Lets be honest, most of the form buttons that you come across are ugly, they work as intended, but really, really look awful. There are reasons for this, firstly form buttons, as with almost anything to do with forms, are notoriously tricky to style with consistency, and secondly, styling can cause major problems with cross browser and cross platform compatibility. The button element defines the submit button. Designers may choose to use the input element to specify these buttons, but [...]

With it being Christmas in the past week, design articles have been a little thin on the ground, making today’s Twitter round-up fairly sparse. Don't be put off, though, there are still a few high quality articles being published around the community, and we have highlighted them below.

Using illustration in web design gives the designer the opportunity to convey there own personal and unique style, and be able to say "this site is mine, and look what I can do". Very few web design styles give an artist this opportunity.

Christmas is here, and the wife has ordered me to take the next three or four days off. I haven’t had more than two days off at any given time in the past year, so perhaps she is right. I have handed over my laptop, handed over the power lead to the desktop and at this moment she is trying to pry my mobile phone out of my hands. I will fight this one, I love my mobile!

As usual we have a mixed bag of resources for you to browse and rummage through. There is a lot of good reading, inspirational posts, freebie downloads and if you stumbled on this page looking for My Little Ponies, well… we have them as well.

The demand for development icons is huge, and thankfully this year has been a fairly productive year with new icon sets being freely released every other week. As you will see from the list below, they are all of high quality, some do have more flexibility than the others, and some do have limited numbers and options, but all are beautifully designed.
Anyway, all of the icons I have listed below have been designed specifically for web design, web development, web applications and blogging. And I am sure you will agree, they are amazing.

This is our selection of reader recommended and sites that I have discovered in the past week. There is a lot of new high quality web designs around this week, I hope you like them.
Send us a recommendation for next weeks Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration (for our review), by clicking here…

On Monday past we published the post 49 Most Creative Photoshop Tutorials of 2009, a collection of the best artistic tutorials for Photoshop from this year. As a follow up to that post, today we have The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009, a collection of diverse and unique effects and type treatments that will add a little extra to your next design.

The purpose of web form validation is to ensure that the user is provided with the necessary information and help so that they are able to fill out and complete the form with the least amount of fuss and time.
There is no particularly consistent method to follow for form validation, there are only guidelines.

As an added bonus, Iconshock, designers of these amazing icons, have allowed us to publish another free icon set for our readers. This time around the icons are humorous caricatures of famous world political figures.
I hope you enjoy them.

When designing the homepage of any web design agency it has to be well thought out, researched and planned. It basically all comes down to what clientele you are going to target? Is it corporate businesses and professional individuals or would you target corner-shop stores and small B&Bs? How your agency is first portrayed to any potential client is the cornerstone to your success. Yes, being good and professional designers and developers certainly helps, but won’t guarantee good business.

As usual we have a mixed bag of resources for you to browse and rummage through. There is a lot of good reading, inspirational posts, freebie downloads and even a nifty jQuery plugin to get your web site into the Christmas spirit.
As always, if you have any cool links that you would like to share, do not hesitate to send them to us here…

What a year it has been for Photoshop… so many new techniques, so many fresh ideas and so many new and creative web sites offering free tutorials. In this post we have collected the best of them, focusing on photo manipulation, design and drawing, poster design, caricature design and finally, illustration within Photoshop. We have purposely omitted icon design, text effects and GUI tutorials, these will be following in the coming weeks, keep an eye out for them.