David Appleyard helps to build fun things for the design community, including Design Shack, Theme Junkie, and Creative VIP.
Thank you to everyone who entered our competition to win a copy of Fanurio. I’m pleased to announce that the winners are Vicente Canales, Mark, and Josh St. John.
Your details have been passed on to the developer, and you should receive a license code shortly!
I’m pleased to announce our latest competition to win a copy of Fanurio, a cross-platform time tracking application. It offers an intuitive interface, flexible timer and the ability to produce detailed invoices.
We have three copies to give away, and entering is simple. All you need to do is leave a comment on this post saying why you’d like a copy. The competition will run for one week, and we’ll announce the winners on the 2nd August.
Good luck!
Font support on the web has long been a topic of debate. Recent years have seen the emergence of various techniques for embedding fonts through flash, a method known as Cufon, or various plays on the new @font-face CSS properties emerging slowly through CSS3.
The main limiting factor to date is that of font licensing. Understandably, foundries are reluctant to allow web designers to publicly host their font files for anyone to download. A few typefaces have been licensed for use online, but designers are severely limited in choice.
This week saw the announcement of a breakthrough system – Typekit.
Leo Babauta, a blogger famous for the philosophy of keeping life and work simple has kindly allowed us to interview him about blogging, design and how we can all work with less clutter.
We’ll be talking about a regular day for Leo, how blogging has launched his career, and the principles he suggests for a designer to be more productive. It’s great to speak to someone so genuine and passionate about their philosophy, and I hope you enjoy reading what he has to say.
Every site has a logo, and whether it’s a page filling feature or a small design element, it often forms the primary title feature of your page. This article will show you how to implement a logo using correct semantic markup and simple HTML code, with all the presentation done via CSS.
It’ll ensure that those browsing your site without images will see a decent alternative, and provide search engines with a correct representation of your page title.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
Thank you to all who participated in our 3D Spiral giveaway. We have randomly selected three winners, who are:
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: