David Appleyard

News / 4 Feb 2009

RSS Feed Changes

With the new design and move to WordPress, there are a couple of changes to note regarding RSS feeds. We’re operating two main feeds as before – one for the CSS Gallery, and one for Articles and Community News. If you’re an existing subscriber to the news feed, you’ll now automatically start to receive community news posts.

If you’d rather not receive community news updates, simply head over to our feeds page and subscribe to the ‘Articles Only’ RSS feed. I hope that you’ll find the new content useful, and am looking forward to keeping your RSS reader updated with daily inspiration!

News / 4 Feb 2009

Onwards and Upwards

Design Shack launched proudly in 2003 and has been gradually growing and expanding ever since. Over the past 6 years the site has gained a fantastic readership, I’ve had the chance to meet some great people, and certainly hope that you’ve been a little inspired by the articles and designs we’ve featured.

2009 marks the start of a refresh for Design Shack, and I’m incredibly excited about what the year has in store. The previous site design has been in place for a couple of years and, whilst I was thoroughly pleased with it at the time, I felt that a shift towards a more professional style was required.

Reviews / 27 Jan 2009

OnmiStar Mailer Review

There are a huge number of different tools for email campaigns available; Emma, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp to name a few. Today I’ll be looking at a longstanding piece of email marketing software with a whole range of tools, Omnistar Mailer. It differs from other software in that it is hosted locally on your server.

Articles / 19 Jan 2009

Barack Obama Letterpress Poster

I’m excited to announce that Kishore – a regular contributor to Design Shack – has today released a Barack Obama letterpress poster to celebrate his inauguration. Inspired by Cameron Moll’s beautiful letterpress design, these 14” by 20” posters are a product of hours of (fun) labour, letterpressed using one of the very few platen letterpress machines still left in Chennai, India.

The poster itself consists of characters from MrsEaves, Bickam Script Pro, Adobe Garamond and the Trajan font families. Instead of using a random set of characters in the artwork, Kishore decided to embed something meaningful; important figures, dates, milestones, words and phrases associated with President Obama.

JavaScript / 2 Dec 2008

Pirobox jQuery Lightbox

Lightbox scripts have become a very popular way of displaying images online in recent months. There are a huge number of them available, using a variety of different frameworks and languages.

I’m pleased to announce that today, in partnership with Pirolab, there’s a new jQuery lightbox script available. It has been designed and created by Diego Valobra. If you’d like to read more about the features and download the lightbox script, click through to read on.

Articles / 14 Nov 2008

Design Forums

I just thought I’d take a moment to mention a new designer forum which launched recently. Design Forums has had a really successful first month, with over 180 members and some 1500 posts. I’m not generally a huge forum fan, preferring to frequent design sites and blogs which have better ‘crafted’ content and articles. That said, I’ve read a few very well thought out posts with some excellent discussion over the past month.

It’s a UK based site, which means that it may not be perfectly suited to US readers (though to be perfectly honest, most of the content is very general).

Take a look and do let me know your thoughts. Are there any other design forums which you frequent regularly?

Navigation / 11 Nov 2008

Simple Hover CSS Menu

Our partner site, 13 Styles has just released a new CSS menu called “Simple Hover“. It is, as the name suggests, a simple affair, with a link description appearing when hovered over.

The menu is completely free to download, use and customize, contains no images (it’s all CSS) and should work in any browser or operating system you use.

Please let me know if you find any problems or would like to contribute a menu in the future.

Visit

Inspiration / 3 Nov 2008

Announcing Design Top 10

A project we have been working on for a while launches today – Design Top 10. The site will be updated every month, featuring the best website designs, tutorials and resources published in that period. Hopefully it will grow into a great place to find inspiration and keep up to date with the best content produced online.

The design stems from a notebook style layout, as the site is a ‘scrapbook’ of discoveries and inspiration on a monthly basis. I feel that it fits the profile of the site well and I’m really happy with it.

Please take a look at the site and, if you find it appealing, write a post about it or drop me a comment – I’d love to hear what you think. I hope you find Design Top 10 a useful source of inspiration!

Visit Design Top 10 Subscribe

Competitions / 27 Oct 2008

3D Spiral Winners

Thank you to all who participated in our 3D Spiral giveaway. We have randomly selected three winners, who are:

• Joseph Engo
• Julio Chacon
• Myriam

Congratulations! We have contacted each of you with information on how to claim your free copy of the 3D Spiral flash component.

To be notified whenever we give away new products and freebies, click below to subscribe:

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Competitions / 20 Oct 2008

3D Spiral Component Giveaway

We have teamed up with FlashLoaded to give away 3 free copies of their latest Flash component, 3D Spiral (a retail value of $49.95 each).

The 3D Spiral is a Flash gallery component that displays images on an interactive 3D rotating spiral. You are able to obtain different layouts by changing the height and width of the spiral. The viewer can scroll, move up/down and zoom the spiral freely.

Software / 17 Oct 2008

GoodBarry Review

GoodBarry is a system which, rather than simply providing a content management service, attempts to offer all the facilities you need to turn your website into a fully functional online business. These range from e-commerce, to newsletter provision, to a complete customer management system. This review is going to cover what my main likes and dislikes are about the system, along with explaining under what circumstances it is particularly suitable.

Before reading this, it might be worth a minute of your time to watch the introductory video at GoodBarry.com. It gives you a quick flavour for what the system does and how it helps to manage your online business.

Articles / 7 Oct 2008

Ten Years of a List Apart

As far as online web design magazines go, A List Apart has been around for as long as I can remember. Their regular articles never cease to probe into new areas of design, or express existing techniques in a new and forward thinking way.

A new post today is celebrating A List Apart’s 10 year anniversary, looking back at how the project started out and evolved over a decade. It also gives an insight into how article submissions are processed and filtered, along with who edits and designs the site today.

If you’re a regular reader, or interested in contributing to A List Apart in the future, it is an article well worth a read.