The end of the week has fallen upon us once more, and another installment of our Arbenting weekly round-up has been filed. We have several wonderful contributions from the online design community to showcase this week, and even a handful of new site launches to mention that joined the ranks since we last talked about it. With spring blooming its way through towards summer, the design community offered several new foliage graphics showing signs that the season is taking hold on the creative minds. Can't wait to see what kind of vibrant summer of graphic design lies ahead. We are, afterall, hippies at heart here at Arbenting...at heart, and pretty much everywhere else, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, we hope you enjoy the rundown, as much as we have. Til next time...
Tutorial - The Ultimate Guide to Setting up WordPress after an Install - There are a few essential steps that need to be taken with any new wordpress install. Obviously not every wordpress blog will be the same but there are some basics that I feel should be done regardless of what kind of blog you're creating.
Group Interview - Designers Predict Design Trends for 2010 - Part I - Design Trends for 2009 are starting to do the rounds on the world wide web. They are being received with mixed reactions. Bring them on! some say, eager to learn about current hypes and what is popular.
Article - 10 Firefox Add-ons that Allow you to Live in your Browser - With the kind of work I do, I practically live inside my browser. I would say that I average at least 9 hours a day in my browser once you combine both work and play. So I am a fan of anything that allows me to get everything done in the one place that I spend most of the time. That is why my geek girl side worships at the altar of the Fox and its many disciples, the add-ons.
Freebie - 10 Free Grunge Swirl Vectors for Your Commercial Projects - As I mentioned before, we have been wanting to take Dead Wings in a new direction, and part of that, is making it a resource hub for cool original vectors for the community to use in their design projects. So I have been building up a few different sets of vectors to give to our readers for supporting and sticking with us.
Freebie - Social Media Stars Icon Set: 26 Free Icons - Since you are all stars to us, we have available for you, in two different sizes (128×128 & 64×64) for your convenience, this new social media stars icon set free for your personal and commercial projects.
10 Misconceptions about Graphic Designing – The claims and blames!! - Graphic Designing is a very flexible career choice with combination of paths to go down. However, at times amazing claims (by my friends and clients) make me doubt my own profession. Short and sweet, graphic designers are often blamed for enjoying extra charms and advantages of their profession, which are not true in many ways.
10 HTML Tag Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit - You better watch out, because the HTML police are about. They scour your code and pick out the most unspeakable crimes against HTML markup. This handy list of ten HTML tag crimes sheds some light on some of the most common coding mistakes and helps provide an alternate solution. Tips include writing valid markup, making semantic choices, avoiding deprecated tags and more!
The CSS Box Model - At the risk of over-repeating myself: every element in web design is a rectangular box. This was my ah-ha moment that helped me really start to understand CSS-based web design and accomplish the layouts I wanted to accomplish. We’ve talked about the positioning of these boxes a bit, and about their behavior. What we haven’t talked about much is the box itself. How is the size of the box calculated exactly?
The Value of Practical Personal Projects - When it comes to design, there are generally two types of projects: client work and personal work. While client work is invaluable in its own right, personal projects seem to have this stigma attached as solely a means of expression without any practical benefit.
How to Stay Ahead of the Curve as a Designer - The more people I talk to who are working in the creative field, the more I am realizing that our current economy is actually creating many opportunities for us. People are going out on their own as a result of being let go, or new opportunities arising, companies are looking for new ways to gain revenue; this means new opportunities to work on websites, web apps, consulting, and collaboration.
Poorly designed webforms force users to leave: Example - A few days ago I was searching for some freebies and found something I wanted to download. When I pressed "download" link I was unpleasantly surprised with the modal window asking for personal information. Why this was an unpleasant experience?
Everything You Need to Know About the !important CSS Declaration - Recently I came across a few articles that mentioned the CSS !important declaration, and there was a little bit of confusion over what it actually did, and how it could be used, as expressed in the user comments on those articles.
Freebies: "Jungle Flora" High resolution textures - I present another high resolution texture pack called Jungle Flora. This pack contains 12 textures (1000 px of width) of some beautiful flowers in the jungle.
29 High Resolution Light Effect Brushes for Photoshop - Adding light effects to your designs may be easier than you think. With just a few clicks and just the right brushes you achieve this effect quickly and effortlessly with Photoshop. That’s why today I am releasing this set of 29 Light Effect Brushes for Photoshop for you guys to use in your work for free.
Free Texture Tuesday: Leaves - Sure, Spring has been here for quite some time now…nevertheless I’m just now getting around to shooting some of the green stuff outside. This week I have some leaf textures, more specifically I tried to focus on the veins of the leaves. Let me know if you guys dig them!
22 High-Res Leaf & Twig Photoshop Brushes - Today I’ve got some very cool high-resolution leaf & twig photoshop brushes for yall. With the popularity of "green" & "eco-friendly" projects lately, I have a feeling these might come in handy! :) The pack includes 22 brushes total, all of which are around 2500px.
Logarde Thin - Free Typeface for Immediate Download - Logarde Thin is a sassy font that I stumbled upon on Behancé a while ago. Being a freelance logo designer, finding quality and unique ‘free’ fonts can be a struggle. Whilst there are 1000’s available, many are poor in quality and feel. Finding those ’special’ free and open-source fonts is something of a past-time for me.
