Beautiful Email Newsletters

An amazing gallery packed with tons of beautiful e-newsletter designs!

Questionable Characters

Questionable Characters is run by two guys: Ben and Frank. Together they offer insight and answers to design questions. Fun site to waste some time on :)

Officeal

Officeal is a showcase of workplaces that really take the idea of creative space seriously. These are the types of companies that resist the urge to fill a room with cubicles.

These are our industry heroes of interior design and corporate culture. Officeal exists to bring them to your attention, and give them a spotlight.

C is for Candy

Another interesting blog discovery this week: C is for Candy. Graphic Designer, installation artist, city planner – Candy Chen makes me thing out of my graphic & web design box.

Logo Design Time Lapse Video

I love to watch other designers work. It’s probably not appropriate to stand behind someone and watch…so instead videos like this from Mattosn Creative will have to do. Check out the process of the Mottsy logo design.

Yeah Toast!!!

This isnt really graphic design or web design related, but I know you guys would find this entertaining! Don’t we all need a toast launcher in our kitchens?

Target E-news designs

I’ve been working on e-newsletter designs non-stop this week and came across this insanely clever design by target’s packaging division. Check it out!

Oops I tweeted my pants!

FL2 has an interesting flash based twitter visualization on their site. They also have some pretty sweet work in their portfolio.

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.

Typography in Motion

A nice educational lighthearted video explaining the basics of typography. We should send this video to all the clients out there that want everything big and bold!

Pulp Fiction

Oldie but a goodie – I will never get tired of the this little clip! The typography in this video expresses the tone of the movie quote perfectly. Quite possible the best kinetic typography video i’ve seen so far!

Kinetic Typography Tutorial by Elrond Hubbard

A nice indepth tutorial on how to create a kinetic typography video. Wishing I had aftereffects now!

Sandimation

Another interesting animation technique: Animation with sand…I’ll call it sandimation!

Stop Motion Break Dancing

Funny stop motion video featuring some break dancing moves that i’m sure arent even possible :)

Rotoscoping

This video features a cool animation technique called rotoscoping.

Time Lapse

Cool time lapse video of a guy driving around a city at night. Light is always so much more intense with slow shutter speeds.

Time Lapse Design Process

Video of Mike from carsonified designing some the slides for his presentaiton at FOWD London. Pretty cool to see the process from beginning to end. Amazing photoshop skills!!!

AC Title Design

I love this little techie red/black short intro. Makes me think of Russian constructivism.

3D Typography

A quick intro spot with some awesome 3d typography effects.

Lightpainting

Creepy and serene stop motion light painting set in nature. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Very cool!

Pipes

Animation inspired by the old ‘pipes’ screensaver

Stop Animation + Candles

A cool little spot for VH1 done with stop animation and candles. Love the low tech approach!

MTV Australia

Love the way the MTV logo gets constructed in mid air in some of these spots – and the flowing cloth as well.

Typographic Battle Scene

I love the way this video uses typography as objects in a battle scene. Check out the process work – pretty complex and amazing!

Megaman

Old school videogame enthusiasts will love this vid! Stop motion animation + cut paper + megaman theme. Wow… funny and well done!

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.

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.

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!

Mustache Typography

A series of posters designed for the University of Brighton 2009 Degree Shows. The theme emphasizes the fact that the University is 150 years old on this year with a Victorian tongue-in-cheek look at University life. Very interesting use of typography with a fake beard… :)

Typophile

Looking to learn the ins and outs of type design? Hand around the pros! Check out Typophile – an active community of type designers. Check our the forums, wiki and blogs.

Exljbris

I’m sure we have all seen and used Exljbris’s fonts:
Delicious, Fontin, Fontin Sans, Tallys, Fertigo Pro , Diavlo, Anivers, Museo and Museo Sans. But have you seen how others are using them? Check out this flickr group of Exljbris fonts in use.

Typographic Posters Directory

Looking for typographic poster inspiration? Check out this massive directory of posters submitted by designers.

Suprb

Suprb has some interesting experimental and custom type work.

PX to EM Conversion

PX to EM helps you convert your text sizes based on a body font size.

Birra Stout

Darden Studio is giving away Birra Stout! This font is bold and chunky and has lots of quirky character.

Sessions

Another free font for you guys! This font was made with the online type tool fontstruct.
Via ILT

Moo

Another free super bold blocky font available for free download. I’ll admit that there are alot of these fonts out there, but you can’t argue with free!
Via I’m Just Creative