16th Annual Webby Awards – The Winners

Dubbed as the Academy Awards of the internet, the 16th annual Webby Awards were announced recently. The Webby Awards honor online performers in four different categories: Websites, interactive advertising, online film & video and mobile apps. Again, each category is split into two prizes – The Webby Awards themselves (judged by the International Academy of Arts and Sciences) and The Webby People’s Voice Awards (online voting system). Speaking of first…

Footer Design Trends

The humble footer – long ignored by web designers – has become a site of a sudden burst of creative energy in the past few years, as designers realize the flexibility of the footer as more than a mere placeholder for contact and copyright info. Facilitating this change has been a gradual move away from a fold-centric design ethos, which focused on concentrating major design and navigational elements ‘above the…

Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.130)

This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy :) If you would like to receive our daily updates and keep up to date with the latest and greatest articles and resources from the design community, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebookor by subscribing to our RSS feed.

CMS: Useful Wins Again

It’s been almost twenty years since the first branded Content Management Systems (CMSs) hit the market. They were an unbearable kluge back then, and didn’t work well; but hey, if you had a bajillion dollars to toss at MarchFirst or any one of hundreds of other pre-dot-bomb era consultancies, you could have a half-baked Web CMS, delivered by a team of twenty dot-commers living large on VC funds, and talkin’…

Ignore the design, please

“Hey, I want to show you something I built. Ignore the design please, it is not finished yet.” From school science fair projects to real world product prototypes, if I had a nickel every time I heard that sentence I would be a lot richer by now. The truth is that a lot of people ask us to ‘ignore the design’ simply because we humans tend to judge anything new…

30 Realistic Pencil Drawings

It’s hard to believe that all of these beautiful pictures are pencil drawings and not digital. Pencil, paper, creativity and a heck of a lot skill are the only attributes of these masterpieces. Check them out: Gurn Drawing Christopher Reeve FuFu What a Lovely Picture Karlstadt Watermill Snow White Broken Heart Yendos Nature Pencil art by Rupak Rai The Tower Not a gammy leg in sight Mic the Dog Sin…

Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration – N.136

This is our weekly selection of our favorite web designs from the past week, thanks to everybody for their recommendations. Feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Cloud Storage from Google – Google Drive

A few days ago, Google added another weapon to its arsenal – Google Drive. Simply put, Drive is Google’s version of cloud storage – say, Dropbox meets Google Docs. As with any other cloud storage service, Google Drive lets you store your data online, edit/modify it as per your needs and share it with others and/or collaborate while working. Drive itself looks like an enhanced cousin of Google Docs –…

No to the Cookie Law

A newly launched site has dubbed the upcoming EU Cookie Law “ridiculous,” echoing the sentiments of a growing number of voices across the internet. As these protests grow louder, No Cookie Law aims to raise awareness of the EU cookie law and hopefully increase the chance of changes being made. No Cookie Law is the brainchild of the rising advocate Silktide who had previously brought us a video summarizing the…

Current Web Typography Trends

The evolution of typography in web design has been hampered by technological limitations. The lack of browser support for CSS in the pre-2000 era, and later, unavailability of a wider range of fonts limited typographical adventures to a handful of font choices. Every web designer willing to experiment and push the boundaries in typography has had to contend with the lack of support for any fonts save the dreaded quintet…

How to Build an Accordion Image Gallery with only CSS

Fluent animated transitions for sliding web page elements such as a menu or an image gallery, have always traditionally been implemented with JavaScript. But using the CSS3 pseudo-class :target and the negation pseudo-class :not() properties, together with the CSS3 Transition Module you can achieve the same effect, but without JavaScript! This means that the very popular “accordion or toggle” effects can be easily implemented using only CSS! In the following…

[Expired] We have 20 Pro Licenses for EasyRotator to Give Away

Today, we want to introduce you to a new WordPress plugin for creating sliders, EasyRotator for WordPress. The standard version of the plugin is free, but we’re giving you a chance to win the Pro version that includes additional templates and features. We have twenty prizes to give away, each worth $20! Check out this video to learn more about EasyRotator for WordPress: You can find instructions for installing the…

Maximum Clarity – 3 Essential Ways to Think For Your Users

We’ve all been there: a client really, really wants to make a change to your design that, as a designer, you can immediately tell will result in disaster. It happens to every designer, and, as far as I can tell, there’s no real way to avoid it. However, there is a four-step method you can use to mitigate the problems caused by what I like to call “Sudden Client Designer…

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