tripwire magazine

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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There are several new and exciting functions and features being thought up for CSS3: text-shadow, box-sizing, opacity, multiple backgrounds, border-radius, border-image, etc…

This article presents 7 New CSS3 techniques that every web designer and developer should be aware of. CSS3 for sure will leads to greater flexibility and make effects that was previously complex and difficult to create much easier. Unfortunately it is not currently all the leading browsers that support CSS3. In some cases other techniques are available making our life easier while waiting for CSS3 to break through and these will be briefly covered as well.

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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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In this article tripwire magazine presents a very large collection of Photoshop actions. A Photoshop action is a series of tasks that you play back on a single file or a batch of files. Actions can make nearly any change to an image and examples could be changing the image size, adding new layers, appling filters, saving files in a specific format etc.

Actions can include stops to allow user to give input. This could be to let users perform tasks that cannot be recorded or where it is part of the Action design to ajust a parameter for a filter. Actions are stored in <file name>.atn files and can easily be loaded into the Actions floating palette.

This article provides a large list of ready to use Actions but you can also use them to be inspired to record your own, customize existing (just double click on sub tasks), and batch-process actions, and you can manage groups of actions by working with action sets. Looking into how great actions apply superior effects is a very good way to learn new tricks. Lets get started.

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Quality logos encompass companies branding identity into one tiny graphic and in some cases vision and strategy is contained as well. That is why Logos are so important and inspirational to investigate. Good designers put significant effort into creating logos and it is an iterative process where multiple design ideas are created and presented.

Good logos are seriously difficult to create, why tutorials where you can learn how others do it can be worth investigating. See more in this article 80+ Logo Designers Huge Essential Toolbox. In my opinion pure inpiration from looking at good and clever logos is still the best approach.

Typography is in many cases an important element in logos and you may benefit from looking at other designs with grat typography and combine some of ideas into Logos. Here you find loads of typo-inspiration. 60+ Really awesome Typography Showcases, 40+ Awesome Typography Wallpapers, serious inspiration, 80+ Very inspiring uses of Typography.

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This article provides an extensive list Essential Pop-up Window enhancements that any web developer should be aware of. The article will mainly but not only focus on lightbox pop-up style solutions that have become incredibly popular.

Did you ever wonder who invented the lightbox pop-up technique? I think I tracked down the source of the “outbreak” that have been really a revolution in how web based interface are designed today. There may have been other similar attempts earlier but they didn’t start this change. (I’m not entirely sure – if you have further information on this please post a comment. ) Back in early 2006 Lokesh Dhakar created and shared a simple little javascript based script for bloggers that put an overlay with an image over the page loaded in the browser, he called it Lightbox JS. See his initial post here if you find this interesting in any way. The main idea of his contribution was to save the user from going to a whole new page to view an enlarged version of an image – essentially by emulating a modal window. Obviously this is really a briliant idea and it is used all over the web now in may different styles and implementations. It isn’t just used for showing a large versions of a thumbnail images. The technique have shown to be useful in many other uses and is for example used for configuration forms in the back-end of fx. Joomla and wordpress, for login and input forms on many websites, etc.

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What is a Photoshop Style? A Style in Photoshop or Layer Style, is a range of layer settings and options. So when you choose to add to a shape, could be some text, for example a drop shadow, a gradient and some stroke, you have effectively created a new Style. If you create a really good style that you may want to reuse or share photoshop supports that quite well. This article shows you the basics of using styles for creating great looking web 2.0 designs and provides essential resources for further studies. Also because styles can be saved in ASL file format you will be able to find preset styles as downloads in the Internet. In this article you will find some really good web2.0 related style resources and tutorials that you should take a closer look at. This article use the famous twitter logo as a case for a simple and quick tutorial. Lets get started and you will be creating your own web 2.0 logos very soon.

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Beautiful images of remarkable nature landscapes or spectacular plants can make most people fell happy and allow some to be lost in their own thoughts dreaming to be there and fell the air, the smell of the flowers etc. Having these images waiting to be admired on the desktop behind all your windows where work and tasks constantly steals your attention is not a bad idea at all. In this article you will access a nearly unlimited resource of stunning and remarkable beautiful Nature Wallpapers. If you’re a designer of any type these nature images will also be inspiring in themselves but they will also be potential material that you can use in your own work. Just make sure to check the license on images and design elements you download before using it in your own designs.

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There are indeed many ways in which designers can use typography to deliver a message or a specific emotion. The fonts used and the way the text is organized can be turned into a art work itself and as you will see below it is only the fantasy and imagination of each designer that defines the limits. This article provides a comprehensive list of more than 60 great typography showcases that I’m it sure will inspire you.

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