Vandelay Design Blog » Tools

40 Excellent Fonts to Use Through Google Web Fonts

Steven Snell — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:12:18 +0000

In recent years the possibilities for using a wide variety of fonts and typefaces in web design has come a long way. There are now several different options for approaches that you can take when you want to use a font other than the basic, standard web safe fonts. Google Web Fonts has quickly become one of the leading options.

With Google Web Fonts it is quick and easy to implement a wide variety of fonts into the websites that you design and code. There are currently more than 500 fonts that are available through Google Web Fonts, and many of them are of sufficient quality to use in professional designs. In this post we’ll feature 40 fonts that you can start using today.

Droid Sans

Droid Serif

Oswald

Lobster

Lobster Two

Yanone Kaffeesatz

Ubuntu

Arvo

PT Sans Narrow

Open Sans Condensed

Dancing Script

Francois One

Arimo

Tangerine

Shadows Into Light

Shadows Into Light Two

PT Serif

Vollkorn

Amaranth

Architects Daughter

Nunito

News Cycle

Copse

Bevan

Neuton

Tinos

Bad Script

Goudy Bookletter 1911

Maiden Orange

Just Another Hand

Signika

Nixie One

Kameron

Merienda One

Berkshire Swash

EB Garamond

Bangers

Coustard

Brawler

Patua One

10 Resources for Creating Website Color Schemes

Steven Snell — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:13:56 +0000

Choosing the right color scheme is one of the most important decisions of the website design process, and it can also be one of the most challenging. Fortunately, there are a number of great tools available to help with color selection.

Some of the resources mentioned in this post will allow you to browse through a variety of color palettes or schemes, many will allow you to create and save your own color schemes, and some are interactive, allowing you to quickly create an effective color scheme.

Kuler

Adobe’s Kuler includes a large library of user-submitted color schemes. You can view the color schemes online or download them to be used in Adobe Creative Suite products.

Colour Lovers

Colour Lovers currently has almost 2 million color palettes created by its users. You can browse palettes by submission date, rating, views, and comments, or you can search by keyword.

ColoRotate

ColoRotate has a library of color schemes that you can browse, or you can create your own with their unique 3D tool. You can use it directly in Photoshop and Fireworks with the ColoRotate plugin.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer allows you to choose the type of scheme that you want to use (mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic, or accented analogic). You then adjust one of the colors on the wheel and the other colors will adjust as well, helping to create an appropriate color scheme.

ColorSchemer Gallery

ColorSchemer has a large library of user-created color schemes. You can browse by submission date, rating, or number of downloads, or you can search by keyword.

Pictaculous

Pictaculous is a simple online tool for generating a color scheme. You can upload a photo and it will suggest colors to use with the photo. You can then download the Adobe swatch of the suggested colors.

Color Spire

Color Spire is fairly simple to use. You select a starting color and it will suggest a palette of colors to use in combination. It also provides a basic preview to show how the colors would look on a sample website layout.

ColorExplorer

ColorExplorer includes a few different color tools. With the color picker you can select a color and see different variations. You can also view color libraries and use the color matching tool to help create a palette.

ColourGrab

ColourGrab is a simple tool that allows you to get colors from a picture that is online. Just enter the URL of the image and it will show which colors are used most in the photo.

Sphere: Color Theory Visualizer

With Sphere you can adjust one of the colors in the scheme and the others will automatically adjust to match. You can try different types of color schemes like analogous, complementary, triadic, tetradic, and more.

For more resources please see:

20 Awesome Thunderbird Addons

Steven Snell — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:33:15 +0000

Thunderbird is a popular and free email application from Mozilla, the people behind Firefox. Like Firefox, one of the reasons for Thunderbird’s popularity is the number of quality add-ons that are available for download. While Thunderbird includes all of the necessary features for managing your email, there are tons of add-ons that bring additional functionality that may make the application far more useful and productive for you.

In this post we’ll highlight 20 add-ons that can prove to be highly useful.

Lightning

Lightning adds a calendar to Thunderbird so you can keep track of your schedule from within Thunderbird.

Organize your schedule and life’s important events in a calendar that’s fully integrated with your Thunderbird email. Manage multiple calendars, create your daily to do list, invite friends to events, and subscribe to public calendars.

Provider for Google Calendar

Provider for Google Calendar integrates Lightning with your Google Calendar.

This extension allows Sunbird and Lightning to read and write events to a Google Calendar.

