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 - 69 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.
Best of August: This Month in Web Design
Published August 31st, 2008 in Links - 10 Comments
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
What Are the Best Sources of Design Community News?
Published August 27th, 2008 in Design - 24 Comments
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.
