42 Creative Movie Posters of 2009

A collection of 42 Cinematic Poster Arts that are creative and dare to be different, all from 2009 films.

Roundup of WaterColor in Web Design

The watercolor look is coming up in a big way. Run through 25+ examples of the best watercolor site designs on the web and 50+ Resources And Tutorials on how to make the look.

WWIII Propaganda Posters

A funny look at some possible WWIII Propaganda Posters.

40 Top-Notch Print Based Tutorials

If the world of print baffles and confuses you, let Tutotial9 shed some light with it’s list of 40 great print based tuts.

12 Essential Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo

Webdesigner Depot outlines 12 essential rules to follow in order to design an effective logo.

45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires

I’m a fan of questionnaires but find them difficult to put together. Smashing Mag looks at a bunch of questionnaires and what makes them successful.

Five Minute Upgrade – Making Your Design Pop

Surely you have at least five minutes to make your next website stand out? Build Internet looks at some of the little things that make a site pop.

9 SEO Tips You’ve Probably Forgot About

Is Just Creative suggesting that we have a bad memory? Take a peak at Jacob’s 9 SEO tips that may have slipped your mind.

Best of The Web – June 2009

TWebDesignDev’s rundown of the best of June from the world wide web.

Busted! 10 Common Freelancing Myths

SitePoint busts down some of the misconceptions about freelancing, hiring a freelancer and what the life of a freelancer is really like.

50+ Tools To Make You a More Efficient & Organized Designer

Design Reviver runs through some tools help you code faster and become a bit more organized.

10 Studios That Find Clients Easier Because They Have Funny Websites

Thinking of injecting a little humor into your website? Inspired Mag looks at 10 Studios with funny websites

How to work with a professional designer

As it gets harder to book a designers and professionals, Pixelmatrix goes over some tips on how to work with professional designers.

19 Awesome Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

Design Shard gets jiggy with 19 Awesome Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials.

20 Great Examples of the Use of Brown in Web Design

Got Brown? Inspect Element serves up 20 great sites from the brown side of the color wheel.

50 Excellent 3D Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

Illustrator is a powerful tool, but it comes with a steep learning curve. Smashing Magazine helps you tackle Illustrator with 50 excellent tutorials.

Motherload Collection of Inspirational Website Design Collections

This is it. The motherload collection of inspirational website design collections served up by The Design Cubicle.

How would you improve your graphic design studio or office?

81 Design looks at some wild and beautiful design offices.

Less CSS

Haven’t you heard? Less is more. Take a look at an upcoming movement to trim down your CSS.

35 Absolutely Useful Firefox Plugins For Web Designers And Developers

Get your FireFox geeked out with 35 Plugins For Web Designers And Developers.

55 Sexy Our Work Page Designs

Everyone wants a sexy portfolio. InstantShift takes a look at some inspirational work display pages.

53 Crazy-good Digital Photography Tutorials

PSDTuts+ takes us beyond the world of good into the realm of crazy-good photography tutorials.

Imitation vs differentiation

Designer David Airey writes about standing out and being different with your design.

Increase Your Freelancing Income by Narrowing Your Focus

We’ve all heard of the benefits of having a niche. Freelance Folder looks at how narrowing your focus can help increase your income.

Dealing with Criticism

GraphicRiver interviews designer Danny Outlaw on how he deals with client criticism.

25 Stylish Examples of Headers in Web Design

Since the header is often the first thing seen on a web site you have to make sure it pops. Six Revisions runs down 25 example of great header design.

30 Designers 1 Question – Where are you most inspired?

Gavin Elliott asks 30 designers when they feel most inspired. Well worth a read.

Design Inspiration Toolbox: 100 Sources of Design Inspiration

If those last 30 designers sources if inspiration weren’t enough for you – check out Designm.ag’s list of 100 more places for design inspiration.

How to Create an Illustrative Web Design in Photoshop

Six Revisions tutorials how to create a professional web design with an illustrated “vector” header in Photoshop.

2009 Web Design Trends and How-To’s

Outlaw Design runs through all the design trends they’ve picked up on in 2009.

Top 50 Best CSS Articles and Resources

A collection of the best articles and resources dedicated to CSS techniques, tips, hacks, tools, and tutorials.

Carsonified Redesigns

Carsonified redesigned their site with a wonderfully illustrative and colorful design! Click around the site and let them know what you think.

Obox Theme Shop

Obox Design launched their theme store this week. I’m really digging their hand done ‘left handed’ theme. Go check it out! Great work guys!

Chat Creative

Chat Creative exists to connect the creative community one video chat at a time. Very cool idea to get to know other designers/bloggers and connect with them and learn!

Mrs. Green

Von Glitschka talks about his process of designing a character and how this expresses a brand.

Bio-Bak.nl

Flashy website with some interesting navigation…

Scrolling Background Effect

Nice header background animation tutorial from youlove.us. Nice use of png’s and jquery!

via The River Current

Packaging With Attitude

Love this simple packaging and identity system and witty copy-writing for Brooklyn Fare. I’m sure all the designers out there would love to have clients like this! :) By Mucca Designs

Post-it Note Stop Animation

Checkout this awesome stop motion post-it note video. I’m amazed at the complexity and length of this video!

Copyright 101 for Designers

Amy has some great tips for designers on basic copyright info over at design sponge. A must read if you a newbie designer or student.

PIXELATED – a lightweight IconKit

PIXELATED is extremely lightweight – the icon file sizes average 60 bytes!
All icons contain only two colors: #222 and #EEE. (I’m considering releasing a developer’s package with PSDs so users can easily customize their colors)
Since the icon’s edges are hard, these transparent GIFs will work on any background.

The icons are free to use – no strings attached.

How To Create a WordPress Theme

Themeshaper has an 11 part tutorial covering wordpress from beginning to end. Good through tutorial for beginners.

Free Typography

Love free (and decent) typefaces? Check out freetypography.com for all the latest on great free typefaces!

Rainbows oh my…

This site might cause you to have a seizure, but this is the glory of the internets. Prepare to bask in the warm glow of animated rainbow gradients :)

Screen Jelly

Screen jelly allows you to record your screen from within the browser. Pretty cool for on the fly tutorials or demonstrations.

247 web usability guidelines

User Focus has put together a HUGE checklist of usability guidelines for web projects. Great in depth resource!

45+ Beautiful Logo Design Tutorials and Resources for Designers

A compiled a list of outstanding logo design tutorials that will give you a head start in the process of creating great logos.

Four ways to keep the creative juices flowing.

Creative Den goes over 4 different ways to stay creative and to keep the new ideas coming.

7 Incredible Computer Generated Works of Art

A great selection of works of computer generated art.

30 More Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download

A collection by Positive Space of some of the most useful PDF documents available to designers on the web.

ProFolio

ProFolio is an elegantly designed portfolio for artists, designers, photographers, or anyone that has creative visual pieces to share.

60 Beautiful High Resolution Paper Backgrounds

I can never seem to get enough paper backgrounds. Photoshop Roadmap drops 60 more HR paper backgrounds our way.

Inspired Interview – Jerrod Landon

Inspired Magazine interviews Jerrod Landon Porter, graphic designer extraordinaire.

When Design Meetings Have Got You Down

A big thanks to Creative Fluff for sending in this clip from one of my favorite comedy troupes.

Ultimate list of Typography resources: inspiration, tutorials, tools and books

A big list from for the typography lovers among us. Lots of useful resources for learning the basis of typography, from books, inspirational works, tutorials etc.

Tips for designing big websites

From the Couch shares their tips on designing for monster size web sites.

Free tool: Symbol Signs collection

Great collection of 50 common used signage symbols, all professionally designed. The symbols signs are free of charge available as an OpenType font format.

25 Creative Flash Websites with 3D Illustration Environment

DzineBlog runs down a collection of the best Flash Websites with 3D Environment and 3D interfaces.

Cute, Japanese emoticons for iChat and for your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Add a little kawaii to your iPhone with with Marmalade Moon’s cute, Japanese emoticons.

10 Helpful Resources for Cross Browser Testing

Ready to add more browser tester bookmarks? Here’s a few more ways to test for cross browser compatibility with minimum of fuss.

Vintage 2.0 – Glossy Retro Takes Over Web Design

Inspired Magazine’s roundup of 25 websites that mix the retro with the shiny. Worlds are colliding!

Maximize Your Keyword Efficiency

A good list of Do’s and Dont’s when it comes to keywords and how they will effect your search engine ranking.

Top 3 Cost-Cutting Strategies for Web Designers

Pinch those design pennies with Matthew Paul’s cost-cutting strategies for web designers.

Jaw-Dropping Examples of Beautiful Contact Page Designs

Some great examples of beautiful contact form design by Balkhis.

Teo Skaffa

Teo Skaffa draws cats and has an awesome 8-bit themed website. I could be entertained by the mario-esque sounds when mousing over links ALL DAY!!!

Ink Pill

Looking to ‘network’ – or waste time on twitter? Check out InkPill’s twitter directory.

iMated

Anyone remember the lovely little spot on the Conan O’Brien show called ‘If They Mated’? Well now its an iPhone app! Everyone should own an iPhone for the sole purpose of using this app – the world would be a much better place!

IE6ify

I know we have all spent countless hours trying to fix websites to work in IE6 – well now here’s your chance to do the opposite! Go break the internets like you were browsing with ie6!

Followerlap

Nifty little web app that shows you overlapping followers with another twitter user.

404 Not Found

This comic made me spit out my coffee and LOL the other week… Gives you a new perspective on the term ’404 not found’ Haha!

Animated Wood!

Hunter Gatherer has a nice little animated video for the Swerve festival. Stop animation+wood blocks=fun!

via hellyeahdude

Turning Green

The Brads has a funny take on the whole Twitter-green-avatar-overlay thingy. :)

Pancakes

I’ve been eating a lot of Pancakes because…well I have no food in my house. Next time i make them I’ll try making a font like this guy did. What a great way to brighten up your breakfast with typography!

Chair Socks?

This made me chuckle a bit – socks for your chair or table legs… :)

The Rebranding of a Company

Sam over at Build Internet has a great write up of how he rebranded his web design business from Cazzu Media to One Mighty Roar. Its always great to read about the reasoning behind others design choices!

Helvetica Moleskine Icon

Bigkobe over at deviant art has some sweet moleskine icons – including the two limited edition Helvetica Moleskines! if you are a swiss-nerd like me you will enjoy these! I’ll be using mine to replace the text edit icon in my dock!

When Free Fonts Aren’t Free

Web typography is about to make another major shift in implementation – weather the font foundries embrace this or not! Typekit has a great blog post about EULA agreements and how they are often times vague and need to change.

Modernizr

Have you ever wanted to do if-statements in your CSS for the availability of cool features like border-radius? Well, with Modernizr you can accomplish just that! Modernizr uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming features like rgba(), border-radius, CSS Transitions and many more. These are currently being implemented across browsers and with Modernizr you can start using them right now, with an easy way to control the fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support them.

XHTML WTF

Web-God Zeldman breaks the news about the death of XHTML and the transition to HTML5. Interesting discussion going on in the comments.

Gridmaker

A sweet grid generator that will help you with your web designs. Just plug in the number of columns and generate a png file to build your designs off of!

You’ve Got 20 Seconds Or Less to Live

At the end of the day, packaging has tobe about substance, not just style, if it is going to be effective. Great article on package design by Ted mininni over at The Dieline.

Table Styling, Fixed Header and Highlighting

Just a couple of quick tricks, from scratch, on coding up tables. We use the proper semantic tags for a table header and then set it to a fixed position so when scrolling the table the header is always visible. Then we implement row AND column highlighting with a bit of semi-clever JavaScript.

Copycat!!!

Looks like the designer of this political campaign website was a little bit more than ‘inspired’ by the iconic Obama design…

Design Boost

Designboost envisions a holistic approach as a condition for sustainable design. To fulfil this vision we believe in upgrading design competence and boosting competitiveness by knowledge sharing. Our four inter-related platforms, BoostUpgrades: BoostEvent, BoostMedia, BoostResource and BoostConcept can be further explored in our periodical table of design knowledge.

For Print Only

FPO is a blog dedicated to both the visual stimulus and the detailing of the development and production of printed matter: Annual reports, books, business cards, stationery suites, collateral materials, posters, packaging and anything else where ink meets substrate. A subject matter we know, love and understand.

Blurb

Looking to have a nice printed bound book of your work? Check out Blurb – I had several friends use this service to print their portfolio books to leave behind at job interviews. Very nice and professional!

3 Deadly Sins of Print Design

A great article with some simple and straight to the point tips about print design. Sometimes we all just need to be reminded of the basics.

Setting Up Crops and Bleed

A design destined for print requires setting up to certain specifications to ensure that the work is printed correctly by industrial lithographic or digital print firms. This often starts with the initial document upon which the design is to be created by adding the correct bleed area and crop marks. Let’s take a look at what crops and bleed actually are, why they are required and how to set them up in your favourite Adobe package.

Lovely as a Tree

Lovely as a Tree – the website that tells you everything you need to know to be a more environmentally aware graphic designer.
We give you the low down on how your choices of design, paper and print impact upon the environment.

Flogged Magazine

Has a client rejected on of your amazing print designs recently? You keep looking at the design, it excites you, it pisses you off, it excites you, it pisses you off. Send it to flogged! they celebrage good designs that hve been blogged in a monthly magazine.

Rethink Design

Rethink Design is an extensive resource for professionals and students in the field of graphic design. It takes considerable time to research and interpret the information needed to make sustainable choices easily. Today’s fast-paced market makes it difficult to find sufficient time for this. Rethink Design makes this information and helpful tools readily accessible for making smart choices easily.

How to typeset headlines

Headlines can become more than just the biggest piece of text on the page. The way you set the type can be come a defining element for your layout or even the entire campaign. Here are different headline styles you may want to explore or build upon in your next design.

Preflight checking in InDesign

The term preflight check originates from the aviation industry where it is a standard procedure for pilots to go over a checklist before lift-off. Preflight checks (preflighting) for print documents have a similar idea in mind. They run trough all the files you used in the document to see if they’re missing, changed or anything else that might have happened to the file.

11 Essential Tips for Good Print Typography

Typography is a huge part of print design and design is a huge part of type. You can’t just throw text on a page, it has to be laid out and organized in a clean way that adds to the information being presented. Here are 11 tips to help you convey information in print the right way.

DIY screen printing tutorial

A great DIY tutorial on screenprinting! Its always good to get off the computer and play with other areas of print design.

Capturing and Optimizing Screenshots for Print

This tutorial came in handy for me when preparing my portfolio last year. Its always good to know how to set up your screenshots to print well. Nothing looks tackier than pixelation – even if you are a web designer!

Before and After Magazine

Before & After magazine has some great pdf tutorials on several topics relevant to both print and web design.

Brush Pilot

Do you have too many photoshop brushes? Have trouble finding that *one* brush that you need? Check our Brush Pilot™ by @bittbox. Brush Pilot is designed to save you time by allowing you to instantly preview your brushes without having to load them into Photoshop.

Silverback

I know Silverback isnt new, but I heard this app mentioned like CRAZY and An Event Apart Boston this week. If you are in need of a way to do some quick usability testing cheaply check this app out!

