Making an Impressive Product Showcase with CSS3

A product page is any page on your website that showcases a product. It has to describe its features, give some screenshots, and be descriptive. Naturally, this is the place where you build up the visitor’s interest towards your product, but it is getting increasingly difficult to be original in grabbing their attention. Luckily, a new compact JavaScript library can help you make a splash.

impress.js is a small, standalone library that makes it easy to design advanced CSS3 presentations with eye-catching effects. But what if we used impress.js for something other than a presentation? This is what we are doing today – we will be spicing up a plain old product page with some CSS3 magic!

Full post: Making an Impressive Product Showcase with CSS3

Best of Tuts+ in February 2012

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Full post: Best of Tuts+ in February 2012

Design before computers ruled the universe

I’m old enough to remember working with Exacto blades and poisonous chemicals to create layouts for printing. I’m old enough to remember printing. I’m young enough to be considered an expert at computer programs, so there’s a bright side to this story and the memories are the truth…except I’m too old to be sure they are the correct memories, but not old enough to accidentally wear my underwear outside of my pants. Where was I? Oh, yes…the short and weird history of the days before computers were in every design studio, home, car, video game, and smart phone.

Full post: Design before computers ruled the universe

28 Inspiring Typography Examples within Poster Artwork

Print work can be very challenging and has a growing demand base. Designers are always on the edge following new trends to attract an audience. Poster designs are one such area where art and marketing can really shine through together.

In this inspirational gallery I’ve put together poster artwork featuring beautiful examples of typography. Lettering and fonts are some of the most important choices you can make in the world of print. I hope these examples will illustrate just how powerful typography can appear in product design. Additionally if you have suggestions or critiques feel free to share with us in the post discussion area.

Full post: 28 Inspiring Typography Examples within Poster Artwork

Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.122)

This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy :)
If you would like to receive our daily updates and keep up to date with the latest and greatest articles and resources from the design community,

Full post: Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.122)

Elevate Your PHP to the Cloud

This article will walk you through cloud hosting for your PHP application with Pagoda Box. It’ll detail how to handle PHP dependencies, get your MySQL databases up and running (and debug locally), and customise various aspects of PHP with ease.

As a developer who has been playing around with PHP since the age of 11, it’s hard to remember many things that have absolutely changed the way I develop. In 2007, I picked up CodeIgniter, which made me rethink how I structure my code and use OOP to get things done. In 2010, I began working with Git and Git Flow for teamwork and branching, but, recently, the biggest thing to change my development workflow has been one "Platform as a Service," called Pagoda Box.

Full post: Elevate Your PHP to the Cloud

How to Write an eBook that People Will Actually Read

Are you looking for new ways to deliver in-depth content on a topic specific to your website? If so, ebooks are a great way to take your audience deeper into some aspect of your subject matter. Through the advancement of technology it’s easier than ever before in history for you to become an author by writing an ebook. With that said, there are things you should do to ensure your ebook is read by as many people as possible. In this article we are going to uncover the benefits of writing an ebook, provide tips for writing a successful ebook, and discuss how you can streamline the Ebook writing process.

Full post: How to Write an eBook that People Will Actually Read

Bringing the Membership Process to the Front of Your Site

WordPress ships with the ability to add users, either manually or via registration. This includes the ability to assign various roles and capabilities. But more often than not you don’t want users to be exposed to the WordPress backend. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a custom registration form on the front of your site as well as a custom profile form. Users will also receive custom emails with each step of the registration process. Please note, this tutorial won’t be covering membership payments.

Full post: Bringing the Membership Process to the Front of Your Site

Valuable Things You Need to Know About Having a Freelance Job

When you hear of a freelance job, you can immediately picture yourself as someone who has flexible working schedule, having time for yourself and being your own boss. These are some of the good things that you will experience while having a freelance job. But of course, everything has two sides. You also have to look into the challenges that you will encounter while doing the job. You would need to prepare yourself for these. Aside from these, there are some valuable things that you need to know about having a freelance job.

