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Just over 2 years ago, I left my full time job as a web designer to go freelance, and it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s been a wonderful ride up to this point, as I’ve been able to work on many exciting client projects and start several of my own ventures, one of which has become my full time job. With WDL being my main focus for the past year, I’ve had little time to do much design work. I miss designing and I miss providing clients with awesome websites. So, in an effort to fill this design void, I’ve started a small WordPress theme shop called Theme Trust, and today the doors are opening for business.

To celebrate the launch, we are offering a special promotion that gives you a 30% discount on any theme. Just enter the code “launch” at checkout to receive the discount. This special is only good for 1 week, and will expire on August 30, 2010.

Affiliate Program

Also, If you want to earn some extra cash and help us promote the themes, Theme Trust has an affiliate program that pays 30% on each sale.

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Last week we ran a Designious giveaway where 10 WDL readers would get to pick a mega vector pack of their choice. Yesterday the winners were randomly selected, and today we are announcing those winners. So… Congratulations to the following ten people.

Angie
Su Hall
Jodi Hendrickson
Mark Bult
DavidC
Chris Morris
Linda Goodwin
Michael M.
Martine
Emma G

A representative from Designious will be contacting you with instructions on how to claim your prize.

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Eleven months ago we launched WDL Premium, and it’s been a huge success for our members, our premium partners, and us. If you’ve not heard about our premium membership, it’s a way for us to bring you high-quality design files and other goodies from top companies. It’s truly been a win – win – win situation for everybody. It’s given our premium members access to incredible design files at an unbelievably small price. It’s given our partners targeted exposure for their other products and services. And it’s given us a way to keep Web Design Ledger going strong.

Our Partners

To ensure the highest possible quality in our premium files, we’ve hand picked the best companies to partner with. They all have a great reputation in the design community and they produce incredible products. Our primary partners are: Go Media, ThemeShift, Designious, Premium Textures, Icon Dock, and Viva Themes. Thanks to all of them!

Instant Access to 48 Premium Files

Over the past eleven months our members have gained access to 48 premium files, and this includes 12 commercial WordPress themes. That’s a huge bargain considering a membership is only $7 a month, and there are other pricing options that make it even more affordable. Sign up and download the complete premium collection.

Here is the complete Premium Collection:

Grungy Wall Textures

Rocky Icon Set from Icon Dock

Wings Photoshop Brushes

Type Explosions Vector Pack

High-Quality Wood Textures

Origami Icon Set from Icon Dock

Superheroes Vector Pack

High-Quality Vector Brush Strokes

deVision: A Business WordPress Theme

Architecture Vectors from Go Media

High Quality Grunge Paper Textures

Pantheon: A Premium WordPress Theme

Floral Photoshop Brushes

deLirium: A Personal Blog WordPress Theme

Scrolls Vector Pack

Colorful Grunge Textures

Ornate Vectors from Go Media

deLuxe: A Premium WordPress Theme

Grunge Photoshop Brushes from Designious

Go Media Stains Vector Pack

deCondo: A Premium WordPress Theme for Real Estate

Wix Unlimited Package Discount

Linework Vector Pack from Go Media

Republica Premium WordPress Theme

PhotoSpin CS Flash Component

deNovo: A Premium Business WordPress Theme

Flow Vector Pack from Go Media

Premium Vintage Wallpaper Textures

3D Carousel Flash Component

Go Media Sketchbook Vector Pack

deCasa: Premium WordPress Theme

Light Grunge Textures

Go Media Doodles Vector Pack

Flip Flash Component

deGusto: Premium WordPress Theme

Go Media Silhouette Vectors

Heraldry Photoshop Brushes

deZine: Magazine WordPress Theme

Stack Flash Component

Go Media Hand Drawn Wings

PhotoFLIP CS Flash Component

A Tastefully Textured WordPress Theme

Go Media Bound Vector Pack

Beautiful Splatters Photoshop Brushes

A Minimal WordPress Theme

Water Color Dry Photoshop Brushes

A Personal Portfolio Photoshop Template

Go Media Ornate and Decorative Vector Packs

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The end of 2009 marked WDL’s first full year in existence, and what a great year it was. We feel that we’ve put out a lot of valuable content that has been helpful to our readers who we greatly appreciate. So before we start publishing new content for 2010, we thought it would be interesting to take a look back at the year that was for WDL by listing some of our most popular articles from 2009.

These popular articles are not listed in order of popularity, but rather date of publication.

30 Most Incredible Textures for Vintage Style Design

One of the most important aspects of a good vintage style design is the use of authentic looking textures. Since most of you probably don’t have time to browse the local antique shop, and your grandmother’s attic is miles away, we’ve put together a list of some of the best vintage textures we have ever seen.

40 Super Sleek Fonts for Clean Web Design

Creating grungy designs can be fun, but sometimes a site requires a cleaner approach, one where artsy design elements take a back seat to clear presentation of content. Typography plays a big role in this type of design.

