October’s Best: This Month in Web Design

It seems like each month there is more and more design-related content available. That means there are plenty of opportunities to learn and be inspired, but it also gets hard to sort through everything to find what you really want. Hopefully this collection of the best posts from October will help.

Web Design and Development:

50 Stunning Examples of a Great Redesign: My Top Picks – Function

10 Tips to Avoid Designer’s Block – GoMediaZine

How Much Should You Charge for a Website? – CSS-Tricks

How to Use sIFR 3 (Screencast) – CSS-Tricks

37 Ways to Design the Comment Form – Blog Design Blog

13 Awesome JavaScript Animated Flash Like Menus – DevSnippets

25 Impressive Blog Footers

Footers are often an afterthought in blog design. I know firsthand, because my footer is about as basic and uneventful as it gets. The blogs on this list are excellent examples for the rest of us that the footer can be a helpful and interesting aspect of the design.

Some of the examples shown here use visual elements to make the design of the footer more interesting, and others simply focus on providing navigation or information in the footer that will help visitors.

CSS-Tricks

Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes

Being able to design custom WordPress themes is almost a must for today’s web designers. The fun thing with WordPress is that there’s always something new that you can learn to make the platform work better for you and your clients. These 10 tutorials will teach basic WordPress theming as well as some more advanced skills.

Designing for WordPress

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks has a three-part video series for downloading and installing WordPress, all the way through everything else involved with designing a custom theme. The example theme that is built through the series is a personalized homepage theme.

35+ Nature Tutorials for Photoshop

There are plenty of great Photoshop tutorials for working with different aspects and elements of nature. This is a collection of tutorials for working with the sky, clouds, grass, water, rain, and much more.

How to Create a Delicious Green Apple Illustration

25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 3

Colorful websites are always a good source of design inspiration (See 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites, and 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 2). These 25 showcase designs make excellent use of color. Hopefully you’ll find at least a few for your own inspiration.

Byron Bay Schoolies

25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Websites

Web designers often browse through portfolio websites of other designers for inspiration and ideas that can be used in their own work. Photographers, like designers, have a need to display an attractive portfolio for their websites visitors, and many photographers have excellent portfolio sites. In this post I’d like to take a look at 25 of the best. This collection is based on the quality of the portfolio site itself, not necessarily the work being displayed inside the portfolio.

Andrew Gransden Photography

A Few Items of Interest

I’ve recently been notified of a few items that I thought were worth mentioning. There are two design contests (with nice prizes) and a new site launch.

WooContest

The Future of Web Design Galleries

Web design galleries started out as a novel idea several years ago when the first few were launched to showcase excellent work of designers from all around the world, specifically those that were exemplary in their use of CSS. However, there are now literally hundreds of design galleries out there. Throughout the design community there are mixed reactions to design galleries. Many designers visit a few specific galleries on a daily or weekly basis to see what’s being added. Others get more annoyed each time a new gallery is launched.With a number of design galleries drawing significant traffic and advertising revenue, others who are wanting to run their own profitable websites are often drawn to the idea of a gallery. However, with so many established galleries out there already, the opportunities for new ones are rather limited in most cases. Still, some new galleries are finding ways to interest visitors through specialization in a specific niche. While niche galleries are unlikely to ever generate the traffic statistics of leading galleries like CSS Mania, they do offer something unique to visitors that can allow them to stand out from the hundreds of other galleries.

45+ Sources and Sets of Photoshop Custom Shapes

For graphic designers, working with custom shapes in Photoshop can be a big time-saver. While free brushes get a lot of attention, custom shapes probably get less. Here is a rundown of some of the best resources to download free custom shapes for your own work in Photoshop.

Photoshop Custom Shapes from the Adobe Exchange (370 sets)
The Adobe Exchange is a great place to find all kinds of resources, including custom shapes for Photoshop. There is plenty of variety and a huge amount of sets to choose from.

12 of the Best Sources of Premium Vectors

There are a number of resources online for finding free stock photography, vectors, custom shapes for Photoshop, and all kinds of other useful items for designers. However, sometimes the quality you need will not be there with free items, and you may also spend more time searching for something free than it’s worth. There are certainly times when it’s appropriate to pay for quality work.

With that in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to put together a small collection of the best sources for buying premium vectors. If you know of other good sources that have been excluded from the list, please leave a comment.