One of my favorite styles of web design to take inspiration from is the magazine style. Creating a well-designed site that looks good, allows for good usability, and features a lot of content without cramming items onto the page is a very difficult task.

Blog theme designers can often put some of this inspiration into practice in their own work, as blogs often face the challenge of displaying a lot of content while still trying to look good.

Clutch Magazine

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If you design websites for clients you know that most clients these days want the ability to update the site themselves. Fortunately, content management systems make this possible. However, depending on the types of clients that you work with, you may find that sometimes going with a full-feature CMS is overkill for a client that only needs to update a few pages.

Each client has there own unique needs, and there may be times when you come across someone who is not interested in anything fancy, but they want a small website that will allow them to change the content of pages.

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Photoshop has tons of potential for improving photos in one way or another. No matter how much experience you have with Photoshop there is probably more that you can learn in these areas. This is a categorized collection of tutorials that will show you some new tricks for photo touch-ups.

Also see 60 Photoshop Actions for Photo Touch-Ups and Enhancements at DesignM.ag.

Skin:

Airbrushing - Natural Smooth Skin

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Premium WordPress theme developers Theme Galaxy are giving away two free licenses to their newest theme, Lyra. This new theme (shown below) features a creative illustrated design that may be just right for your blog.

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Artistic and creative websites with interesting background images and/or headers seem to be more and more common all the time. I’ve done a few roundups of this style in the past, but great new examples keep popping up, so here is part 4.

Madame Surto

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Sometimes it’s amazing how realistic a Photoshop creation can look. In this post we’ll feature 35 tutorials for creating realistic effects in Photoshop. Some will show you how to illustrate an object from scratch, while others teach how to edit photos with realistic elements, such as water or snow.

Create a Realistic Blackberry Style Mobile Phone from Scratch

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A lot has been written about the recent release WordPress 2.7, and I think most WordPress users and developers understand that this release adds some significant features that open up some new options for theme development. I did a little bit of experimenting with one of the changes and I wanted to write a brief tutorial that demonstrates a real-world situation for taking advantage of a new feature.

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Although most websites use dark text on light backgrounds, but sites with dark backgrounds with light text can be very striking when executed effectively. In the past, I’ve published two collections of great dark designs (see part one and part two), and here is part three.

BrandStorm

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2009 is almost hear, and that means it’s time for the last monthly roundup in 2008. This month’s edition includes links to a wide variety of design and development-related blog posts, and some inspirational resources as well. if you’re looking for a good roundup of all of the best content from the past year, see Noupe’s 2008 Most Popular Design Posts, Tutorials and Resources.

Web Design and Development:

10 Ways to Cut Down Web Development Time - Six Revisions

How to Make Your WordPress Title Tag SEO Friendly - WP Recipes

8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks - Smashing Magazine

Top 29 Free UX Tools and Extensions - UX Booth

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Christmas may be over, but you still have a chance to get a great gift for yourself. A few weeks ago we ran a giveaway from Jumpeye Components that provided 3 lucky winners with an unlimited license for FlashEff. With a strong response from readers, Jumpeye is now giving away five one-year Premium Plus licenses ($149 value) to their new online, flash banner maker, BannerSnack.

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