10 High-Quality Free Leaf Textures - In this set, you’ll find 10 free and high-resolution leaf textures which can be utilized in a wide range of ways. They have a very liberal Creative Commons license so you can use them in any manner you choose, whether it’s personal or commercial.
9 Retro Grunge Wallpaper Patterns - Today’s web treat is a combo pack of 9 tileable retro grunge wallpaper Photoshop patterns (.pat) and a corresponding seamless retro grunge texture pack (.jpg).
An Interview with Aaron Irizarry - Aaron Irizarry is a hard-working, fun-loving, and super helpful member of the design community. He runs This is Aaron’s Life and a host of other design related sites. I’ve been privileged to get to know him a little better the last couple weeks. The other day, he was kind enough to agree to this interview, check out his thoughtful responses.
Interview with Janko Jovanovic, Janko at Warp Speed - Web developer Janko Jovanovic is the owner of Janko at Warp Speed and knows a lot about web development on a Windows platform and web development for the front-end. He specializes in ASP.NET, C#, Transact SQL, LINQ, WCF, jQuery and XHTML & CSS.
Interview with Nate Williams, AKA Alexander Blue - Nate Williams who is also known as Alexander Blue is an artist, illustrator and designer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nate is an incredibly prolific artist and has worked extensively in various facets of the illustration industry with a wide variety of clients.
Interview With Charlene Chua - If you follow the Weekly Vector Inspiration here at Vectips or are a fan of vector art in general, you most likely have came across one of Charlene Chua’s pieces. Charlene Chua is an amazing illustrator with a range of styles. Charlene has been kind enough to do an interview with Vectips.
Interview with Logo Designer David Airey - This week I had the opportunity to interview Irish logo designer David Airey (@davidairey). I have admired David’s work for quite some time and was very pleased that he agreed to be interviewed. In the interview David discusses many issues facing modern logo designers.
Five Questions with Matthew Kammerer - I first heard of Matthew while exploring UX Booth, a darn nice little blog and resource site dealing with user experience by four young folks. Then I heard he joined the team at BuySellAds, a company I take great interest in because both because of their success and because it’s a wonderful service that I use here on CSS-Tricks. I thought I’d catch up with him for a few questions…
Interview with Chuck Anderson - As an extremely bright veteran of the design world Chuck Anderson has done a ton of work for large corporations such as ESPN, Reebok, and even created album covers for artists like Lupe Fiasco, and FallOut Boy. Chuck shares some important tips with us and gives us a look at his book "Wandering Off Into Space".
Getting Started Writing WordPress Plugins - A wonderful and in depth tutorial on how to create your own WordPress Plugins
WordPress theming for beginners, an introduction - One of the key reasons of WordPress success is its templating system. In fact, thousands of free WordPress themes are available on the Internet. However, if you want a truly unique theme, you’ll need to create your own. This article will give you a basic understanding of a WordPress theme’s structure.
How to Create a Blog from Scratch Using Ruby on Rails - This tutorial shows you how to create a basic blog using Ruby on Rails. By covering the design aspects of a Rails web application, it makes it easier to understand the concepts behind Rails and how they fit together.
Making of a Scary Mental Hospital Scene - There are some really nice, ghostly techniques toward the end that are very helpful.
Foller.me - Foller.me is a Twitter service that can provide you with the most detailed information about a specific Twitter user in the least amount of time! It builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, all based on the user’s recent activity, AND excluding all stop words!
Fuel your Writing - FYW is the inspirational “go to” site for writers of all flavors: business writers, novelists, short story, advertising, technical writers…the list goes on and on. Stop by to pick up ideas, the latest news in the writing world and knowledge about your fellow wordsmiths. Another great launch from the Fuel Brand Network!
Fuel Your Creativity - Spanish - The Fuel Brand Network also launched their second alternative language site with Fuel Your Creativity - Spanish.
esquareda - A new website and blog by Eric E. Anderson, a web designer & photographer living in San Diego, CA.
Minimalist Web Design - Clean & Beautiful Typography
For the inspiration compilation this week, we decided to take a minimalist approach. Not saying that we are only showcasing one or two inspirational images, just that we are focusing on minimalist website designs. More specifically, those sites whose use minimalism both effectively and with a strong focus on incorporating the typography into the design. We found some amazing examples for you below.
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Whoah, yet another great roundup from great articles! I’ve already seen most of them in my RSS feed, still some are new and I really want to check them out. Thanks (and of course thanks for my Freebie mention ;) )!
Marcos last blog post..Freebies: “Jungle Flora” High resolution textures
Great round-up. I liked the Grunge Swirl Vectors and Social Media Stars Icon Set so much that I am adding them to my sites.
Heathers last blog post..Russian Nesting Dolls
@Marco — Thanks! I’ve been trying to scale them down a bit lately without sacrificing quality.
@Heather — Thanks so much, I’m glad you like the freebies. And thank you for adding them to your sites!
good :)
lawrence77s last blog post..Vodafone ZOOZOO Ads!
It looks like you’ve posted almost everything here. Awesome Post