50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus
Published November 10th, 2008 in Galleries - 191 Comments
When I’m looking at excellent websites for design inspiration, one of my favorite aspects of design to notice is the navigation menu. While I enjoy seeing excellent designs of all types (minimal to artistic to colorful to dark) and various aspects of the site (including headers and footers), a well-designed and well-executed navigation menu can have more impact on my appreciation of a site than any other single piece of the design.
In this post I’d like to take a look at more than 50 stellar examples of navigation menus that positively impact the design of a website. The list includes a great deal of variety. Regardless of what you personally prefer, there should be some inspirational examples in here for you.
Interview with Brian Gardner of Revolution Two
Published November 9th, 2008 in WordPress - 8 Comments
Those of you who have been around the WordPress community for a while are no doubt familiar with Brian Gardner and his popular line of Revolution themes. The Revolution themes have been incredibly well-liked by bloggers, website owners and designers, and they’re probably the most recognizable of the premium WordPress themes.
In recent weeks Brian and Jason Schuller have taken some bold steps with the new generation of Revolution themes, Revolution Two. These high quality themes are now free and open source (the original Revolution themes are no longer available). Since WordPress is an open source platform, the idea was to align the focus of Revolution with that of WordPress in general.
21 Ways Websites Communicate with Visitors
Published November 5th, 2008 in Design - 38 Comments
One of the most important responsibilities of a website is to communicate with its visitors. Regardless of whether the site is a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site, or an e-commerce site, it exists to communicate with visitors.
The communication in some cases is two ways (blog comments are an example), but in many ways the website is communicating to visitors before they even offer their feedback. In order for the site to communicate effectively the designer and site owner need to clear purpose of what messages should be evident to visitors.
In my opinion, improving the communication is an ongoing process. As I evaluate my own sites, or those of clients, these are some of the factors that I consider.
35 Tutorials for Creating Website Layouts in Photoshop
Published November 2nd, 2008 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 119 Comments
Photoshop is an excellent tool for creating attract websites. Fortunately, if you’re looking to brush up your skills or learn some new tricks for creating layouts and designs in Photoshop, there are plenty of tutorials specifically for this purpose.
The 35 tutorials featured here will each take you through the process of creating an example website design in Photoshop. The are all different types of websites and styles of design represented, so you should certainly be able to find some useful tutorials from this group.
Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch
October’s Best: This Month in Web Design
Published October 29th, 2008 in Links - 19 Comments
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
Published October 27th, 2008 in Galleries - 135 Comments
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.
Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes
Published October 22nd, 2008 in WordPress - 86 Comments
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
Published October 20th, 2008 in Design - 23 Comments
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
Published October 14th, 2008 in Galleries - 38 Comments
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.
25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Websites
Published October 12th, 2008 in Galleries - 361 Comments
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.
