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.

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!

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.

Technique For Creating A Hand Drawn Website

The guys at From The Couch have a great video tutorial on a technique for creating hand drawn websites. Definitely check it out if you are looking to try something different!

Rounded Corners In FireFox And Safari

A quick tutorial on CSS3 selectors that make rounded corners a piece of cake in FF and Safari!

Stop Trying Start Doing

Another great video blog from the guys at From The Couch.

Interview with the guys ‘From The Couch”

Tired of the from the couch links yet? Ha! Well this is the last. Check out this interview Aaron did! Its cool to see how the guys got their start video blogging and what they are inspired by.

Build a Photo Gallery Tutorial

Chris from CSS-Tricks seems to never run out ideas for video tutorials. Check out this tut on building a photo gallery.

jQuery for Beginners

Looking to learn jQuery but don’t know where to start? Check out Jeff’s video series that will teach you how to use jQuery from the ground up!

Diving Into Php

Another great series by Jeff over at Theme Forest & Nettuts is diving into PHP. I’m currently going through these tutorials and learning a ton!

From Design to Print Podcast

Enough web stuff – let’s talk about print design: Bleeds, die cuts, paper types oh my! Check out this podcast if you want to learn more about all things print related. (itunes link!)

Boagworld Podcast

Another great web design related podcast to check out, subscribe to and follow religiously: Boagworld. This weeks show is about conflicts that surround design decisions.

Rookie Designer Podcast

Adam over at Rookie Designer runs a great podcast that covers important topics that newbies need to know about. This most recent episode Adam talks about how hiring a sales person to bring in new business may or may not help freelancers out there.

Grasshopper

Last but not least – check out this typography based video on entrepreneurship. Quite inspiring! :)

15 fresh & funny iPhone apps you must touch

For all you iPhone lovers, you’ll want to check out Inspired Magazines app rundown for the iPhone & iPod Touch. These aren’t your traditional apps!

Twitterspread

Spread the good work with this Twitter app. Twitterspread is about those small moments of joy that bring a smile to our face, and on rare occasions, that ultimate kick-ass-feel-good moment.

Creative Opera

Be sure to bookmark this new blog. Designer Manda Szewczyk has worked in the design industry for over 10 years and brings a lot of value for new designers, future designers, and those who just love to love design.

Mushin Do

Johan Dorper sent us in this link to the website Mushin Do. I’m a sucker for anything Japanese…but I must say I really dig the header and how it breaks out of the box.

twittag

Impress your friends by busting out Designer Rafie’s twitttag at your next conference. It can be used for tweetup (twitter meet up) or any social networking event where twitter is common. Maybe don’t bust it out at your Grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary :P

Molly On Opera The W3C And Web Standards

OpenSourceRelease interviews usability expert Molly E. Holzschlag on her take on current web standards and Opera. It’s also great to see Molly using a different headshot :)

Iconfinder

A big thanks to Martin Leblanc for this link to Iconfinder! It’s a wonderful resource for quickly searching for freely available icons. Simple to use and it works really well.

My 10 Favorite Typefaces Of All Time

Grace Smith goes through her top 10 favorite fonts. It’s always fun to see which fonts capture the imagination of designers. One thing I have to say about Grace’s favorites – she certainly likes sans serif helvetica-ish style fonts :)

Why Niche Banner Ads Fail

Interesting article by Zach Dunn on why certain niche banner ads fail. I’d say most surfers filter out ads pretty well. It’s as Zach says because of the “tendency of serving up some incredibly bland or gimmicky contextual banner ads for many basic keywords.”

The Social Bird icon set

Tired of the same old twitter icon? Inspired Magazine servers up some…unusual alternatives.

Creative Gap

Jin gives his feelings on what he terms the “Creative Gap” – the disconnect between what we want to create, and what we end up creating. Very interesting article on what many designers suffer with when they get stuck in a design.

BestPhotoshopTutorials

Tired of searching the net for Photoshop Tutorials? BestPhotoshopTutorials tries to pull all the quality tuts into one place.

Illustration work by Matti Kemppainen

Illustration work by Matti Kemppainen for Finnish catering service. Some great use of strong saturated colors.

Reviewmydesign

From browsing the FreelanceSwitch forums there always seems to be a big need for designers to have their work reviewed by their peers. It’s great to see the launch of Reviewmydesign as a site dedicated to having your worked reviewed by fellow designers.

How Much for a Website?

The question “How much for a website?” can be every designer’s dream or nightmare. Matthew Ferreira article justifies the cost of a strong website design and build by outlining the number of steps involved in the creation of a website. And he doesn’t even use the “How much is a car?” analogy once!

Wikimetro

Looking to add some local twitterers to your follow list? Wikimetro makes searching for people in your area much easier that doing a regular twitter search.

60 Layout design tutorials

Area 1 rounds up some quality design layout tutorials. Make sure you have some extra time before you click because the list is gigantic!

25 years of cool designs

Internationally recognized design firm Duffy & Partners has just posted 25 years worth of logos they have created. It’s quite a collection.

Spray paint: a collection of 9 hi-res textures

Get grungy with some high resolution spray paint textures. The best thing is – no annoying spray dots all over your arms and clothing!

Shadowness Sneak Peek

For those unfamiliar – Shadowness is an art community that allows artists to share their work with others. It’s currently undergoing a new design and Kyle Thacker gives a little sneak peek behinds the scenes.

Beautiful board game designs

I’m a board game geek – no ameritrash for me! :P So I was excited to read Creative Closeup’s list of beautifully designed board games.

The Creative Unity

Joseph Vanlandingham lets us know that The Creative Unity has just launched a new website and is now accepting designs for their 2nd book. Submitting is free and there is no limit on the amount of designs that you can submit.