Arbenting’s Weekly Inspiration and Best of the Web #7

The design blogs have been on fire as of late, and filling the bandwidth with some amazing content. In fact, we have had to start really cutting down on how much we put in the showcases, because if everything that we wanted to go in them was included, they would grow exponentially week after week. So after much deliberation and possibly one or two coin flips and rock-paper-scissors sessions to pick and choose what stayed in and what would, alas, be cut, we have an awesome collection of this weeks design community contributions! Hope you enjoy…

Arbenting Around the Web

Freebie - 10 Free High Resolution Red Rock Textures - Living among the beautiful red rocks of the Colorado Rockies has not only given the Arbenting duo a love and appreciation of the amazing natural rock formations, but they have also provided us with a number of amazing texture images to spread through the design community.

Blog Launch - Geek Girl - Starting Arbenting made me realize how fulfilling it is to blog about a topic you’re passionate about. Arbenting takes care of most of those passions but I have a geeky side of me that it just doesn’t fully fulfill. Geek Girl is where I plan to let my geek flag fly and cover those geeky topics that don’t quite fit at Arbenting.

Article - Mozilla Labs Calls for Help with Ubiquity - Mozilla is getting ready to release Ubiquity 0.5 and they need developers, command authors and regular Ubiquity users to help them out.

Articles

Prepress Checklist : Use on Graphic Design Projects Sending Out to Printers - Your project is camera ready and you are ready to ship it out the door. Here's a quick list that you can use on almost any project you send out for printing. Print one of these and check off each one as you verify things for each project you do.

The CSS Overflow Property - Every single element on a page is a rectangular box. The sizing, positioning, and behavior of these boxes can all be controlled via CSS. By behavior, I mean how the box handles it when the content inside and around it changes.

Warning: Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes? - Here are a few quick mistakes that I see new bloggers making (some of which mistakes I made myself). They’re listed in no particular order.

Wordpress theme frameworks - There are various reasons to use a framework. As you might know, frameworks provide you with convenience and code that you don’t have to write all over.

Burnout - Web professionals are often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating.

WordPress tip: Create invisible custom fields - Existing Custom fields are visible and editables when you edit a post. But when the custom field is created by a piece of code, you may not want to display it publicly. Here is how to do.

6 Tips to Avoid Blog Abandonment - Blog abandonment can happen for many reasons. Some people have shifts in their personal life that prevent them from finding the time (why I had to abandon my personal blog), others lose interest in their topic, others suffer some form of catastrophic failure while some just move on to something else.

45+ High Quality & Creative Wallpapers - A desktop without a good wallpaper looks like you are working on an old age computer. I download creative wallpapers weekly for my desktop. So today i have collected really amazing wallpapers for you and i worked on this list for whole one day to collect the best ones.

10 Wordpress Tips to Make Your Blog Look Like a Website (for Beginners) - Whatever industry you happen to be in, you want to stand out from the crowd and be unique, and not give the impression that your online presence is just a slightly modified cut and paste job. Of course, if you’re depending on a pre-built content management framework like Wordpress for the core of your blog or website, then that could prevent your online presence from truly standing out.

How to Lose Readers [And Not Get Depressed] - It might seem like a strange topic to write about - but the reality is that all blogs, whether they are successful ones or not, lose readers from time to time.

10 Intelligent Ways of using [FORM] Elements - The post below is made up of 10 smart and intelligent ways of using

elements to produce some neat effects, components and plugins, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure.

40 Beautiful Examples of Minimalism in Web Design - There is something extraordinary about making something magnificent with limited resources, and in this showcase, you’ll find the work of talented designers that exhibit exemplary use of Minimalism theories applied to web design.

Freebies

Free Vectors: Engraved Ornaments - I’ve got a set of vectors for everyone today. These are engravings from currency and old documents. Most of them came from the previous generation of American paper money.

Free Photoshop Brushes: Grunge Backgrounds - This set consists ultra high-resolution Photoshop brushes made out grungy textures. Created using Photoshop CS2, these brushes have maximum resolution of 2500 pixels, making it suitable as background images for your projects.

Social Media Grungy Watercolor Brushes - A set of 75 Social Media photoshop brushes free for both commercial and personal use.

Free Gorgeous Patterned Vector Trees - These are just simple elliptical shapes and rectangles clubbed together to mimic funky trees, a no-brainer really. But since I had already made these, I thought about sharing it, so if you need them you don’t even have to spend 5 minutes in Illustrator.

WP Soul Free Wordpress Theme by TechieSouls - WP Soul is a free 2 column Wordpress Theme looks simple and elegant from the front end and offering vast Admin options at the back end. With wide variety of tune able Theme options in the admin menu you don’t need to edit .php files manually to do basic theme adjustments.

23 High Resolution Photoshop Splatter Brushes - I know that I mention this often, but I really love splats. While there is no shortage of splatter brushes out there on other sites, I knew that I could create some awesome high resolution splats of my own and share them with you guys to use in your work for free.

Free Texture Tuesday: Experimental Grunge - Another experimental set of textures coming your way this week, look out! To make these textures I layered all kinds of different images and textures on top of each other in Photoshop and then just played around with the blending layers, curves, brushes, etc. until I got something I liked.

10 Colorful Motion Blur Textures - I've taken motion blur to the extreme for these textures. They were created by simply leaving my shutter open for around a half a second accompanied by a small aperture. While the shutter was open I simply swung, twisted, and spun the camera around, creating the blurs you see here....it's all about experimenting.

