Design Reviver http://designreviver.com Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:28:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en 14 of the Most Useful Web Design Blogs http://designreviver.com/general/14-of-the-most-useful-web-design-blogs/ http://designreviver.com/general/14-of-the-most-useful-web-design-blogs/#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:05:57 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=177 There is definitely not a shortage of web design blogs floating around the web, and it’s easy to understand why. Web designers can utilize skills that they already have to get a good looking blog up and running with relative ease. Out of these blogs there are a handful that really stand out in terms of useful content.

Here are some of the most useful web design blogs out there. I’ve excluded big blogs like Smashing Magazine and A List Apart, since most web designers, more than likely, already follow them.

Noupe

Six Revisions

Vandelay Design Blog

We Function

Just Creative Design

Fuel Your Creativity

Dev Lounge

Outlaw Design Blog

CSS Tricks

Blog.SpoonGraphics

DesignM.ag

Woork

Web Resources Depot

Web Designer Wall

]]> http://designreviver.com/general/14-of-the-most-useful-web-design-blogs/feed/ 10 Excellent CSS Tips and Tutorials http://designreviver.com/tutorials/10-excellent-css-tips-and-tutorials/ http://designreviver.com/tutorials/10-excellent-css-tips-and-tutorials/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:04:59 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=176 CSS is a technology that web designers use everyday, but yet it is something that most struggle with as well. Whether it’s keeping stylesheets for large sites manageable, or creating image effects that are cross browser compatible, there are plenty of things to cause frustration. This article is an attempt to provide you with a few resources that might help you with your CSS woes or introduce you to a few tricks you didn’t know about.

Organization

Write a well structured CSS file without becoming crazy

A detailed and well written post about how to write a well structured CSS file.

Organizing Your Stylesheet Using CSS Edit

Rob Soule of Viget Labs shows you how to organize your style sheets using CSS Edit, a powerful CSS editor built exclusively for the mac.

Tips for organizing your CSS

A set of practical tips for organizing your style sheets.

Tabs and Buttons

Expandable CSS Tabs Tutorial

A tutorial on creating expandable CSS tabs.

Simple Round CSS Buttons

Learn how to create rounded corner buttons with only One Image and One CSS file.

Scalable CSS Buttons Using PNG and Background Colors

Beautiful CSS buttons with icon set

Learn how to create a clean set of buttons with CSS and an icon set.

Working with Images

CSS Decorative Gallery

Decorate your images and photo galleries without editing the source images.

Placing text over image using CSS position property

A simple technique for placing text over an image.

Create Resizing Thumbnails Using Overflow Property

Learn how to create a cool resizing thumbnail effect.

]]> http://designreviver.com/tutorials/10-excellent-css-tips-and-tutorials/feed/ Watercolor Roundup: 200+ Beautiful Brushes and Textures http://designreviver.com/freebies/watercolor-roundup-200-beautiful-brushes-and-textures/ http://designreviver.com/freebies/watercolor-roundup-200-beautiful-brushes-and-textures/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:09:00 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=173 Watercolor effects are a hot trend right now in web design. It seems like we are seeing at least one or two sites featuring this style show up on the design galleries every week. Adding watercolor elements to a design can definitely give it an artistic appearance, and when done well, can make a website look as if it was scanned from a canvas.

Here are some of the best watercolor brushes and textures that can be found on the web.

Brushes

Textures

]]> http://designreviver.com/freebies/watercolor-roundup-200-beautiful-brushes-and-textures/feed/ 10 of the Best Color Resources and Tools http://designreviver.com/general/10-of-the-best-color-resources-and-tools/ http://designreviver.com/general/10-of-the-best-color-resources-and-tools/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:20:57 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=172 Color plays an important role in the way we communicate with each other. Color not only helps give a design visual beauty, but it can also make a person react or feel a certain way. This feeling may be on a subconscious level, but it could affect the way that person thinks about a product or service. That’s why it is so important to choose the right palette when creating a new design. Here are some resources and tools to help you choose that perfect color palette

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is the ultimate resource for all things color related. It is a social site that gives people the ability to share and rate color palettes and read color related articles.

