Another week packed full of brilliant contributions from the design community across the whole width of the web has wound down to its end, but we here at Arbenting are not done with these posts quite yet. We have assembled the best of what we felt the week had to offer, and once again we present them in our new Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #3! Here is what stood out this past week in our eyes, and being that we are prone to miss things once in a while, we would love to see your ideas of great stuff we missed as the week moved on! Just leave it in the comments and we will check it out.

Speaking of leaving comments, did you catch Arbenting’s new contest, where a single comment on the post could win you a free license to the time tracking and billing software Fanurio? (Now that’s a segue!) It runs for two weeks, and we wanted to offer up a reminder about it for anyone who may not have caught the post we snuck in yesterday afternoon. The post is Comment & Win One of 3 Free Fanurio Licenses, and is pretty self explanatory. If you are not familiar with the software, the post has some info you can check out to see if you would be interested in acquiring one of the three licenses being offered.

Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2008 — If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it’s up to each of us to stand up and represent. Last year, 30,055 of you did just that, taking time out of your busy day to answer the sometimes detailed and often thought-provoking questions in the second A List Apart Survey.

20+ Web Applications and Tools for Designers — I love playing with new applications and this list gave me quite a few new toys to keep me occupied this week.

15 Exceptional JQuery Resources And Tutorials — These resources not only help you accomplish amazing things, but they do it with style and elegance. Follow along as we count down 15 of the best jQuery resources out there.

10 Simple Steps to Landing More Gigs — Finding success as a freelancer requires a steady stream of paying gigs. Obtaining new business through referrals is great, but referrals alone won’t keep your schedule packed with paying jobs, especially when you’re just starting out.

Want a cheap logo? Go and get some clip art then — While the article focuses on logo design, I fully identified with it as a web designer as well.

50 Simple Marketing Ideas All Freelancers Can Use — As a freelancer, you have a wide variety of marketing options available to you. Just which ones will bring you the clients you prefer to work with depends — it’s important to make sure that the methods you use allow you to reach the places prospective clients will be. It’s worth considering a wide variety of options. For that, it’s useful to have a list of options to consult.

10 Professional Looking Free CSS Menu’s — Ten nice looking CSS menu’s all ready to be used. In most there are CSS stylesheets ready to be downloaded directly from this site but a few are in tutorial format and needs to be directed to the source website for you to complete the tutorial.

20 More Explosive Web Development Screencasts — Nettuts is back with twenty more web development video tutorials that should prove to be as equally helpful in your quest to become a web development ninja.

ASP.NET for web designers: Introduction — As I promised in the one-year-celebration article I am starting an “ASP.NET for web designers” series in order to introduce ASP.NET to web designers who mostly use PHP; as well as to introduce basics of web design in ASP.NET to developers who actively use this technology.

Facebook versus Twitter and Why They Should Remain Separate — As a designer, I am constantly networking with peers worldwide using social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter . As both services grow, develop and increase in popularity, they begin to take on a similar shape to one another. We can share links, photos and other information to our online friends using applications dedicated to one or both of these services. So, why use both? As Facebook and Twitter battle it out, users are left in the middle to deal with the overlap, the mess and the frustration of constantly seeing double.

Showcase of Twitter Integration on Blogs — You’ve probably noticed that Twitter links and updates are now very commonly found on blogs. There are a few different ways that Twitter can be used and integrated into a blog, and this post will showcase 30 blogs that are promoting a Twitter account.

13 Beneficial Wordpress Plugins For Your Design Blog — 13 Wordpress plugins that I have personally used on The Design Cubicle that will give your site an extra boost and provide a better experience for your visitors (plus some other great additions you can add).

Glowing Lines Retro Background PSD Freebie — An Abstract Retro Background for you to play around with and use as you want. 4 color variations and a massive resolution of 2275×1665.

Free Documents for Freelancers — The Docket — The first freebie in All About Freelance’s new series, Free Document Friday — The Docket.

15 Spray Textures; Just another day at the office — A few years ago, I worked at a print shop, and we had a huge Roland printer, we did a lot of vinyl graphics and we would go through huge ink toners. One day we thought instead of throwing them away, we would always have a small amount of residue so we tried extracting that by smashing the toner on paper. These are the results, enjoy!!

25 Free, High-Res Watercolor Textures — These awesome watercolor textures are brought to you by Daniel Davidson.

5 Free High Resolution Stone Textures — Feel free to download this set of 5 high resolution stone textures and use them in your designs for free.

Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday — I was originally hoping just to get some insights and maybe a few quick “sound bites” about FollowFridays for the post, but Micah was so open and accommodating that I decided to include the entire content of the interview which offers some nice insight into FollowFriday.

Five Questions with Richard Felix Jr. — I’ve been friends with Richard for years. In between sending funny links back and forth to each other, we’ve been able to kick out a few projects (Are My Sites Up, LyricSift). I design, he develops. I’ve always been impressed with Richard’s work ethic, problem solving ability and how he always has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry.

Five Questions with Collis Ta’eed — Collis Ta’eed is the kind of guy that every web designer with a little entrepreneurial spirit wants to be. He is a trend-setting designer who’s work is seen, used, and interacted with by millions of people a day on Envato’s sites like PSDTUTS and FlashDen.

HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery Killer Tutorials — Getting started with HTML, CSS, PHP or jQuery can seem like a daunting task for many beginners. Some people think you need to go to school for these subjects but as many of you already know, there is an abundance of free resources to get you well on your way to becoming a pro in any of these subjects. Here are some killer tutorials and screencast series which cover the most popular topics (HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery).

Maximize the Use of Hover — Usually, we create hover effects by changing: font color, font styles, border styles, background, and etc. But there are a lot more that we can do with hover. We can use hover to beautify design, minimize clutter, and display additional information. In this article, I’m going to provide various examples of websites that maximize the use of hover.

How to Make a Stylish Glowing Box in Photoshop — In this Adobe Photoshop graphic design tutorial, we are going to create a magical glow effect coming from a box in Photoshop. This is a pretty simple effect that looks great and can easily be adapted for use in other ways.

20+ Best Tutorials to Convert Psd to Html/CSS — you’ve designed your site but you’re having a little trouble turning your design PSD into a coded layout. Here i’ve listed 20+ Best Tutorials to convert Psd to Html/CSS.These tutorial should help you learn how to find the best way to code it.

How to Create a Simple, Dark Yet Stylish Portfolio Design — I always try to create things the unconventional way. There are so many tutorials on how to create a portfolio mock up in Photohshop. Also, I have seen tutorials on gimp too, however none on Pixelmator. It is nice image editing software for mac. I enjoying working on it. So I decided why not create a Portfolio mock up tutorial. In this you will find how to make simple, dark yet stylish Portfolio mock up.

Shading with Watercolor Textures — This tutorial will try and show an alternative way of using the watercolor texture files in order to give some color to your line-art.

Create a Bright Retro Grunge Vector Illustration — Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create a range of vector shapes and graphics that can be combined into a great looking vector collage illustration. We’ll then finish off the illustration with some subtle touches of depth and detail, giving a polished graphic with hints of a retro-grunge style.

Photoshop Tutorial: The Best Way to Sharpen Photos — There are a hundred ways to improve your photos. In addittion to color correction, the other important aspect of photo retouching that you should be looking at is how to sharpen your images. Photoshop offers you extraordinary degree of control over the sharpness of your image.

Creating Different Elemental Effects — This tutorial takes you through all 5 elements and how to apply the effect to images.

Mr. Vector — Each piece of vector artwork we produce is detailed by hand to ensure the highest quality. We have detailed images of our artwork along with a free sample from each our vector packs that you can download to see our work for yourself. We hope that you will like what you see and add your name to our list of happy customers.

Underworld Magazines — Underworld Magazines is; a completely independent form of media that focuses on promoting all forms of art. The magazine eagerly focuses on demonstrating different forms of art in the world. Underworld Magazines doesn’t necessarily follow the standards that many other forms of media have choose to follow. This publication takes pride in revealing smaller un-known artists to the world of art. Fashion, music, movies, writing, graphic design, and other forms of artistic outreach is what you will discover by just browsing the stories, and articles featured in Underworld Magazines.

Munny

On this weeks inspiration portion of the post, we focused on the traditional art craze, the Munny. If you have somehow missed out on these cute little alterable art bases, that people do amazing things with, then it is our pleasure to introduce you to their weird little world. We sought out some of the most original and eye-catching designs that we could find for this showcase, and feel we have succeeded. These little folks are so Munny, and they don’t even know it! (No? Swingers? I thought it was funny. What about this…) Show me the Munnies! (Oh, forget it…)

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Have something you would like to see showcased next week? Send it to us!

More From Arbenting:

• Arbenting’s Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #5
• Arbenting’s Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #4
• Arbenting’s Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #2
• Arbenting’s Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #6
• Arbenting’s Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #11