35 jQuery Animation Tutorials

Creative designers can do some amazing things with jQuery. A wide variety of animation effects are possible, and these 35 tutorials provide excellent learning resources for anyone who is wanting to brush up their skills in this area. You’ll find tutorials for creative animated navigation menus, as well as for other types of animation that use jQuery instead of Flash.

Animate Image Filling Up Using jQuery

25 of the Best Calligraphy Fonts for Designers

Having the right fonts is critical to successful web and graphic design. Fortunately, there are a lot of quality free fonts that are available for use. In this post we’ll feature 25 of the best calligraphy fonts for download. Be sure to check the restrictions of any font before using on a commercial project.

Champignon

35 High-Quality and Free Paper Textures

Paper textures are extremely useful and versatile in web and graphic design. Whether it is brown paper, notebook paper, wrinkled paper, or something else, they are frequently used by designers. In this post we’ll feature some of the best free paper textures. Always be sure to check the license and terms before using.

For more textures please see:

• 35 High-Quality and Free Concrete Textures
• 45 Free Wood Textures

25 Beautiful Minimalist Websites – Part VIII

Throughout the existence of this blog our readers have appreciated posts on minimalism more than just about any other topic. Here we will continue our series of showcasing exceptional examples of minimalism in web design.

Clean, Simple, Clear

Win a Free eCommerce and Discussion Forums License Package from concrete5!

concrete5, an up-and-coming open-source content management system, has offered to give a lucky blog reader an eCommerce and discussion forums license package! The total value of these two licenses is $145.

35 High-Quality and Free Concrete Textures

Concrete textures are great for adding some character to your web and graphic design projects. In this post we’ll feature 35 concrete textures from various sources. If you see something you like, click on the image and you will be led to the source. Be sure to read the license or terms of use, especially if you are planning to use it for a commercial project.

Create an Advanced Contact Form for Client Inquiries

Most web designers rely on inquiries from their portfolio website to produce a decent portion of their business. Contact forms can be very simple, collecting a name and contact information, or they can be much more detailed, providing enough information to get an estimate. While the primary purpose of the contact form on our website has always been to make it easy for potential clients to contact us about web design projects, there are also a number of other reasons that visitors use the contact form and a one-size-fits-all approach has its drawbacks. We recently changed the contact form to include some conditional fields that make the form more customized according to the reason the visitor is contacting us, and in this post we’ll go through the process of creating this type of form.

The form we’ll be creating will contain some basic fields (name, email, phone, website, and message) that are shown to all visitors who are filling out the form, but based on the reason they are contacting us they will also see a few other more specific fields. If the visitor selects “Web Design Services” as their reason for contacting us they will be prompted to tell us if it is a new website or a re-design, enter a budget, and tell us how they found us. If they select “Content Development Services” they will also be prompted to enter a budget, but with different options than the budget for web design services, and so on.

In the past our contact form has included a field to allow visitors to select a budget, but that was based on the assumption that they were contacting us regarding web design services. Since the budget field isn’t applicable for someone who is filling out the contact form just to say hi, this “advanced” form will only show what is relevant based on user input.

Design Inspiration: Graffiti Art Showcase

Design inspiration can come from just about anywhere. In this post we’ll feature examples of graffiti art that can serve as inspiration. Here you’ll find 30 pieces of graffiti art that display text effects, character illustrations, beautiful color schemes, and more.

25 Excellent jQuery Slider Tutorials and Plugins

jQuery sliders and image galleries have continued to grow in popularity for use on homepages or on portfolio pages. Last year we published 25 jQuery Image Gallery/Slider Tutorials and Plugins, but a number of high-quality tutorials and plugins have been released since then, so it’s time for a follow-up post. Here you’ll find another 25 jQuery sliders (13 tutorials and 12 plugins) to help you in your own work.

jQuery Slider Tutorials:

A Beautiful Apple-Style Slideshow Gallery with CSS & jQuery

13 Keys to Success as a Freelance Designer

Being a freelance web designer is an appealing job for many people. There are perks like a flexible schedule and the ability to work from home that encourage people to move towards a career as a freelancer. Unfortunately, many people do not consider everything that is involved in being a successful freelancer and all of the challenges that come with being in such a crowded marketplace. In this post we’ll examine 13 keys to achieving success as a freelancer. These are all areas for would-be freelancers to consider before making the jump, and potential areas of improvement for existing freelancers.

Being successful as a freelancer requires you to be rather well rounded, as you will notice from the diversity of the keys on this list. Fortunately, you don’t need to be an expert in all of these areas, but you do need to consider them and recognize their impact on your work. You’ll be able to develop your skills in theses areas with time and effort.

1. Discipline and Commitment

Working as a freelancer or an independent designer is much different than working as an employee for a design studio or as an in-house designer. As a freelancer there will be no one to hold you accountable, no one to tell you what you should be working on at any given time, no one to set your hours, and no one to hand work to you. Everything is on you.

While there are significant benefits to working on your own and being in control, there is also great responsibility. In order to achieve any type of lasting success as a freelancer you will need be disciplined with your work and time and committed to your own success. Some people are naturally driven and well-suited for working as a freelancer, and others tend to have more stability and less risk.

Freelancing can be many things to different people (see Is Freelancing Right for You?), but if you are hoping to make it a long-term career choice, don’t jump into freelancing before considering the discipline and commitment that will be required. For most freelancers, the first few months and years are the most difficult, and as you become more established it should become a bit more natural and easier. However, making it to that stage will require a great deal of work.