QuickFolders (Tabbed Folders)

QuickFolders can help to improve the organization of your inbox.

Cut through the clutter of the folders sidebar with your favorite folders as tabs. Open folders and sub folders, move mails without scrolling around or searching.

Contacts Sidebar

Keeping track of your contacts can be much easier with Contacts Sidebar.

Displays the address books in a sidebar in Thunderbirds 3-pane-window and can be toggled with the F4 key or a toolbar button.

FoxClocks

If you work with clients in different parts of the world FoxClocks can help to keep you organized.

FoxClocks lets you keep an eye on the time around the world – or just your local time – by putting small clocks in your statusbar. Choose from a set of useful time formats or create your own – custom formats are easy to create and very flexible.

XNote

With as many emails as you receive each day it’s often hard to keep track of everything ad remember the context or important details surrounding the message. XNote can help by allowing you to enter a sticky note attached to messages.

XNote allows you to create a note for each mail. Thus, you can add for example the phone number of that contact or when you have to contact the sender back.

ThunderBrowse

With ThunderBrowse you can click on links within email messages and view them in a browser within Thunderbird.

Did your friend send you a cool link? Want to read the rest of that interesting article? Don’t want to open up your web browser just to view it? You don’t have to! Just view it in Thunderbird with ThunderBrowse!

Tag Toolbar

Tag Toolbar allows you to organize your inbox by adding tags to messages.

This extension adds new toolbar and display the tags you have created as toggle buttons; the added toolbar is called “Tag Toolbar” and the space for showing tags is called “Tag Bar”. You can attach/remove tags to/from the selected messages. The tag buttons’ states are changed automatically, so you can easily know what tags are attached to the message. Moreover, you can filter the tags to be displayed by categorizing tags. You can create and change category from the listbox on Tag Bar.

eMarks

With eMarks you can bookmark messages that you will want to be able to access later.

Do you have an email that will need to revisit/attend later on ? Would you like to keep it handy and get it with a simple click? Bookmark your important emails with the eMarks addon.

Quick Translator

Do you ever get emails in different languages that you cannot read? Quick Translator can help.

The most lightweight and easiest translator. Translate between more than 50 languages with one click or a hot key. Translate from one word to a whole page.

Quick Locale Switcher

If you communicate with clients or contacts in different languages, Quick Locale Switcher makes it easy to move between different languages.

Allows you to quickly change and apply a different locale related setting from the tools menu, the statusbar, or your Toolbar.

AttachmentExtractor

If you receive a lot of emails with attachments, AttachmentExtractor can help by unzipping and extracting those attachments.

Just select the messages containing the attachments you want to extract and select ‘Extract Attachments’ and this extension does the rest. No more having to go through each message to extract the attachments!

Nostalgy

Nostalgy can help to improve efficiency by giving you control to setup keyboard shortcuts for working with Thunderbird.

Adds keyboard shortcuts to change folder, move/copy messages, with folder name auto-completion (using only the keyboard). Same for tags. Also includes a system of rules to suggest a target folder for saving messages; re-creates Eudora’s Alt-Click; facilitates navigation in the 3-pane window; makes it easy to change between To/Bcc/Cc fields in the composer; facilitates tag-oriented operations. All that with the keyboard only!

Quicktext

If you find yourself typing the same types of emails over and over again, Quicktext can help by allowing you to use email templates.

Using Thunderbird, Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails. Quicktext performs both simple and complex tasks. The program can insert different signatures into your emails depending on whom you are sending the email to.

ReminderFox

ReminderFOx adds helpful functionality for setting up alerts and to-do lists.

ReminderFox displays and manages lists of reminders and ToDo’s. ReminderFox makes sure you remember all of your important dates via easy-to-use lists, alerts, and alarms, right in your browser without the need for a separate calendar program.

Send Later 3

Send Later 3 allows you to schedule messages for the future.

Changes the “Send Later” command (Ctrl+Shift+Return) in the message composition window, so that instead of merely copying the message into your Outbox so that it is sent the next time you go online or do “Send Unsent Messages”, a dialog pops up which allows you to specify when the message will be sent.

Signature Switch

Signature Switch allows you to easily manage multiple signatures.

Switch the signature on/off or choose a new one from your predefined set.

Zindus

Zindus will sync Thunderbird address book with Google.

Sync Personal Address Book or another addressbook with Google. Manage your Gmail contacts from Thunderbird. And vice-versa.

Mouse Gestures Redox

Mouse Gestures Redox allows you to use mouse movements to do specific things in Thunderbird.

Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard. You can also use click-only “rocker” gestures which are even faster than drawn gestures.

ConfirmFolderMover

Accidentally moving messages to the wrong folder can be very frustrating and it can take time to find the messages that you have misplaced. ConfirmFolderMove can help.

Introduces a preference that allows users to be prompted before moving folders to prevent accidental moves that may take a significant amount of time to wait out and undo.

For more useful resources please see:

Best Options for Real Time Analytics

Steven Snell — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:04:34 +0000

Every business, large or small, has a need to know what is going on with its website and how users are interacting with it. There are a number of different options when it comes to website analytics, and this post will feature the leading options that provide visitor data in real time.

Real time analytics can prove to be invaluable when working with social media or viral campaigns that tend to send traffic quickly and in short bursts. In these situations you’ll need to be able to react quickly, and real-time website analytics allow you to do so. Here is a look at some of the best options.

Google Analytics
In recent weeks Google Analytics rolled out a new feature for real-time reporting. You can see how many visitors are on your site at the moment, what specific pages they are viewing, what sites referred them, where they are located geographically, and more. You’ll need to be using the new version of Analytics in order to view the real time data (read more about that in this post on the Analytics blog).

Clicky
Clicky’s focus is on provide real-time analytics. When you login by default you will see your current data from today. Historical data is also available. Detailed Twitter analytics is also included to help you gauge the impact of social media to your website. The ClickyTouch app is available for the iPhone and iPad.

Woopra
Woopra lets you watch visitors live to see how the are interacting with your site, and you can even chat with those visitors through the Woopra Chat Widget. Woopra also includes an advanced notification feature that allows you to set up several different types of notifications (email, audible, popup) based on different actions and situations.

Chartbeat
Chartbeat provides real-time analytics for news publishers and other types of websites (specialized analytics for e-commerce sites is on the way). Chartbeat’s unique engagement metrics help you to see how visitors are interacting with your site and identify areas for improvement.

GoSquared
GoSquared provides all the standard types of metrics, plus it allows you to view data specific to individual visitors. GoSquared integrates with Olark so you can even chat with those visitors. You can set up an alert to notify you of traffic spikes or sudden decreases of traffic.

Mixpanel
Mixpanel allows you to watch your visitors engage with the site, observe trends, and compare metrics from previous points in time. Extensive segmentation and funnel analysis features are also included.

Reinvigorate
Reinvigorate provides real-time analytics as well as heatmaps that help to visualize where visitors are clicking and to identify dead spots. You can even view nametags for your registered users to track their usage of the site.

Piwik
Piwik is an open-source option for real-time analytics. Piwik can be downloaded and installed on your own server in a five-minute process.

ShinyStat
ShinyStat offers four different products including a very limited free analytics product for personal and non-profit websites. The business account includes search engine ranking detection to help track and improve your rankings.

SeeVolution
SeeVolution is currently in beta. It features heatmaps and real-time analytics overlaid on your website. Live heatmaps are even available. SeeVolution’s visual tool sets provide a unique way to view analytics data without leaving your site.

FoxMetrics
FoxMetrics provides real-time analytics based around the core concepts of events and attributes. You can set up your custom events to be just about anything you want. Based on the data gathered from the events and attributes, FoxMetrics provides actionable reports that will help you to improve your site.

StatCounter
StatCounter is a free real-time analytics program that can be installed with just a few lines of code. It includes all the typical analytics data, plus you can set up automated email reports to be sent daily, weekly, or monthly.

Performancing Metrics
Performancing Metrics provides real-time blog statistics as well as other features like Twitter analytics.

Whos.Amung.Us
Whos.Amung.Us is different from most of the other solutions listed here. To use Whos.Amung.Us you can embed a widget on your site or blog to provide real-time stats. Bothe free and paid accounts are available.

W3Counter

W3Counter provides real-time data and over 30 different reports. You can track Twitter mentions, view details of your most recent visitors, view a click overlay, and more. A limited free account is available as well as a paid account.

TraceWatch
TraceWatch is a free real-time analytics program that can be installed on your own server. You’ll all the typical stats and reports, plus you can view details of your most recent visitors and track their exact path through your pages.

For more resources please see:

19 Resources for Getting Design Feedback

Steven Snell — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:19:21 +0000

Designers have a constant need for feedback, whether it be from clients, users, or team members. Gathering and organizing feedback can become quite cumbersome without an organized approach. Fortunately, there are plenty of apps and resources available to help with this issue, and we’ll look at many of them in this post.