A Feed Apart

Didn’t make it to An event apart this year? Well you are in luck! The designers that did attend TWEETED like CRAZY! The awesome folks over at Lion Burger made a cool site that aggregates tweets and pics by speaker and session. Go enjoy! Its just like you were there!

Mac Dock Icon Spelling!

I’m not the only geek that notices this: inadvertent spellings in your dock! Check out this gallery of doc arrangements that spell out words. A great time waster :)

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond

I attended Aarron Walter’s session on building findable websites this past week at An Event Apart boston. This is the companion website that has some valuable tools and tips on making your website findable.

Paul-Rand.com

A Paul Rand tribute site that contains biography information, writings, and his works – great if you are looking for classic logo inspiration.

Cardon Copy

1 find crappy hand drawn poster
2 redesign
3 post

Apple Nav in Pure CSS

Tutorial on how to make the apple nav using nothing but HTML and CSS. Pretty impressive!

Left Channel

Left Channel just updated their portfolio and show reel with some sweet new motion work. Go check it out!

1,000 Clients or 1,000,000 Fans

Great discussion from the Couch boys on whether it’s better to be loved or successful.

3 Ways To Get Clients From Twitter

Twitter seems to polarize people. You either love it or hate it. For those that use it, Freelance Folder has 3 tips for getting clients using Twitter.

22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques

CSS button styling can be tricky and sometimes tedious. If you are looking for a simple and effective way of creating dynamic CSS buttons with cross browser compatibility, these tutorials are for you.

When and How to Pay a Blogger

A good article by Advertising Age on how to manage your credibility with your monetary requirements.

Working From Home: 10 Unconscious Cues to Create a Work-Life Balance

Whether you work in your pajamas or not, you’ll appreciate Jonathan Field’s tips on striking a happy balance while working at home.

I’m the worst designer

Kyle Steed writes about how designers get caught in a cycle of constant comparisons, and how we can break out of it.

Why EXACTLY Designers Hate Comic Sans!

Clients love it, designers hate it. We’re talking about the prolific Comic Sans. The Design Cubical talks about what exactly they dislike about Comic Sans.

22 Extremely Well Written Icon Design Tutorials

If you’re looking at adding icon designer to your list of skills, Web Design Ledger has a nice rundown of icon design tuts.

60+ Really awesome Typography Showcases

Tripwire Magazine hits us with a typography tour de force.

Announcing the Launch of 5 Niche Galleries

Looking to get your work featured on something more specialized than the typical CSS gallery? Vandelay Design points us in the direction of 5 new niche galleries.

Spot the Fake Logo Quiz

How’s your logo sniffer? Wallet Pop puts it to the test with a Spot the Fake Logo quiz.

How to get Creativity running through your veins!

If coffee ever stops working for you, you’ll want to check out Creative Den’s article on “How to get Creativity running through your veins!”.

Website FAIL – 30 Web Designs That Will Hurt Your Eyes

Do you enjoy pain? Do you enjoy personal anguish? Then you’ll want to check out Datadial’s Website Fail.

Bad Logos – When Logos Go Bad

If your checked out that last link you’ll probably want a good laugh (or cry) about now. Head over and find out what happens when logos go bad.

15 Coolest Minimalist WebDesigns Using Photograph as Background

A great list of designs that use big, powerful imagery.

50 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Design

As if you needed more sites in your RSS feed, right? :)

24 Beautiful Calligraphy fonts

Warm up the font installer, Logo Studios drops 24 beautiful calligraphy fonts.

The Real Secret to Becoming a Popular Blogger

Want to have riches, fame, and babes? Copyblogger shares their tips on the secret to becoming a popular blogger.

The Three Ds That Will Make or Break Your Blogging Career – Desire

Skellie hits us with the first in a three part installment of what can make or break your blogging career.