Kuler

Kuler is an Adobe site that also lets you share and rate color themes, but it also gives you the ability to download and use these themes in Adobe Creative Suite.

COPASO

COPASO is a tool that can be found on COLOURlovers, but since it is so robust, I wanted to include it separately. It includes features such as a scratch pad to save colors and a photo color extraction tool.

ColorJack

Color Jack is an advanced set of tools for choosing color schemes.

ColorBurn

The ColorBurn is a simple widget that provides daily color palette inspiration.

ColorSchemer

ColorSchemer’s online tool allows you to enter a Hex value and in return, it give you a matching color palette.

ColorBlender

Color Blender returns a blended color scheme based to two color value inputs.

Color Wizard

Color Wizard returns a scheme based on a submitted color.

ColourMod

ColourMod is a dashboard widget that give you and easy way to pick and convert color values.

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is a Firefox extension that allows you to determine the color value of any point in your browser. It also gives you the ability to measure distance between two points and get various information about DOM elements.

]]> http://designreviver.com/general/10-of-the-best-color-resources-and-tools/feed/ 400+ High Quality Patterns http://designreviver.com/freebies/400-high-quality-patterns/ http://designreviver.com/freebies/400-high-quality-patterns/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:37:15 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=171 Patterns can be found every where. Most commonly we can see them in fabric and wallpaper, but they also make great visual elements for web design. Here is a collection of patterns of all shapes, sizes, and color. Some are images, and some are pattern files for Photoshop and Illustrator.

]]> http://designreviver.com/freebies/400-high-quality-patterns/feed/ 15 Amazing 3D Flash Websites http://designreviver.com/inspiration/15-amazing-3d-flash-websites/ http://designreviver.com/inspiration/15-amazing-3d-flash-websites/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:18:32 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=167 A couple of months ago, I wrote a tutorial on Getting Started with 3D in Flash. It demonstrated how easy it is to use Papervision3D to produce a real time 3D interface within the Flash player. But so much more can be done with Papervision3D and other 3D engines for Flash. Here is a showcase of sites that take the 3D interface and environment to the next level.

The Eco Zoo

Franck Sorbier

MCBD

White Void

Spectra Visual Newsreader

Play > Smart

Wirtualne Centrum Sztuki

Park.seasons

This one is more of an experiment, but I included it because it looks incredible.

Motorola Razr2 :: Gondry’s Dream

Coca-Cola Brasil

Audi RS 6

The Neighbourhood

XX3

Nitro

Karim Charlebois-Zariffa

]]> http://designreviver.com/inspiration/15-amazing-3d-flash-websites/feed/ Font Resources: Create, Organize, Identify, and Test http://designreviver.com/general/font-resources-create-organize-identify-and-test/ http://designreviver.com/general/font-resources-create-organize-identify-and-test/#comments Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:28:16 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=162 Who doesn’t love fonts! Collecting them is easy, storing them takes minimal space, and most of them are free. But when your collection becomes rather large, do you have the proper resources to organize and test them? Have you ever ran across a website with a beautiful font that you wanted to identify? Or have you ever wanted to create your own font for the sake of tinkering? Well in this article we link a bunch of font resource websites to help answer the above questions.

This is a guest post by Omar the Radwan.

Online Font Making Tools

Fontstruct

A couple of months ago fontshop released an online font making tool called ‘fontstruct’. This FREE flash based site allows anyone to try their hand at the art of font making. Not only is it basic enough for any beginner to pick up, but it also features more complex options for those familiar with type. When finished, you are able to download your newly built font directly to your computer, and also have the option to add it to the ‘fontstruct’ database.

BitFontMaker

Although a couple of years old and still version 0.1, BitFontMaker is an online font making tool that allows you to create Bit Fonts. It isn’t as complex as ‘Fontstruct’ but is very simple to use.

