me. Resolutions for your Samsung galaxy device are available by just clicking the links. If you’re looking for live wallpapers then check these android Live Wallpaper Downloads or are you on the look a new case or cover to your SG2 device? Then check out our article on Best Samsung Galaxy S2 Cases. Feel free to comment if I missed out some wallpapers that deserves to be in the list. Enjoy!

1. Purple Haze

2. Android TMNT

3. BioShock Cartoon

4. Angry Birds

5. Evil And Angel

6. Music

7. Explicit

8. Smiley

9. Stewie

10. Tron Android

11. Negative

12. Rolls Royce

13. The Simpsons – Homer and Marge

14. Dwight Howard

15. Hot babe and the red car

16. Help

17. BMW M1

18. Anywhere is…

19. Batman

20. Barney Stinson

21. Android Lightsaber

22. Tekken

23. Waterfalls

24. Crazy dog

25. Abstract

26. Girl

27. Streen of colors

28. Pink Android

29. Nba

30. Alien ware

31. Android Robot

32. Sunrise

33. Live Laugh Love

34. Spongebob

35. Turtle

36. Sphere

37. Underwater

38. Nexus One Live

39. Motorcycle Details

40. Ace Spade

41. Unique Bubble

42. Modern Art

43. City Lights

44. Bio Shock Diver

45. Tiger in the Long Grass

Author : Dustin Betonio

How to Create a Seach Bar in Photoshop

sanjay — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:09:15 +0000

I’ve been thinking to put a search box on my site lately, and while doodling in Photoshop for some design I finally had something. So while I am still waiting to decide on where on my site I should put it – I wanted to show you how I created it in detailed steps.

Again, all of my tutorials are fairly easy to do. No special technique has been used, if you got lost on the steps please do ask me in the comments below.

Final Result

Let’s begin!

Open your canvas, use width 400px and height 200px.

Grab your Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and set the radius to 5px. Draw the same shape like above.

In Blending Options > Drop Shadow set your foreground to #818181 and Distance 1px and Size 5px.

Select Inner Glow and set the Foreground to #FFFFF and change the size to 1px.

On Gradient Overlay, set this colors.

Follow the Gradient Settings above.

In Stroke, change the color to #b1b1b1 and set the size to 1px, Opacity to 100%.

You should have the same box like the one above.

We will create another one, this will be our input field (when doing HTML). Same as the first step, Rounded Rectangle Tool – radius is set to 5px.

On Drop Shadow, change the Foreground to #FFFFF and Distance and Size to 2px.

Now select Inner Shadow, Foreground color #b6b6b6 and Angle to 90, Distance 1px and Size to 5px.

Inner Glow, Foreground color #FFFFF change the Size to 1px and hit OK.

Now select Stroke and set the size to 1px. Change your color to #9d9d9d.

Here is our form field, it’s coming out pretty well.

Now, we will create the search button. Create a new layer and select Marquee Tool (M), draw a square shape like the one above. Fill it with #5d8f27.

Now, while still highlighting the search button layer click the input field layer and press CTRL + SHIFT + I and hit delete. Result should be the same above.

On search button layer, Blending Options > Drop Shadow set the Distance to 1px, Size 2px.

In Gradient > follow the color settings above and hit OK.

To create a left border on the button, we will add a line. On Single Row Marquee Tool (M) and fill in the color with #76a934.

Here is our search button, I also added some text. I use Bebas 16pt #5b8c26.

Next is to create some detail to our text. Drop Shadow > set the color to #fffff and Distance and Size to 1px also angle to 90.

In Inner Shadow, Foreground is #538224 and Distance, Size 1px.

Here is the text, someone is looking for a job! Font is Bebas 16pt #6f6f6f.

On text that we just put in, select Blending Options > Drop Shadow and follow the settings above.

Inner Shadow use #00000, and Distance, Size 1px.

Here it is! Almost done, now to add some background patterns so it’ll look good.

Ta-da! Here it is, finally. As you’ve noticed we didn’t use any new or advance technique to create this search bar UI. What we used a lot is blending options for layers and a few gradients which gives us a greater detail. You can download the PSD here for free.

The question now is, can you turn this into a working HTML / CSS search bar form? So I can finally use it on my website

Author : Sanjay Khemlani

Sanjay is a Web Designer from Philippines, he is dedicated to clean coding and effective design. He also writes tutorials about Web IU and Web Design on his blog.