Today, we will show you what these things are. Knowing these are important for you take note of in order to have enough knowledge on freelancing. Being equipped with apt know-how would help you to be more successful in the field of freelancing. So, here are ten things that you need to be aware of regarding a freelance job.

Full post: Valuable Things You Need to Know About Having a Freelance Job

50+ Lovely and Adorable Butterfly Patterns

Butterflies are adorable little creatures that come in various colors and designs. Aside from aiding in the process of pollination, they can also help in making the environment look more beautiful and colorful. Due to their pleasing appearance, butterflies had been a subject for designs and various artworks. They have served as inspiration to many artists and creative minds to come up with amazing works of art.

Today, we will give you one proof of how butterflies inspired the design world. We will showcase a collection of butterfly patterns in a variety of colors and design styles. For sure, you will be glad to find out that your favourite butterflies are also seen in patterns. So, what are you waiting for? Check out this awesome list of butterfly patterns!

Full post: 50+ Lovely and Adorable Butterfly Patterns

80+ Awesome Freebies from Dribbble Community

Creativity means a lot in any kind of presentation. Whether it’s a logo, banner, advertisement or a complete design; being able to inject creativity into it not only helps in floating the message around, it also leaves solid impression on the viewer.
Good design is not easy thing to create, or it is often a very challenging job to discover creative designs. However, there are few ways by which you can improve your designing skills. One of them is analyzing others work and find the inspiration behind every details. Infect, it’s even easier if you can able to use others creative work in your design with proper permission and guidelines. For that same purpose some highly creative dudes created Dribbble, a show and tell for designers. Since it’s release, Dribble has been a huge influence on the design community.

Full post: 80+ Awesome Freebies from Dribbble Community

How To: Integrate Facebook with WordPress – Plugins & Advice

Facebook is undoubtedly the king of the social media. This vast platform of millions of users is open for all kind of websites to interact with readers, build communities and increase engagement. Integrating Facebook into WordPress can enable your website to take advantage of Facebook’s huge social media platform and massive user base. In this post we will look at how you can combine the power of Facebook into your WordPress powered website using plugins.

Full post: How To: Integrate Facebook with WordPress – Plugins & Advice

Packaging Design Inspiration

Packaging design is a critical aspect of product development and can play a significant role in sales by capturing the attention and interest of customers. Products that feature effective packaging design are typically more appealing to customers than equal products with sub-par packaging. A high level of quality in the packaging often results in a higher opinion of the quality of the actual product by potential customers.

In this post we’ll showcase 30 examples of great packaging design for your own inspiration.

Full post: Packaging Design Inspiration

5 Important Free SEO WordPress Plugins

The most important part after starting blog is getting traffic. You can get traffic instantly after social marketing but to get continues traffic from search engines is important. Search engine traffic is more engaging because they come to your blog in searching something. You have to do search engine optimization to get organic traffic and promote your online business for specific keywords.

WordPress is already search engine friendly but to optimize your content more and high-rank for keywords you need SEO WordPress plugins. There are many SEO plugins available that can help you optimize your WordPress blog but i am listing down the best ones and the ones i am using on PelFusion. There are many free WordPress ebooks which you can read to learn more about WordPress SEO or check out articles by Yoast.

Here i am listing 5 important WordPress SEO plugins.

Full post: 5 Important Free SEO WordPress Plugins

5 Best WordPress Security Plugins

Irrespective of how small or big your website is, it is important that security plugins should be installed for your website. They may not be enough to provide the ultimate security for your website, but they may provide a strong and secure front line.

Security plugins are definitely required for all those sites that make use of the credit card payment system. Although WordPress is by itself pretty secure, yet, there are several additional plugins that can be used to strongly protect your WordPress website from any kind of hack attacks.

Full post: 5 Best WordPress Security Plugins

A Showcase of Beautiful Bird Photography

Nature photography is often more beautiful than photography featuring manmade subjects, as it presents us with the beautiful randomness of the world around us. Some of the most stunning creatures within nature are birds. With around 10,000 species of birds, bird photography presents us with an endless variation of colors, patterns and visuals.

Bird photography is particularly impressive because of the speed and agility of birds. Finding the perfect moment to capture their exquisite details can be near impossible. Bird photographers often have to wait hours for the perfect shot, so it takes plenty of patience!

Below is a showcase of beautiful photography featuring birds. We recommend that you check out each photographer’s portfolio as they have some wonderful work.

Full post: A Showcase of Beautiful Bird Photography

40+ Fresh & Free Social Media Icon Sets

Social Network Icons are an important part of Website Design and can really boost a websites appearance if designed and placed well. Here's a large collection of new & 100% free Social Icon Sets which have been beautifully designed.

Full post: 40+ Fresh & Free Social Media Icon Sets

Create a Baseball-Inspired Text Effect in Photoshop

Applying texture to a text effect can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will explain how to create a baseball-inspired text effect using layer styles, patterns, and brushes. Let’s get started!

Full post: Create a Baseball-Inspired Text Effect in Photoshop

Discover the Modern Paths of Web Design

These days, web design is a very important tool that can literally help hundreds of businesses to promote their products and services. In the virtual world, most people are searching for professional-looking websites in order to do business. Therefore, the web designers who intend to create some truly great web design structures adopt the latest tools and strategies that can help them to achieve the best outcomes within this field. None can deny the fact that web design is a very important niche, which can create the image that most businesses are looking for. By simply considering all these aspects, you can easily see that the internet has effectively changed the way people do business.

Full post: Discover the Modern Paths of Web Design

10 awesome HTML5 audio players

Among other great features, the new HTML5 specification allow native audio streaming. In this article, I have compiled the 10 most awesome HTML5 audio players available today.

Full post: 10 awesome HTML5 audio players

40+ Impressive Website Footers for Your Inspiration

Designing a creative and appealing footer is crucial if you want to make each element of your web design as successful and efficient as possible. Although the footer of a web design appears at the end of the page yet it cannot be neglected. With an effective footer design, you can create a long-lasting impression on your visitors. Through a well designed footer, you can certainly grab the visitors’ attention.

Full post: 40+ Impressive Website Footers for Your Inspiration

37 Fresh And Free Icon Sets In PSD Format

Here is a fresh and absolutely free collection of Icon sets PSD files for all those designers who are looking for high quality icons PSD files that they can alter in accordance with their own needs. High quality freebie PSD files are the designers’ best friend that always comes in handy and particularly when they don’t have much time to design an icon from the scratch.

Full post: 37 Fresh And Free Icon Sets In PSD Format

10 Best Job Boards for a Word Press Specialist

Word Press, as we all know, is a content management system (CMS) and is among the most used websites of the Internet.Although it had started as just a blogging site, it now has a huge collection of plug-ins, themes and widgets.

Full post: 10 Best Job Boards for a Word Press Specialist

5 reasons you should become a freelance designer

A lot of people can be very sceptical about pursuing a career as a freelance designer. Freelancing can be seen as not a secure income, where as being an in house designer or web designer offers more stability. Through out this article I have shared some of the advantages which come with being a freelancer within the web design industry, but pretty much relates to any niche.

Full post: 5 reasons you should become a freelance designer

30 Minute Redesign #81: A Chef’s Daughter

Today I’m going to be redesigning A Chef’s Daughter, a fun recipe/cooking blog.

One of the things I love about this site is that you instantly get a sense of personal branding. The logo is fun and personal, the tagline helps establish a personal note and explains the site clearly, and the mascot is awesome!

Full post: 30 Minute Redesign #81: A Chef’s Daughter

A Common Learning App for JavaScript MV* Frameworks

Developers these days are spoiled with choice when it comes to selecting an MV* framework for structuring and organizing JavaScript web apps. Backbone, Spine, Ember.js (SproutCore 2.0), JavaScriptMVC… The list of new and stable solutions goes on and on, but just how do you decide on which to use in a sea of so many options?