As you look at the resources covered in this post you’ll see a great deal of variety. Some are intended to assist with feedback from clients, while others may be intended for team members or users. Some focus on simplicity and ease of use while others have extensive feature lists. Find one that works well for your needs and you’ll find that you have a much more efficient process for managing feedback.

The Best Resources for Getting Design Feedback

ProofHQ
ProofHQ is a full-featured web app for managing feedback and collaboration. You can upload and manage over 50 types of files that can be commented on and marked up by reviewers. You can manage multi-page files, easily share your proofs with anyone, manage contacts and groups, and more. Prices start at $17 per month with a 14-day free trial available.

UFeedMeBack
UFeedMeBack aims to help your design by allowing you to get feedback from top level designers. You submit your design and choose which designers you would like to provide feedback on your work. The cost is $2 per submission plus whatever fee is established by the designers you have chosen.

Cage
Cage is a feedback app that is currently in beta. It is intended to help you get feedback from clients as well as to facilitate communication and feedback from teammates and collaborators. You control the privacy settings and other details of your projects. Currently Cage is free to use.

Design Signoff
Design Signoff will help you to get feedback on your client projects while working to get approval and signoff of your work. Design Signoff is currently in beta but you can request an invite from their site.

UpShot
UpShot helps you to manage feedback from clients and get signoff. You can manage several versions of the same image or document, turn client remarks into to-do list items, brand your account, get client signoff with one click, and more. Pricing starts at $6.66 per month with a 30-day free trial.

Notebox
With Notebox you upload your design, send it with your notes to clients (clients don’t need to login or download), clients will add their feedback, and you’ll get email notifications when you have feedback. Prices range from £5 to £10 per month with a 30-day free trial.

Notable
Notable helps with gathering feedback from clients and collaborators. You can take any webpage screenshot, sketch or wireframe and exchange notes on specific details with your team. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

SmartMargin
SmartMargin is a brandable app that helps you to gather and organize feedback from clients. You can set up different portfolio galleries, protect them or make them public, manage users, and more. The current price is $99 (one time).

Concept Feedback
Concept Feedback provides expert feedback on your design projects. Once you create an account you will be asked to provide feedback on five other concepts before you can post your own work. You can earn reputation points and increase your rank in the Concept Feedback community.

ConceptShare
ConceptShare allows designers to get feedback on their work through easy markup. Reviewers can use simple tools like pointer, pen, crop, and highlighter. Other features include threaded comments, in-line replies, email notifications, and more. Several different editions are available, no pricing details are provided on the website. You can request a free trial by completing on form on their site.

Other Useful Resources for Design Feedback:

Bounce

Recurse

The Commentor

WebProof

Approval Manager

Feedback Roulette

FiveSecondTest

Critique the Site

Moocup

For more resources please see:

Magic 3D Photoshop Action

Steven Snell — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:55:38 +0000

Today we have a free Photoshop Action for easily creating 3D effects. The action was created by Damian Watracz for the readers of the Vandelay Design blog. With the help of the action you can easily give 3D effects to layers, vector shapes, and text.

Damian has also created a video to demonstrate how to use the action.

Download the action and associated files (1.3 MB zip file).

25 Useful jQuery Tooltip Scripts

Steven Snell — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:17:03 +0000

Tooltips can be a helpful way to provide information to visitors without creating clutter in a design. If you would like to add an attractive tooltip to your website it doesn’t have to be difficult. There are plenty of quality scripts available for use that will allow you to set up tooltips without coding it from scratch. In this post we’ll present 25 different jQuery tooltip scripts.

Project Management Apps for Freelancers and Designers

Steven Snell — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:10:22 +0000

Managing client projects is a major requirement for efficiency and for creating a positive experience for clients. Regardless of whether you freelance, work for a small agency, or work for a large agency, there are a lot of details and communication involved in client projects. Having an efficient system for managing those projects is essential.

In this post we’ll look at 10 project management apps that can help. While many of them have similar features, each has it’s own unique way of doing things. Some are web-based apps that involve a monthly fee, others software with a one-time fee, and others are open source and free.

Basecamp

Basecamp, from 37signals, is one of the most popular options for project management. Communication with other group members is easy with Basecamp, making it much more efficient than email. Other features include file sharing, to-do lists, assigning of due dates and responsibilities, project templates, and more.

