Announcing the 3 Winners of a Free Theme from Templamatic
Published September 18th, 2008 in Competition - 10 Comments
Thanks to everyone who commented and showed an interest in the contest from a few days ago for a free premium WordPress theme from Templamatic. The response was very good and apparently a lot of people wanted the theme! The winners of the With Style theme are: Ben’s Choice – IcyOne2 (chosen because theme theme [...]
35 Tutorials for Mastering Photoshop Brushes
Published September 17th, 2008 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 81 Comments
For Photoshop users, downloading free brushes and creating your own custom brushes can quickly help you to achieve more effective results and improve productivity and efficiency at the same time. There are essentially unlimited options when working with brushes, so it’s a skill that can always be further developed.
Regardless of your skill level in working with brushes you should find some tutorials here for you. Some cover the basic uses and functionality of brushes, some will teach you various ways to create your own custom brushes, and some will help you to develop your skills by using them as an integral part of a design.
Rotating Brushes
A simple way to rotate any brush to fit your needs.
Win a Free Premium Theme from Templamatic
Published September 16th, 2008 in Competition - 57 Comments
A few months ago we gave away a free license to a premium WordPress theme, and today the opportunity for Vandelay Design blog readers to get a free theme is back! Templamatic has offered to give away three copies of it’s recently-released theme, With Style.
25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs – Part 4
Published September 15th, 2008 in Galleries - 68 Comments
A few of the most popular posts on this blog are the 3 collections of inspirational, minimal web designs (see part 1, part 2, and part 3). So why stop there? These 25 sites are also clean and attractive.
Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers
Published September 14th, 2008 in WordPress - 132 Comments
One of the fundamental building blocks of the WordPress blog structure is the category. Of course the category serves as a way to organize the content and help visitors with navigation, but it also provides theme developers with opportunities to do some different things to make the theme a bit more distinct or more effective.
In this post we’ll take a look at a number of things you can do with WordPress coding that involve categories in one way or another. Hopefully this will be a helpful guide that you can refer to whenever you’re developing a new theme.
My First Impressions of Amazon S3
Published September 10th, 2008 in Hosting - 16 Comments
A few months ago I was looking into a variety of hosting options before launching DesignM.ag and Amazon S3 stood out as an attractive option for hosting the images used on the site. If you’re not familiar with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), it “is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”A growing number of websites and blogs are using S3 to host media files and for server backups, and ultimately I felt that it was a great way to reduce the burden on the server of the host by storing images on a separate server. S3 is an attractive option because it is low cost (particularly in comparison to hosting overage charges) and very flexible. Once you open an account you can upload as little or as much as you want, and you only pay for what you use.
40 Icon Tutorials for Photoshop
Published September 8th, 2008 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 59 Comments
There are a growing number of excellent Photoshop tutorials creating for your own icons. Here are 40 of the best.
How to Create a Super Shiny Pencil Icon
Interview with Chris Spooner
Published September 7th, 2008 in Design - 17 Comments
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.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Blog Theme
Published September 4th, 2008 in Blog Design - 30 Comments
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.
25 More Incredibly Artistic Website Designs (Part 3)
Published September 1st, 2008 in Galleries - 51 Comments
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.