The Best Social Media Icons All In One Place

The ability to easily bookmark or share content on popular social media platforms is now a must have feature for web sites. It’s also important that this feature isn’t over looked by web site visitors. So it’s always a good idea to use icons when linking to social media sites. They get peoples attention and the logos are immediately recognizable.

All the Small Icons You’ll Ever Need

Big highly detailed icons make great eye candy, but small icons can be very useful when designing websites. They are great for styling lists and giving links visual flair that is eye catching and meaningful. It’s amazing what can be said visually in a 16 x 16 pixel area. In this post, you will find a large collection of small icons that should fit most of your design needs.

10 Best Content Management Systems for Designers

There are a lot of content management systems out there, but many of them are overly complicated and require a certain level of technical expertise. However, there are a select few that focus on simplicity and ease-of-use, but still give the designer flexibility in templating features and customization. In this article, we have listed ten of these CMS’s. Some of them are well known, while others you may have never heard of, but deserve a look.

20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Design

When you are creating a website (or hiring a web/blog designer to create one for you), there are specific items you need to be aware of. Things that normally wouldn’t cross your mind. For the average person who wants a website or blog for their business, they are after one very important thing – sales. Now, they may tell you that they want the big flashy logos, or the overdone textures/gradients, but it is the job of a well skilled web designer to steer their clients in the right direction.

404 Error Pages for Your Viewing Pleasure

Error pages are easy to create, so there’s no excuse to avoid them. Even with the most solid website, you never know when someone might mis-spell a URL link and hit a page that doesn’t exist. Be prepared when that happens to you, even if by no fault of your own. Let these great error pages be your inspiration to creating your own.

Most Used and Abused Web Design Trends of All Time

The year is 1999. You’ve just watched the Matrix, and it’s blown your mind. You sit down in front of your computer to work on a web design and then create or download an animated Matrix background for your Geocities website. You’re so cool. Fast forward 10 years, and you say to yourself, yikes, what was I thinking?! We’ve all been there. As a matter of fact, I’m personally guilty of copying many of following trends.

The Definitive Guide to About Me Pages

One of the most important and least used aspects of any website is the “About Me” page. It’s not enough to have an interesting site and great product if your visitor can’t find a way to relate to you.

Web Design Trends for 2010

Although this list isn’t a drastic departure from what was popular in 2009, it marks different trends that will be expanded upon and made better as a result. As you think of how you will incorporate new trends into your designs, focus on the main idea of each trend. Be encouraged to dabble into these trends so that you become part of the movement.

The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design

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.

33 Creative and Beautiful Logos

Logo design, like any other design process, sometimes requires some inspiration to spark creativity. If you’re in need of some logo design inspiration, here is a collection of 33 creative and beautiful logos. These all have varying styles, but possess the same high quality.

30 Website Navigations that Make You Wanna Click It

The navigation might be the single most important aspect of a web design’s usability. Without a navigation, you would be stuck on the home page for a very long time. I believe a navigation or menu must be easy to use, but this doesn’t mean it has to be boring. In fact, it helps to add a little flair to your navigation. It entices visitors to click and hang around your site a little longer.

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Here at WDL, we greatly appreciate our sponsors. They help make it possible for us to do what we do, and we feel that all of our sponsors offer services and products that can be very useful to web designers, developers, and online creatives. In order to let you know more about what our sponsors have to offer, we’re going to periodically feature one of them. Today we’re going to tell you about Ronin, an online time tracking and invoicing service.

As a web designer, you might be inclined to think that putting the finishing touches on your deliverable is the last step in your masterpiece. However, there is often one more step that’s just as important as all the rest: sending out an invoice and getting paid. Ronin is a simple, yet powerful online invoicing and time tracking tool built with web designers in mind.

Ronin let’s you quickly add in your clients and create projects against them. After a project is completed, you can create invoices and have those hours automatically added in as line items. Aside from managing clients, projects, and invoices, you can also send out estimates, which can then be converted into a project when the recipient approves.

While all this pretty much covers the fundamentals of what you’ll need to start tracking your hours and billing for your time, it’s Ronin’s invoice customization feature that is probably most important for web designers. Using HTML, CSS, and some replacement variables, you can craft your invoices to look exactly as you want, which makes it so that the last point of contact with your client is as memorable as your deliverable design. The same customization can also be applied to estimates, which is sometimes your first point of contact and very important for that first impression.

To round out the features, Ronin offers PayPal and Authorize.Net integration, which means that your clients can pay you online. You can even add a fee on top of your invoice total for paying online, which can be used to offset the costs of using a service like PayPal.

If you’re looking to step up your web design business, take a look at Ronin. A free plan is available for those who are just getting started with a couple of clients and professional plans are available for when you grow. It’s worth a try.

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A couple of weeks ago we posted a giveaway of two Unlimited Packages from Wix worth $149 each. In order to be eligible, all you had to do was leave a comment on that post. Today we’re announcing the two winners that were randomly selected from all the commenters.

Congratulations to Nicole and Julia May! Enjoy your Unlimited Packages from Wix.

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Wix has given us two Unlimited Packages to giveaway to our readers, which are worth $149 each. If you’re unfamiliar with Wix, it’s a site that makes it super easy to create your own Flash websites that are highly customizable and search engine friendly. Their easy to use drag and drop tools require no technical skills at all.