Pricing for Basecamp is based on the number of projects and the amount of disk space needed for storage. The basic plan starts at $24 per month (15 projects, 5 GB of storage). A limited free plan is also available.

activeCollab

activeCollab is a project management tool that installs on your server or local network. In contrast to subscription-based project management apps you’ll have unlimited users, unlimited projects, and unlimited storage space. It provides a platform for planning, progress tracking and communication. activeCollab has a number of tools that save your time. Create project templates, easily reschedule milestones and tasks, quickly add new tasks and discussions and more.

The cost for a small business is $249 plus $99 per year for support and upgrades (first year is free). A 30-day free trial is available.

Mavenlink

Mavenlink aims to help client service providers, like web designers, by providing everything needed to manage projects. It offers all of the standard features for collaborating and communication that you would expect to find in a project management app, plus it has a few additional features that are likely to be highly useful for freelance designers and small design agencies. With Mavenlink you can work with integrated contracts for your projects, and you can also invoice and accept payment from clients.

The Expert plan is priced at $39 per month for unlimited projects, unlimited account members, unlimited invoices, 20 GB of storage, and custom branding. A 30-day free trial is available, as well as a limited free plan.

Subernova

Subernova is a project management app that lets you track time, send invoices and estimates, collaborate with others and keeps your business smooth by keeping tabs on late payments, deadlines and more.

The cost for Subernova is $14.99 per month or $149.99 per year. A 30-day free trial is available.

ProjectPier

ProjectPier is a free, open-source, PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. If you’re not interested in paying a monthly subscription fee or a software license fee, ProjectPier may be a good option. With ProjectPier you’ll get plenty of features to manage projects and collaborate with team members and clients. It includes features like milestone tracking, tasks and tickets, file sharing, assigning of tasks, privacy control, and more.

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is used by thousands of companies for online project management, task management, and many other types of work. Securely share your work sheets, attached files, reports and discussions with team members as well as external contractors or clients.

The Basic plan is $9.95 per month for unlimited users (1 sheet creator), 10 sheets (projects), and 3 GB of files storage. A free 30-day trial is available.

Collabtive

Collabtive is cloud based groupware (free) for project management. It allows you to manage projects, milestones, and tasks. Timetracking and reporting are also included. Collabtive is intended for small to medium-sized businesses and freelancers.

Projecturf

Projecturf helps you manage projects, people, and tasks. Create and assign tasks, share files, collaborate with others, track time and budgets, calendar events, and manage tickets.

Pricing starts at $9.99 per month for one project at a time, unlimited users, and 2 GB of storage space. A 14-day free trial is available.

Wrike

Wrike is a project management tool that allows you to manage unlimited projects, and collaborate and communicate with the ability to share any kind of file. Wrike allows you to create plans and manage tasks. You can even create a task in Wrike directly from Outlook.

Pricing starts at $49 per month for 5 users, unlimited projects, and 5 GB of storage space. A free trial is available.

EasyProject.net

EasyProjects.net offers management of unlimited projects, milesstones, project templates, batch operations, custom fields, portfolio management, time management, billing and invoicing, and more.

A hosted version of EasyProjects.net is available for $75 per month (5 users), or for $648 you can purchase a license and install it on your own server.

For more resources please see:

20 Highly Useful Google Chrome Extensions

Steven Snell — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:53:49 +0000

When it comes to extensions and add-ons, Firefox has been far ahead of other browsers for quite some time. But as Google Chrome has taken an increasing share of the market over the past year or two we have seen a significant increase in the number of Chrome extensions that are available.

Many users have been impressed with Chrome’s speed but have been hesitant make the switch from Firefox because of add-ons that they use regularly. In this post we’ll take a look at 20 Chrome extensions that are available. This is just a sampling of what’s out there, and more extensions are being released all the time, especially with Chrome’s growing user base.

Mail Checker Plus for Google Mail

This extension allows you to easily manage your Gmail accounts. Features include:

Mail preview window, read mail without leaving the current tab
Delete, archive, spam, star and mark as read functionality
Desktop and sound notifications when new mail arrives
Support for multiple Google and Google Apps accounts
Mailto-links open in your Gmail or Google Apps Mail account
Monitor all your labels or priority inbox

WOT (Web of Trust)

WOT can help you to identify sites and pages that are security threats. WOT ratings are powered by a global community of millions of trustworthy users who have rated millions of websites based on their experiences. The WOT add-on shows reputation ratings next to search results when you use Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and many other search engines.

Clip to Evernote

Evernote is used by many designers for storing inspiration and other types of bookmarks. The Clip to Evernote extension makes it easy for Chrome users to save content to Evernote. You can also easily find content that you have already saved to Evernote, search through your Evernote account, and more.

Feedly xt

Feedly transforms Google Reader into your own personalized magazine, resulting in a fast and stylish way to enjoy and share the content of your favorite websites.

Shareholic for Google Chrome

Share links from within the browser, from any webpage, with anyone, using the same services you already know and love like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Evernote, Delicious, Digg, and more from one simple all-in-one browser extension.

LastPass

LastPass is a free online password manager and Form Filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure.

StayFocusd

StayFocusd is a productivity extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day.

Google Chrome to Phone Extension

This extension adds a button to Chrome that lets you seamlessly push links, maps, and currently selected text and phone numbers to your Android device.

goo.gl URL Shortener

goo.gl url shortener is an extension which allows you to shorten the current website URL with the Google URL Shortener service.

Picnik

Use Picnik for photo editing right in a Chrome tab. There’s a complete set of tools from basic fixes to professional quality effects and cosmetic touch ups. Get creative with our selection of fonts, shapes and stickers. Plus: Picnik connects right to all your favorite photo sharing sites like Facebook, Picasa Web, Flickr, Photobucket, and more so it’s never been easier to connect and share with your photos.

Google Tasks

Easily add and manage your tasks from Chrome in one of three ways:

Simply type “t Your new task” into the Chrome Omnibar to easily add a task from whatever web page you’re on.
Click the Tasks icon to add a task, see your tasks and task lists and mark a task as completed
Highlight text on any web page, right click and add that text to a new task.

Google Similar Pages

Enjoying the page you’re looking at and interested in other similar pages? Trying to find more pages about a topic you’re researching, but having a hard time coming up with the right query on Google? Google Similar Pages can help. Now you can quickly preview and explore other pages that are similar to the one you are browsing — on the fly.

Diigo Bookmark, Archive, Highlight & Sticky-Note

Diigo is the #1 extension for annotating, archiving and bookmarking webpages. With this easy-to-use tool, you can

Bookmark links to archive webpages or to read later
Attach highlights & stickies to a webpage as a reminder
Share pages with annotation via Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz
Access anywhere, via iPhone, iPad, Android.
Create groups to pool findings, share resources or curate content
Automatically cross-post to social bookmarking site Delicious (optional)

exfm

Exfm turns the entire web into your personal music library. As you browse, exfm runs in the background indexing every MP3 file you come across, building a music library for you. exfm will continue to check the sites you’ve visited, adding new music for you to listen to every day.

Tweet Button for Chrome

Twitter for Google Chrome is the easiest way to share links on Twitter right from your web browser. It functions just like Twitter’s official Tweet Button. Simply click the button, and a pop-up opens with a tweetbox pre-populated with the URL you were at and the page’s title.

Awesome Screenshot

Capture the whole page or any portion, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, one-click upload to share.

iMacros for Chrome

iMacros was designed to automate the most repetitious tasks on the web. If there’s an activity you have to do repeatedly, just record it in iMacros. The next time you need to do it, the entire macro will run at the click of a button. With iMacros, you can quickly and easily fill out web forms, remember passwords, create a webmail notifier, and more.

YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page.

Chrome Stylist

User styles are applied to any website.

Pastebin

With this extension you can quickly paste any type of text to the website http://pastebin.com. The extension installs a small icon in your browser. When you highlight any text in Google Chrome and press the ‘Pastebin’ button, it will automatically paste the selected text into the textarea. When you press submit you will be presented with a unique URL where you can find your pasted text. You can customize the extension via the Options panel.

For more resources please see:

Ultimate Collection of Free Photoshop Styles

Steven Snell — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:57:42 +0000

Photoshop users can save time during the design process by making use of layer styles. Whether you are saving your own custom style to be used multiple times throughout your design (such as with a button), or using pre-made styles created by other designers, taking advantage of this feature in Photoshop can greatly speed up your workflow.

In this post we’ll link out to a number of useful Photoshop layer styles that can be downloaded for free. Many of them have been created especially for text, others for buttons, and some are more general. Download the styles and apply them to your layers for instant results.

Glossy Text Styles

Letterpress Style

Letterpress Styles

Textured Metallic Style

Metal Text Style

Metal Text Styles

Gel Style

Colorful Jelly Text Styles

Dark Layer Style

Chrome Layer Style

Chrome Text Style

3D Text Styles