Full post: A Common Learning App for JavaScript MV* Frameworks

Design a Grungy Western Movie Poster in Photoshop

I recently watched the movie Tombstone (1993) on TV, which gave me the inspiration to try my hand at designing a wild west themed movie poster. Follow this step by step tutorial to create a grungy western poster design, see the whole design process from start to finish as the various stock resources are manipulated to complete the composition.

Full post: Design a Grungy Western Movie Poster in Photoshop

Things I Hate about My Clients

In the Things My Clients Hate. What about Yours? article I discussed 5 things my clients hate. Now, let me present the other side of the story – i.e. 5 things I hate about clients. Well, with so much hatred, it might sound like we freelancers and clients are at a war but definitely I don’t think this is the case.

Full post: Things I Hate about My Clients

Showcase of Solid Color Backgrounds in Web Design

We often assume the more detail we put into our website designs the better they will be, but great design doesn’t always have to include all the bells and whistles. This post showcases a variety of sites that are based on solid colour backgrounds. You won’t see a gradient, texture or pattern but all these sites boast great design.

Full post: Showcase of Solid Color Backgrounds in Web Design

WordPress Transients API caching benchmarks

WordPress Transients API is very powerful tool which allows temporary storing data in wp-options table. It is very similar to WordPress Options, but has an expiration time, which enables us to use it as a caching engine.

The best thing about WordPress Transients is that they are inherently sped up by caching plugins, where normal options are not. A memcached plugin, for example, would make WordPress store transient values in fast memory instead of in the database.

Full post: WordPress Transients API caching benchmarks

30 Sets of Free Crack Brushes for Photoshop

Photoshop brushes are incredibly useful for graphic designers by helping to make it fairly fast and simple to apply numerous effects, textures, and elements into their designs. There are tons of photoshop brushes available to choose from ,however, it is usually hard to look for the best. If you are one of those who are looking for some photoshop brushes to be used in giving cracking effects to your graphic projects especially to your textured, old and grunge-style designs then this post is for you. We have collected various set of crack brushes for photoshop that may assist you to chip and crack your way through any sort of object.

Full post: 30 Sets of Free Crack Brushes for Photoshop

jQuery Accordion Slider and Menu Plugins

Uses of jQuery Image Sliders and menus like Accordion animation effects for website designing are attractive that showcase featured articles and products in the front page, you will get a list of jQuery Accordion Plugins and Tutorials are professionally designed.

jQuery Accordion Plugins and tutorials will help you to learn creating attractive with the dynamic transition and transform effects. you can add animation to the transitions from one CSS structure to another, Compatible with more different browsers like internet explorer, Google chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari.

Full post: jQuery Accordion Slider and Menu Plugins

MyInkTrail: Best of the Design Community, March 2010

There was plenty of good stuff to see and learn on the interwebs this month. Here are the best articles, tutorials, inspiration and more for March 2010 from my trek through the design community.

Source: MyInkTrail: Best of the Design Community, March 2010

50 Fresh Useful Icon Sets For Your Next Design

Beautiful and free icon sets always come in handy. Used properly and moderately, icons can be helpful to provide users with memorable metaphors and illustrations that would provide a visual support for otherwise unspectacular text blocks. For instance, in web-applications memorable icons can be very helpful as they can make it easier for users to memorize how to perform some specific task or where to find some specific functions.

Source:50 Fresh Useful Icon Sets For Your Next Design

50 New Free High-Quality Icon Sets (with Easter Icons!)

Today we are pleased to provide our readers with a yet another round-up of high-quality icon sets. Below, you will find free sets covering a wide range of subjects, including Easter and food sections. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the icons, and feel free to follow the links: they will certainly come in handy when you’re designing a new website or looking for inspiration.
Read more!