Make sure you visit Wix.com to learn more about their service.

Unlimited Package

Wix does offer free packages, but you get a lot more with the Unlimited Plan, which is what we’re giving to you. Here are some of the Unlimited features:

• Use your own domain
• Unlimited bandwidth
• 2.5GB of storage
• No Wix logo
• Unlimited pages
• Professional hosting
• Premium support

How to Participate

It’s easy to take part in this giveaway. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. On December 18, 2009 the contest will end. We will randomly draw two people from the pool of comments. You are only allowed to leave one comment, and please be sure to use your correct email. This is how we will contact the winners.

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We’re happy to announce the launch of Finest Tees, a gallery dedicated to showcasing the best t-shirt designs on the internet. We created this site to give t-shirt lovers a place to discover and discuss new shirts, and a place for t-shirt designers to get inspiration and promote their designs.

Be sure to subscribe to the Finest Tees feed and follow the tees on twitter.

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There were a lot of very good tweets promoting WDL Premium, which made the judging process very challenging. What we liked most about the tweets was that there was a good mixture of both funny and explanatory approaches taken. However, there ended up being six tweets that really stood out, and of course only one that we felt did the best job of promoting WDL Premium. Here is the MacBook Pro winner followed by the lifetime membership winners.

MacBook Pro Winner

StopDropDesign
Chuck Norris just killed an army of zombies using nothing but his beard and some sick vectors from WDL Premium. #wdlmacbookpro DCalDesign
http://twitter.com/Stopdropdesign/status/3836040283

Lifetime Membership Winners

Samuel Mateo, Jr.
Signed up 4 WDL Premium. 5 mins later I’ve downloaded about $300 worth of stuff. Best $7 I’ve spent. http://j.mp/u914U #wdlmacbookpro prosam
http://twitter.com/prosam/status/3929156797

MyIncarnate
Yo Taylor I’m really happy fo ya I’m gonna let ya finish but WDL Premium has the best design resources of all time #wdlmacbookpro Incarnate
http://twitter.com/MyIncarnate/status/4013922795

timmcleod
Just take a sip of WDL, everybody’s doing it. http://bit.ly/u914U #wdlcontest1 timmcleod
http://twitter.com/timmcleod/status/3840342564

Sam Harding
WDL, a great site for high quality #web #design resources. Premium? It’s great! $7/month for $40+ of stuff a month! #wdlcontest1 samwilliamh
http://twitter.com/samwilliamh/status/3837238206

Joe Tower Grangler
Design folks, at $7/month, WDL’S Premium Content is the trifecta between those Beatles remasters and your work. #wdlcontest1 joetower
http://twitter.com/joeydollaz/statuses/3876192759

To the winners of the lifetime membership, we will cancel your subscriptions at Papal so you will no longer be billed.

We think this contest was a success, but there were a few existing members that were disappointed about not having a chance to win the MacBook Pro. Just so you know, all future contests will give all members a chance to win the same prize. Who would like us to do another contest?

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The contest is now over and the judging has begun.

After one week, there have been 130 new members sign up out of the 150 spots available for the Macbook Pro contest. That means there are only 20 spots left. If you want a shot at winning the Macbook Pro sign up for WDL Premium and check out the rules below. With a premium membership you will have instant access to hundreds of dollars worth of high quality design files plus more added every week.

Macbook Pro Technical Specs

13-inch: 2.26GHz
Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB Memory
160GB hard drive1
SD card slot
Built-in 7-hour battery2
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

How to Win the Macbook Pro

To be eligible to win the Macbook Pro, you have to follow 2 simple steps:

Step 1 Sign up for a WDL Premium membership. Only the next 150 new members will be eligible starting today, September 7, 2009. We will keep you posted on the progress.

Step 2 Send out an update on twitter to help spread the word about WDL Premium. At the end of the tweet include this hashtag: #wdlmacbookpro followed by your new WDL Premium username. The person with the best tweet will be declared the winner. Tweets will be judged on the best promotion of WDL Premium within the 140 character limitation of twitter.

Example tweet:

The second and third place tweets will win a free lifetime membership to WDL Premium.

Existing Members

You’re not left out. We’re giving away 3 free lifetime memberships for you all. Since you are already a member, simply do the following:

Send out an update on twitter to help spread the word about WDL Premium. At the end of the tweet include this hashtag: #wdlcontest1 followed by your WDL Premium username. The 3 people with the best tweets will be declared the winners. Tweets will be judged on the best promotion of WDL Premium within the 140 character limitation of twitter.

Example tweet:

Official Rules

• Contest begins September 7, 2009.
• Contest will end when 150 new members have signed up.
• Tweets will be judged on the best promotion of WDL Premium within the 140 character limitation of twitter.
• Only one sign up and tweet per person.
• Web Design Ledger staff members and family of staff members are not eligible.
• Winners will be notified by email.
• Macbook Pro prize will be awarded in the form of an Apple gift card for the amount of $1,199.00.