tripwire magazine

Tutorials on how to create Web designs in tools like Photoshop have increased rapidly in numbers recently and as always there are some that are better than other. I have previously created quantitative lists trying to list any tutorials available that is worth following fx. 185+ Web Design Tutorials using Photoshop, CSS, HTML etc. In this article I have put a significant effort into picking only a few but some of the best available. This should make your life easier and its not too overwhelming to plan going through them to sharpen your skills and be inspired. I have based my assessment on the quality of the design itself, appearance of interesting and useful tip/techniques  and on the detail and quality of the individual tutorial steps. Stay tuned as I will scan through more tutorials and provide more Web Design Tutorials you can’t resist trying out!

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Most websites and blogs follow same overall structure in their design. At the top there’s a header section with a logo and in some case a few ads and some kind af navigation. At the bottom there’s some kind of footer. Between the header and footer there are one or more column with content. Traditionally most space and focus have been put on the header and the content sections while the footer have been one or two lines with maybe some contact information and a few important links. Many websites still follow this pattern but there’s certainly a trend right now turning this completely around. Modern websites and in particular blogs offer footers that are significant design elements, that become essential for the usability and overall look and feel. Of cause footer contents varies quite a lot from design to design (some having article lists, contact forms, votes, bio, navigation, image feed etc.) but it’s interesting to see how designers prioritize their footer today. Looking at footers created by other designers for great websites and blogs is inspiring and it may help us get ideas on what fits will in our own footer sections. This article showcase more than 40 great looking footers and should be enough to keep you inspired. But I hope you will leave comment if you know about  a great footer we should all know about.

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Blog designs certainly can by complex, colourful and overwhelming and many free themes for Wordpress belongs to that category. Some bloggers on the other hand prefer simple and clean layouts for their blog leaving more space for the text itself to be in focus. If you should go for a minimalistic theme is really up to you to decide but if you’re considering this post will give you the inspiration needed and may help you find the theme you are looking for.

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There are indeed many ways in which designers can use typography to deliver a message and even though humans use many years in school learning to read and write images are still making larger and more instant impact on us and affect our emotions easier than plain text. As you know “A picture is worth a thousand words” and this fundamental principle is often used by designers combining or modelling typography into images illustrating or supporting the message provided in text itself. This is a very large showcase compilation providing you inspiration, ideas and some of the best typography artwork created.

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As a designer you are probably it is likely that you have got yourself  an iPhone by now. If not I’m quite sure this post may make you reconsider if it is time to invest. This post provides a list of 30 iPhone Apps that will be particularly useful for Designers. A great thanks to Kevin from http://www.theroxor.com/ for contributing with this guest post.

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Designing web sites is a highly creative process and it isn’t easy at all to get started if you don’t have the right ideas, inspiration and tools available. One thing is to get the idea or falling in love with a design used on some web site you run into. Turning the idea into a concrete design, fx. a nicely layered and structured PSD ready to be sliced can be quite a challenge unless you have years of experience. One of the best ways to get started is to learn from others having enough experience and passion to share their techniques and ways of working in detailed tutorials. Great thanks to all the tutorial creators – keep up the great work!

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As a designer you are probably hungering for good quality Fonts that are not going to destroy your budget but that at the same time are giving what you need to be at the front foot as a professional. Fonts are used everywhere and I bet you agree that adding more to your tool box won’t be too bad. Go on and see if there’s anything you can use!

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Working on a design for a new Logo? Looking for inspiration? You have come to the right place! This article “Fresh Logos Inspirational Showcase” will take you through a seriously large series of intelligent, well designed and inspirational Logos. Good Logos isn’t something designers just create – Good Logos need to catch attention and be easy to memorize. This is the hard part really but as you can see below there are plenty of ideas to stimulate the human mind and force us to say…hmmm what is that? Hope you will produce some unique ideas of your own by going through the list below!

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This article has been extracted from this book: http://www.packtpub.com/blender-3d-2-49-incredible-machines/book“. It is a guest post by Pact Publishing covering concepts of Steampunkt and provide basics steps for modelling af Steampunkt spacecraft with the 3D modelling Tool Blender 3D. If you didn’t know it already Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. If you wan’t to try modelling yourself you can get Blender here. You can create very realistic scenes with Blender 3D and there are many interesting resources available Internet but in my opinion reading a good book on how to use this tools is recommended – especially if you want to get started using it or plan to learn new features the good old way that we all know simply works!

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Are you aware that the features making Wordpress so popular for bloggers actually may be quite useful as a CMS for anyone building a website? Actually Wordpress is silently serving a lot of websites that have nothing to do with blogging at all and I think the number will be growing dramatically in the near future.

Regardless if you’re a passionate blogger writing about subjects you’re interested in or if you have a company selling services or products, publishing content on-line is all about interaction with other people. The blogging tsunami that have hit us over the last couple of years has significantly changed the way a lot of people seek and publish information on-line and more importantly how people interact and share opinions and ideas. Information can be produced by anyone and people have used this opportunity! There are millions of bloggers today and their busy lifestyle demands good tools for publishing; it must be easy, simple, fast, accessible and make it easy for their reader to contribute and communicate. Wordpress is the tools and it offers everything a blogger needs and more and then it is completely free and so is thousands of extensions and themes produced by the enormous community supporting Wordpress. Further Wordpress is know to be highly optimized for search engines and may make a difference in the amount of traffic you get from this channel.

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