Font Creation Tutorials

Chank - How To Make Your Own Fonts

My First Font - How To Make Your Own Font

Iconian

Online Type Testers and Font Identifier

TypeTester

A great tool for comparing web fonts side by side.

FontTester

WhatTheFont

Font Organizer and Installer

The Font Thing

Windows doesn’t handle the mass storage of fonts very well, so most designers only keep the basics installed. ‘The Font Thing’ allows you to not only custom test each font that is located on your computer, but it will handle the installing and uninstalling of these fonts to keep your system from lagging. This software is FREEWARE, very handy, and is packed with useful features.

Font Making Software

High Logic

High-Logic offers great font creation software at a very reasonable price. FontCreator is their flagship program that allows you to create a Truetype font by importing and vectorize character images or by directly drawing the shapes individually. Just like most feature-packed software, there is a slight learning curve, but the overall options included in this program are well worth the time spent to learn it.

High-Logic has just released a new Script-to-Font style program called ‘Scanahand’. It’s
interface is extremely easy to use as it only requires 3 steps.

1. Print the template page and draw each character using a pen or marker.
2. Scan the finalized paper into ‘Scanahand’.
3. Export your new finalized font and save it to your computer.

Free trials of both can be downloaded from their website.

]]> http://designreviver.com/general/font-resources-create-organize-identify-and-test/feed/ 350+ Brushes, Textures, and Fonts: Massive Hand Drawn Roundup http://designreviver.com/freebies/350-brushes-textures-and-fonts-massive-hand-drawn-roundup/ http://designreviver.com/freebies/350-brushes-textures-and-fonts-massive-hand-drawn-roundup/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:51:59 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=161 You don’t need to have your finger on the pulse of web design trends to know that hand drawn style is hot right now. To achieve this look you have a few options: you can do some sketches and doodles on paper and scan them in, or you can draw them directly in Photoshop. The third option would be to take advantage of the resources found in this article.

Textures

To take your hand drawn design to the next level, it is good to place them on nice textures where they would normally be found:

Fonts

  • Grutch Shaded
  • Jamaistevie
  • Barnes
  • Stun Filla Wenka
  • My Turtle
  • Sketch Rockwell
  • Pointy
    • ]]> http://designreviver.com/freebies/350-brushes-textures-and-fonts-massive-hand-drawn-roundup/feed/ Breathtaking Photo Sets Guaranteed to Inspire http://designreviver.com/inspiration/breathtaking-photo-sets-guaranteed-to-inspire/ http://designreviver.com/inspiration/breathtaking-photo-sets-guaranteed-to-inspire/#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:26:55 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=160 As I have mentioned before, there are many places and ways to find design inspiration. Sometimes it is good to take a break from browsing the web design galleries to look at other forms of art, and photography is probably one of the best places to look.

    Key design elements such as color, composition, lighting, and texture can all be found in photography. So examining a great photo is a good way to spark the creative process. Here are 10 amazing photo sets found on flickr that possess quality guaranteed to leave you inspired.

    Click on the images to view the complete sets.

    land- and seascapes - Uggla

    Nature - Siebe

    European Bug In - Andreas Reinhold

    Uribe Kosta - ssabin

    Your favorites - Lars Trebing

    Landscapes - broadview

    Top 100 - Your Superset of Faves! - Stuck in Customs

    Water Colors - GeorgeAugustine

    Most Interesting - EJP Photo

    Most Interesting - slimmer_jimmer

    ]]>     http://designreviver.com/inspiration/breathtaking-photo-sets-guaranteed-to-inspire/feed/     400+ Swirls, Curls, and Fleurons http://designreviver.com/freebies/400-swirls-curls-and-fleurons/ http://designreviver.com/freebies/400-swirls-curls-and-fleurons/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:02:38 +0000 Henry http://designreviver.com/?p=157 Ornamental web design is often comprised of swirling, curling, or flower shaped elements. This style is influenced from decorative art pieces and architectural accents from centuries ago. Using ornamental style is a great way to give your site a classic look. Here is a list of Photoshop brushes that should help you out with your next ornamental design.

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