tripwire magazine

If you’re a Web Designer you should be spending most of your time creating unique and creative designs for your customers. Web designers need to know some aspects of web development to understand what is possible and where the technical limitations are but should code the web pages themselves too?.

Unless you’re a designer/developer multi the process of converting a design into web pages can be really hard and seriously time consuming. Doing it right requires deep knowledge of several technologies and good programming skills. This is especially true when a client requires the pages to be complying with and validating against most of specifications and standards available. In this situation there are different options you may choose from. First of all you can consider not to do it yourself and get some professional help. Obviously this has a cost but you may be spending your own time on productive work in stead of struggling with stuff you’re not comfortable with. You may consider to team up with a skilled programmer or try one of the companies specializing in slicing up a web design. If you on the other hand decide to do it yourself you should get some help anyway. In this situation tutorials and online tools comes in handy. This article first provides a list of PSD to HTML/CSS Service Providers and then a list of tutorials and tools in case you’re working all by yourself. If you need inspiration and help on creating web design that may not be too hard to slice up your should take a look at this article: 80+ Photoshop Tutorials: Practical Web Interface Design

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In this article you will get access to a massive collection of Photoshop brushes in the categories; Splatter, Retro, Symbols, Grunge, Abstract, Fractal, Light, Hand Drawn, Plants and Animals. Most of the images in this Brush showcase links to large collections of free brushes ready for your download and for being applied in your designs.

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With icons, web designers and graphic artists have a good opportunity to showcase their skills, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A well created, good looking icon set is a great way for designers to showcase their work and it may be a way to build up some reputation in the online sommunity. Creating professional Icons and allowing people to download them for free is a certain way to attract attention and visitors on a design portfolio or blog. But how how should you get started with creating icons that rock and stand out from the endless masses? This article provides a large collection of tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator that currently is the de facto standard tools for this purpose. The article also provides links to some very interesting and worth reading articles on icon design. Get started and please comment and drop a link to your own creations and favorite icon tuts and resources.

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Typography is a key element of design and communicating a message. This is especially true when it comes to Headlines that must attract immediate attention and wake an interest to investigate further. This articles provides a large collection of Fonts for Big, Bold and Beautiful Headlines that will be really useful for most designers. It also provides an opportunity for anyone to have their own headline showcased. submit comment or send mail to be added at the very bottom of this article.

All Fonts listed should be free. If you find that this is not true for any of them please comment to let me know.

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A really great source of inspiration is CSS Gallery and Web site design Repository sites. Looking at the successful work others created is one of the best ways to get ideas and kick start the creative process. This article provides a large compilation of web sites that specialize in collecting great web designs and making them easy to browse. All web sites are presented with screenshots and I hope you will easily find the sites that matches your needs. Get started with your creative journey with 30+ CSS and Web Site Design Showcase Sites any Designer MUST Know.

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It’s getting more and more usual for designers to showcase their artwork online and the result is tons of portfolio websites competing for awareness. This means that you need to be special to stand out. Having access to collections of great web designs that really stand out may speed up your design process significantly and increase the chance that the result you end up with have new and unique features. The value of fresh inspiration should not be underestimated and in this article you will find more than you’ll need. Get started and be inspired to create a unique and attractive portfolio.

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For designers nothing can be more handy than effective and time saving tools supporting their creative process. Of cause dependant on the specific needs free web-based tools can significantly help you accomplish tasks such as color selecting, color palette, creating own and unique fonts, editing images, and testing typography.

In this article tripwire magazine presents 30 essential Tools that hopefully will be useful for most Designers.

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Do you sometimes find Photoshop too hard and time consuming to work with? Photoshop can certainly create the effects you can dream up but it is expensive and not that easy to learn.

A large number of online services are available to help us all saving time or just having fun manipulating photos and creating effects instantly. Most of these are also free so you may get you graphical job done without investing in expensive tools. Of cause these tools have their limits but they are fun and can be useful some cases.

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In this article you will find more than 20 unique and worth knowing CSS Data Visualization Techniques. The techniques show in this article reallt takes CSS to a new level and even if you’re not going to visualize data you may get inspired from investigating them.

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As a follwoup on the article 40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets it is now time to deliver a similar package to Web Designers. Creating Web Designs isn’t easy at all as it is first of all a creative process. To get the creative process started it may be a good idea to seek inspiration by looking closely at the designs used on websites that belong to the segment your design will target (ex. e-commerce shop, corporate website, personal blog etc.). Once a designer have all the inpiration and all the ideas lined up to start the actual design process he or she needs to master a set og software products (ex. Adobe Photoshop) and best practice patterns for designing web user interfaces. This article will cover the elements you need to get work done more effectively as a web developer (ex. working in photoshop, Illustrator etc.) Please make sure that you post a comment if you know an important resource that have not been included in the article. I hope you will find this article useful, lets get started!

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