During the past few weeks we’ve been publishing our “Best of 2009″ series in which we’ve shown you the best WordPress themes, fonts, icons, and Photoshop Tutorials. In this article, our focus is on jQuery. Over the past couple of years jQuery has been growing in popularity, which means more and more plugins are being created to make web designers’ lives easier. Here are our favorites from 2009. (more…)
Today we’re giving our WDL Premium members a premium texture pack from PremiumTextures.com. These vintage textures are a collaboration between Caleb Kimbrough from Lostandtaken.com and Evan Eckard from Dinpattern.com. They are some of the highest quality, and truly “most-awesome” vintage wallpaper textures you’ll ever come across.
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For those not familiar with Papervision3D, it’s a real-time 3D engine for Adobe Flash. In the past couple of years Papervision3D’s popularity has been growing and we’ve seen and an ever increasing adoption by Flash developers, and it’s no surprise as to why. By coupling Flash’s interactive nature and the power of a 3D engine, developer’s imaginations can run wild. Big name brands are opting to go the Papervision route to create highly immersive games and interactive environments to promote their products. In this post, I’ve rounded up some of the most impressive examples of Papervision3D to be found. (more…)
Have you ever looked at a web site and immediately been impressed with it’s design? Then you take a closer look and discover what really makes it amazing. It’s the subtle details. Some designers are great at including this in their designs. These types of designers are border line perfectionists and aren’t afraid to make full use of the zoom tool and 1px brush size in Photoshop. In this article, we will look at several ways subtle details are being used in web designs to take them from great…to amazing. (more…)
Whether you’re a CSS pro or just learning, it’s important to have a good set of tools to speed up and simplify your development. What makes the web so great now, is that many valuable tools can be found online and used inside your browser. Here are 11 online CSS tools that should be a huge help to your CSS development. (more…)
Minimalism in web design is all about stripping things down to only the necessities – so there is nothing in the way of the content. You’ll find that minimal designs have a focus on typography, simple layouts, and a lack of fancy design elements. So what makes an effective minimal web design? Effective minimalism happens when a design gets out of the way of the content and still remains visually stunning. Here is a showcase of websites that are able to achieve this. (more…)
Today we’re giving our WDL Premium members the 3D Carousel component from Advanced Flash Components, which sells for $45. AFC is also the maker of UMapper, the first universal web-based map authoring application. Be sure and check it out. (more…)
In our “Best of 2009″ series, we’ve shown you fonts, icons, and Photoshop Tutorials. In this article, we’re presenting our picks for the best free WordPress themes of 2009. There were plenty of free themes created in 2009, but here are the ones that we feel had a little something extra that made them stand out from the crowd. If you think we missed or left one out, let us know about them in the comments. (more…)
There’s a lot that goes into creating a web design, but I believe it can be broken down into four main components. If you’re able to execute on all four, you will have a hit web design on your hands. However, if you come up short on one, the entire design will suffer. That’s the challenge. All aspects of a great design must compliment each other while helping achieve the end goals of the website. In this article, I’ve broken down the four key components of a great web design with examples and resources. (more…)
The days of using tables for layout are hopefully gone. This doesn’t mean that tables don’t have a place in web design and development. When you have tabular data, tables are the way to go and are what you should be using. However, ordinary tables can be limiting to the user when you have complex data to display. Here are 12 very useful jQuery plugins that will add valuable functionality to your tables such as column sorting, fixed headers, pagination, and more. (more…)
