Custom Website Design

Last month I published a collection of 45 Photoshop Tutorials for Better Navigation, which quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog. Due to the response, I spent some time finding more great Photoshop tutorials. Here are 50 of the best tutorials for working with text.

Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text

Smooth Glass Type

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Grid-based design is obviously a popular approach in modern web design. Ford designers that use grids, this post includes links to useful tools that can improve your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as some articles for advanced techniques. For those of you who are not as familiar with the details of grid-based design, there are plenty of articles and learning resources here.

Articles:

Grids Are Good - Presentation in a PDF document

Grid (page layout) - Wikipedia

Why Use a Grid - Mark Boulton

5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Preface - Mark Boulton

5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Part 1 - Mark Boulton

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Lists of Great Fonts:

40+ Excellent Freefonts for Professional Design - Smashing Magazine

80 Beautiful Typefaces for Professional Design - Smashing Magazine

60 Brilliant Typefaces for Corporate Design - Smashing Magazine

30 Fonts that All Designers Must Own - Just Creative Design

Most Popular Free Quality Fonts - Tech Magazine

Great Fonts for Web 2.0 - Modern Life is Rubbish

13 Typefaces Every Graphic Designer Needs - David Airey

25 Best Free Quality Fonts - Vitaly Friedman

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Recently I had the privilege to do a brief interview by email with 10 excellent designers. I asked each designer the same five questions, and all of their responses are included below. You probably are familiar with most, if not all, of these people, and I’m sure there is plenty that we can all learn from these interviews.

The participants are:
Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe
John Phillips of Freelance Folder
David Airey
Matt Griffin of Liquid Design Media
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks
Connor Wilson
Thord Daniel Hedengren of Splashpress Media
Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design
Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design
Dejan Cancarevic of StylizedWeb

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Web designers have plenty of online resources available for design inspiration. There’s no shortage of CSS galleries out there to help you by displaying some creative and high-quality work, but offline sources of inspiration can provide new perspectives and encourage you to stretch your boundaries further than you have before. Looking at other websites for inspiration can only take you so far, and sometimes you’ll enjoy taking in the design concepts used in other mediums.

Design inspiration can come from just about anywhere, and in this post we’ll take a look at a number of the best places to look. There are several links and resources included in the post to demonstrate how inspiring these sources can be and to make the post as useful as possible. However, don’t limit yourself to just visiting these links or you will be missing the point of offline inspiration. Look to some of these sources and see what you can find to be applicable to your web design projects.

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Web design is a profession that requires constant growth and development of abilities in order to remain competitive. Technology is obviously changing constantly, and design trends certainly do not stand still either. A designer who is not committed to improvement will eventually become a designer that is searching for work.

A few weeks ago I published a post that examined a number of different skills that web designers can work to improve, including coding, graphic design, project management, SEO, marketing, communication, and more. If you haven’t seen that post there are links to some great resources that you may want to check out. Taking that idea of constant improvement a step further, putting yourself in challenging situations is a great way to promote growth. Sure, challenges are sometimes uncomfortable, but if you are actively seeking out the right types of challenges you can drastically improve your marketable skills as a designer.

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Navigation is obviously one of the most crucial aspects of web design in terms of usability, but often it is also a focal point of the design. Navigational buttons, bars ans menus provide the designer with an excellent opportunity to be creative and add some style to the design. What better tool to use for this purpose than Photoshop?

Here is a collection of 45 tutorials that will help you with creating the perfect navigation. Some of them produce an end result that is fairly similar to another tutorial on the list, but you can learn something from each one as they take a slightly different approach.

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If you look around at websites that are well-designed and are effective, you’ll see that the target audience of a website has a profound impact on the design of the site. Obviously, different audiences prefer different types of websites and they will also have different needs.

The term user-focused is commonly thrown around. In this article I’ll take a look at a number of different ways (in no particular order) that the audience of your site will affect they way it is designed. This is an attempt not to be all-inclusive, but rather to show just how many ways the audience of a site can impact its design.

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Being an effective web designer requires developing a number of different skills. Not all of these skills are limited to the technical and artistic aspects of web design. Communicating with clients, project management, and promotion are all important as well.

Freelancers and designers that work for small firms typically have to wear many hats, and being well-rounded in design and business is almost essential.

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As a web designer you may be faced with the challenge of getting your work and your abilities in front of others. If this is the case, here is a list of 11 different things you can do to get noticed.

1. Submit Your Designs to CSS Galleries

CSS galleries display high-quality designs, and you can submit yours to be considered for inclusion. The leading CSS Galleries (CSS Beauty, CSS Vault, CSS Drive, etc.) have huge audiences that will see your work if it is included. Additionally, there are a number of specialty galleries, such as Light on Dark, eduStyle, No Resolution, and The Horizontal Way.

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