Articles - Page 139

Business / 6 Feb 2010

Creating a Well Designed Invoice: Step-by-Step

Boring paperwork is one of the necessary evils of being a freelance designer.

There’s simply no way around it, if you want to track and manage payments from clients, you’re going to have to setup an invoicing system. It’s not all bad news though; the fun part is that you actually get to design a custom invoice.

Today we’ll walk through designing an invoice from scratch. I’ll be as in-depth as possible and include everything you need to know from the absolute basics to advanced features and even a little design theory.

Business / 31 Jan 2010

How to Make Money as a Freelance Designer

So you want to be a freelancer, now what?

Despite the glamorous reputation, freelance design is no walk in the park. It takes an incredible work ethic, significant entrepreneurial prowess, and a little bit of insanity to pull it off effectively. This article will discuss how to effectively make a living as a freelancer (designer or otherwise). Since we are in fact a design blog, I’ll scatter in some well-designed freelancer sites along the way for inspiration.

Graphics / 16 Nov 2009

25 Awesome Tools for Choosing a Website Color Scheme

As a designer, color management should be an integral part of your workflow. A website’s color scheme helps shape its identity and therefore should not be carelessly thrown together. Here are 25 online, desktop and iPhone applications to help you live and breathe color management no matter where you are.

Web Standards / 26 Oct 2009

HTML5: Get It Working Today (4 of 4)

This will be the final article in our series on HTML5. This go around we’ll have a brief look at which new HTML5 technologies major browsers are officially supporting and go over some techniques you can use to take advantage of the new elements in your coding today. Finally, we’ll discuss how you should start preparing to support HTML5 in all the sites you build from here forward.

Web Standards / 23 Oct 2009

HTML5: Semantic Changes (3 of 4)

In the last article, we looked at a number of new elements introduced in HTML5 and how to implement them properly. In this article, we’ll again be discussing a set of new elements but this time we’ll be examining only those HTML5 elements that represent a significant semantic change to the way you structure your sites. This article will cover how to use each of these new elements in a way that will bring much needed relief to the div-itus that plagues the structure of so many sites today.

Web Standards / 21 Oct 2009

HTML5: New Elements (2 of 4)

A couple of days ago we posted an introduction to HTML5 and briefly covered some of the content we’ll be outlining in this series. Today’s post, which is the second in the series of four, will take a look at how to use six of the new elements in HTML5: canvas, article, audio, video, meter, and mark.

Keep in mind that HTML5 is not exactly ready for widespread use – so don’t go changing anything on your site quite yet. Be assured that HTML5 is in fact coming soon, therefore these concepts may prove useful in the near future.

HTML / 8 Jul 2008

The Footer Copyright Notice

Almost all websites contain some sort of copyright notice in their footer (e.g. Copyright © 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.). But what’s the best way to do this? We’re going to take you through the requirements for your copyright notice, and a nifty JS (or PHP) trick for ensuring that your copyright year is always up to date.

CSS / 13 May 2008

Introduction to CSS3 – Part 4: User Interface

This tutorial will be taking a look at some of the new ways you can manipulate user interface features in CSS3. But what do we mean by “user interface”?

CSS3 brings some great new properties relating to resizing elements, cursors, outlining, box layout and more. We’re focusing on three of the most significant user interface enhancements in this tutorial.

CSS / 7 May 2008

Introduction to CSS3 – Part 2: Borders

For the second part of our series on CSS3, we’ll be taking a look at borders. Everyone who uses CSS is familiar with the border property – it’s a great way to structure content, create effects around images and improve page layout.

CSS3 takes borders to a new level with the ability to use gradients, rounded corners, shadows and border images. We are going to look at each of these in a bit more detail, using examples where possible.

CSS / 6 May 2008

Introduction to CSS3 – Part 1: What Is It?

This article marks the first of several, providing an introduction to the new CSS3 standard which is set to take over from CSS2. We will be starting from the very beginning – taking you from not having even heard of CSS3, to feeling ready to hit it running as various features start to become more widely adopted.

Layouts / 12 Mar 2008

10 CSS Form Examples

Forms can be greatly enhanced with a touch of CSS, making them more usable and far more visually attractive. Follow some of the examples below and you’ll be creating stunning CSS forms in no time at all.