Custom Website Design

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.

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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.

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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

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In case you missed any of the best posts of the month, here is a round up to keep you busy for a while.

Web Design and Development:

7 Principles of Clean and Optimized CSS Code - Smashing Magazine

Top 10 Web Typography Sins - Smashing Magazine

10 Adobe AIR Apps for Web Designers - Six Revisions

10 Tools for Evaluating Web Design Accessibility - Six Revisions

Label Placement on Forms - CSS Tricks

11 Reasons Why a Web CMS Will Make Your Life Easier and Your Wallet Fatter - Chromatic Sites

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In the design blogging niche many sites are starting to post community news sections where readers can submit a link to one of their own posts or to someone else’s post that they appreciate. In fact, this is a feature that I included when I launched DesignM.ag because I like the idea of getting others involved and helping to spread the word about great content.

I think community news feeds are probably a love-it-or-hate-it thing. The down side is that with a number of them in the design community much of the “news” is repetitious from one site to the next. Of course, if the best and most interesting content is being linked to, it’s natural that there is some overlap from one site’s community news to the next.

Fortunately, if you’re not into the community news, most blogs aren’t including this in their main feed (or they exist primarily for news and you would have no interest in the site to start with). But my intention with this post is to look at several of the popular sources for design news and to quickly give you an idea of what is posted there. Hopefully this will help you to identify a few sources that you’d like to follow, and maybe some that what be a good fit for submitting your own content.

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Creating posters with Photoshop can be a lot of fun and there are unlimited opportunities. In these tutorials you’ll learn some new ways to enhance your Photoshop skills while creating posters for all kinds of purposes.

Creating an Old Collage Effect Poster

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Last week Mason Hipp wrote a post at Freelance Folder, 5 Easy Ways to Start a Productive Day . If you havenʼt already seen this post it is worth your time, but I also wanted to build on that post and look at the subject of productivity for freelance designers and how you can end your day successfully.

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There’s obviously no shortage of content online for web designers, but the offline content is frequently overlooked. There are a number of print publications that cover various topics that are relevant to web and graphic designers. Here is a look at 12 magazines that may interest you.

.net Magazine

“.net delivers cutting edge practical advice on the full range of topics essential for today’s web builders: design, development, sales, marketing, usability and accessibility, information architecture, security, copywriting, advertising and more. It is read by people who are serious about the commercial application of the internet.”

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There are unlimited possibilities when working with lighting effects in Photoshop. A number of designers have created custom brushes especially for various sparkles, glows and glitter. In this post you’ll find links to over 200 free brushes that you can download to reduce the amount of time spent on your designs and to produce some excellent results.

Glow Brushes - 11 brushes

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Freelance designers are often so focused on the present and the immediate future that a long-term career plan is non-existent, or at least under appreciated. What needs to be done in order to complete that big project? Where will the next client come from?

Many don’t want to deal with the stress and unpredictability of freelancing forever. Without a long-term plan you may earn a decent living, but down the road you’re likely to find yourself wishing you had been more prepared. Some freelancers are comfortable enough in their careers that they would like to continue to freelance for the foreseeable future. Others would like to eventually expand their business and limit the amount of client work that they must do.

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