I had a request from a long term client to design six different Tumblr themes, to be honest the first question I thought of was: ‘Why?’. Being a very good client I thought I had better looked into things, have an educated answer ready for all his questions, and then ask him again: ‘Why, oh, why?’. I had a fair idea what tumblr was, a lesser WordPress, maybe a more functional Twitter. I knew nothing. For those that read this [...]

The amount of WordPress Plugins available for download are endless, to sift through them and find one or two that you can actually use can be horrendous. Quite often you can find, like a Flickr Plugins, hundreds that do the same function. Others are far too complicated for the designer as well as the user to be usable. Some are even just pointless, and use up design space. How do you test all of them? Do you rely on word [...]

This theme has been a change for me, I went for a darker look. I kept to my usual style of using a minimal amount of images, in this case images for the logo and RSS buttons only, and relied upon css styling, maintaining my philosophy of keeping it simple. Like all my themes these were designed with the web designer in mind, something simple to edit and change. The theme has a white content area making legibilty easy and [...]

Quite often we stumble on to a blog that looks bland, in dire need of some color, a little bit of character, these sites maybe aren’t very familiar with blog design, let alone CSS. The simplest way to freshen up a site is with a new theme or to do a little CSS tweaking with your current theme. You could be surprised with the results. In this article I will show you the best resources for backgrounds and textures. For [...]

In recent weeks I have written about website inspiration styles, showed were to get the best free icons to gloss up your site, the proper fonts to use and were to get the best WordPress Themes. This week I am going to write about color, and the importance of selecting a perfect color scheme. There are many different building blocks to designing and building a web site. Content/product has always got to be at the forefront of your mind in [...]

A year in the life of web design can be compared to architecture from the sixties to the architecture of the nineties. The difference is phenomenal. If you don’t keep up with web trends then it will most definetly reflect on your design, technologies evolve slower, making it easier to keep up to date, but styles make life harder. One of the most prominent design styles to make it to the forefront of design is the ‘clean’ style and the [...]

Please Note: This article has been updated, click here: Top 40 Free Icon Resources for Web Designers (Updated). Some of the below links have died and I have added 15 new excellent links. 1. Fam Fam Fam (www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/) 2. Brand Spanking New (www.brandspankingnew.net/archive/2006/12/hohoho.htm) 3. Greyscale (www.e-lusion.com/design/greyscale/) 4. Drunky Love (http://www.el73.be/drunkey-love/downloads) 5. Strawbee (www.strawbee.com) 6. N Design (www.ndesign-studio.com) 7. Sweetie (www.sweetie.sublink.ca/) 8.Fast Icons (www.fasticon.com/freeware/ 9. ASP NET Icons (www.aspneticons.com/) 10. Two Tone Icons (www.2pt3.com/news/twotone-icons-for-free/) 11. Website Icons www.websiteicons.com/tab/FREE_Pixel_icons 12. Pinvoke (www.pinvoke.com/) [...]