Chunk Open Source Typeface for Immediate Download - Chunk is an ultra-bold slab serif typeface that is reminiscent of old American Western woodcuts, broadsides, and newspaper headlines. Used mainly for display, the fat block lettering is unreserved yet refined for contemporary use.

Free Quatro typeface - To receive a beta version of Quatro please email mark@pprwrkstudio.com with the subject line Quatro. Please include your full name, where you work/title and a current email address and I will supply a compressed postscript typeface shortly there after.

Interviews

The ‘Drifting Creatives’ designing their way across the country? - Gavin Braman & Martin Hooper are pretty cool guys trying to solve a common problem in this economy; joblessness. Here at the Fuel Brand Group we support a growing network of creatives. As soon as we heard about them and what they are trying to do (not to mention some cool ideas they are brewing too!) we wanted to support them by sponsoring the Drifting Creatives & help spread the word across the community.

Interview with artist and illustrator Munino - Jimena Elías-Munino is an artist and illustrator that goes under the artistic name Munino. She’s 21 and in addition to be pursuing the fine arts career, she’s a street art performer. She will be telling us here a little bit about the things that inspire her.

An Interview with CSS Mastermind Chris Coyier - Chris Coyier is a popular figure in the design community, well known for his blog over at CSS-Tricks and his general all round expertise with CSS and jQuery.

Interview with Ryan Downie - Today we are interviewing Web Designer, Ryan Downie who currently lives in Lancaster, England. Ryan is very talented and loves working with ExpressionEngine. He works full time at BFInternet.

Interview with Mark Rozier. - Continuing on with our theme of interviewing designers from around the world, Mark Rozier was the obvious choice. Read more to read the interview and post any questions you may have for him!

Leonardo Dentico Interview - Leonardo Dentico is a unique artist with a strong passion for his work. An up and coming artist with a great set of skills and strong beliefs that he represents in his art. In this interview Leonardo talks about his two best illustrations, how he made them, and what their intended message was. Along with that Leonardo also gives us some of his favorite websites, and insight on why he wanted to become a designer.

Interview with Hasrimy from hasrimy.com - Hasrimy is a freelance web designer based in from Malaysia with a very promising portfolio.

Tutorials

The complete guide to creating widgets in WordPress 2.8 - I have seen some good tutorials on creating widgets for WordPress 2.8 floating around the WordPress-o-Sphere. But, I didn’t feel any of them really covered practical usage. I want to show you how to create a widget for real-world development using WordPress 2.8’s new widget class.

Design a trendy blog header with a retro styling - Handmade-looking graphics add a personal touch to a project and inspire a sense of nostalgia. Wendy Ding examines how this can be done for a web banner in Illustrator and Photoshop

The 1Kb CSS Grid, Part 1 - Here is a fresh take on the CSS grid (loosely based on Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System). Its mission is to be lightweight. And, as I’ll show in part 2, it can be used to streamline page templates for content management. All this in just one measly kilobyte (actually, 662 bytes, but who’s counting).

Create a Poster Celebrating the Passing of Spring - Use a variety of techniques to create a poster celebrating the transition from spring into summer.

How to Create a Steampunk Style Illustration in Photoshop - Go simultaneously backward and forward in time with this Steampunk tutorial. The main focus, aside from the style of course, is fusing elements from different sources together to create a cohesive whole. There are many tricks to this end and we shall be looking at light sources, shadows, and image grading.

Make a 3D Vector Film Roll, Drawn In Perspective - In this tutorial, I'm going to share with you how to draw a realistic film roll, drawn in perspective. You should already be familiar with using the Pen Tool, Ellipses and Gradients.

Coding a Clean Web 2.0 Style Web Design from Photoshop - This is the second part of a two-part series that will teach you how to create the layout in Photoshop, and then how to convert it to a standards-compliant (X)HTML web design.

Sewing a Fabric Badge in Photoshop - A wonderful tutorial teaching you how to make a sewed fabric badge in photoshop using fabric textures.

Beginner Illustrator Tutorial - Create a Vector RSS Icon - The best way to learn the ropes of a new application is to get stuck in with a working project. This Adobe Illustrator tutorial covers the simple steps involved in creating a vector RSS icon and includes a range of handy techniques that can be put into practice in future creations.

Create an Awesome Grunge Poster - In this tutorial we will walk through the process of creating a grunge poster. We will cover techniques like creating diamond shaped patterns, knocking out white backgrounds and keeping layer transparency.

Awesome Milk Typography Effect in Photoshop - I will show you how to create a nice effect I saw a few months ago on DeviantArt that is a text mixed with some milk splashes. We will use Photoshop and Illustrator for this tutorial.

Formatting Typography and the Use of Styles in Adobe InDesign - This tutorial will cover the formatting of type within Adobe Indesign using their wonderful paragraph and character styles feature.

Inspiration

Apparel Design

This week for the dose of inspiration we are dropping on you, we went with something a little more fashionable. Get it? Fashionable? Wait, did I mention it was a feature of Apparel Designs by Estúdio Romeu & Julieta? That probably would have drove home the fashionable pun, but whatever. Do you get it in retrospect? Either way, we found some brilliant apparel designs that we instantly knew we would be sharing with our readers, so much so, we almost couldn’t wait for Sunday to arrive to share them with you. Below are their fine works.