My First Impressions of Amazon S3

A few months ago I was looking into a variety of hosting options before launching DesignM.ag and Amazon S3 stood out as an attractive option for hosting the images used on the site. If you’re not familiar with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), it “is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”A growing number of websites and blogs are using S3 to host media files and for server backups, and ultimately I felt that it was a great way to reduce the burden on the server of the host by storing images on a separate server. S3 is an attractive option because it is low cost (particularly in comparison to hosting overage charges) and very flexible. Once you open an account you can upload as little or as much as you want, and you only pay for what you use.

40 Icon Tutorials for Photoshop

There are a growing number of excellent Photoshop tutorials creating for your own icons. Here are 40 of the best.

How to Create a Super Shiny Pencil Icon

Interview with Chris Spooner

I recently had the opportunity to interview Chris Spooner. I’m sure many of you are followers of his blog, Blog.SpoonGraphics.com. Chris has just recently made the jump to full-time freelancer, and I hope you will enjoy getting to know more about him.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Blog Theme

One of the greatest benefits of blog platforms is that they make it easy to quickly get new content onto the site without the need to spend time on the design and layout of each page/post. Once the theme is set, all you have to do is create the content and hit publish. However, this can also be a negative as well. With the ease of publishing new content it’s extremely easy to overlook the importance of the design and it’s impact on the blog overall.

25 More Incredibly Artistic Website Designs (Part 3)

If you enjoy getting inspiration from artistic designers, here is a collection for you. It’s a follow up to the first two popular collections: 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites and 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites Part II.

Four Travel Deals