Ever wondered if there is a Digg specifically for web designers? Well there is, and there’s many of them. These selection of websites compiled here are all social bookmarking sites fit for Design. So if your a web designer, your in paradise. There is so many great resources listed daily at these websites.

I could only find 10 social bookmarking sites specifically fit for design, but if you know of any others, then I would love to hear them. So feel free to drop in a comment anytime.

DesignBump

This is a quality design bookmarking website. We submit all our blog articles to DesignBump and It has a great community!

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DesignMoo

DesignMoo provides fresh daily design links to web designers.

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The Web Blend

This site is kinda the new kid on the block in terms of design social bookmarking, but has hit the internet hard.

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Design Related

This site has a nice design, and is the perfect resource for any web designer.

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Share Brain

Recently renames from DevMarks, ShareBrain still provides designers with the same quality links.

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Pixel Groovy

This beautiful design social bookmarking site shares all the best design links with web designers.

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Developers Niche

Developers Niche lives up to its name. Its user submitted content just keeps getting better!

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D Zone

D Zone is the place for web developers to find new and exciting stories. There are some awesome user submitted links!

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Design Float

With Under 20,000 Alexa, Design Float is doing very well. There is more a less hourly popular content that makes the homepage. Its another perfect resource for web designers and developers.

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Graphic Design Links

This social bookmarking site lives up to its name. There are some great content submitted by many top web designers.

Link:
Top 10 Design Bookmarking Sites

There are so many iPhone applications available for download today. Many of them have their own website that tells everyone about them, aswel as being included on the iTunes app store. Showcased here are 20 beautiful and inspirational websites, that show off iPhone apps.

This was our selection of 20, so if you think that there are any others that deserve to be part of the list, why not let us know by dropping in a comment. Enjoy the list.

iPhone App Websites…

Outpost

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Tea Round

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Dig Deep Fitness

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Outside App

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Tapbots

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Cellar App

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Broadersheet

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Tap Tapas

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The Typography Manual

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Paraply

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Barista

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The Fun Tip Calculator

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June Cloud

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Wheel of Tea

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Tic A Tac Poker

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Ego App

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Happy Dangy Diggy

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TweetDeck

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Wordpress For iPhone

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Tweetie

See the rest here:
20 Beautiful And Inspirational iPhone App Website Designs

I decided to write about something different today. Many designers incorporate people into web designs. Weather its a big photo, or the person is actually within the website design. Here is a showcase I have put together that features 20 super website designs that contain people within.

I think my favorite has to be the Electricurrent design. What do you think? If you have any more designs you know of that feature people, then feel free to drop in a comment for critique.

cPeople

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Gavin Castleton

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Tierra Virtual

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Brooklyn Fare

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Urban Originals

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Uni Qlo

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Galante

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Celly Shop

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Michael J Fox

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Envirenew

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Hitachi

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ToLingo

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Practice Cafe

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Woolshed Grove

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Health Angle

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MediaStroika

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Dental Plan Cards

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Electricurrent

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Rocket Club

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Billy Hughes

Read more:
20 Super Website Designs Featuring People

UX Magazine

UX Magazine was created to deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience.

Signal vs. Noise

Signal vs. Noise is the blog of 37signals. Having built popular web apps like Basecamp, they know a thing or two about user experience.

UX Booth

The UX Booth is a blog by and for the User Experience Community. It’s full of useful articles and resources on usability, user experience, and interaction design.

Adaptive Path Blog

Adaptive Path creates user driven products that deliver great experiences. Their blog allows them to share what they’ve learned with others.

UsabilityPost

The Usability Post is a blog about design – not about what it looks like, but about how it works. The aim of The Usability Post is to provide relevant resources, tips and insights into good design in order to help you make great products.

inspireUX

inspireUX is a blog that posts quotes relating to user experience (UX). Every quote on inspireUX focuses on the impact that user experience has on people, business, or the world. You can even download and print them out on 4

A pixel is a single point in a raster image. Computer displays are capable of showing millions of these at a time. So how can one lone pixel have an impact on a web design? It probably can’t. However, if you extend that pixel in one direction, it becomes a line, and in the hands of a masterful designer with an attention for subtle detail, the 1px line is a powerful design element. It can be used in many different ways, but in this article we’re going to take a look at how pixel perfect line work can add depth to a design.

The Light from Above

To effectively create depth, one must understand light sources. A light source creates two things: highlights and shadows. The combination of these two things can make something appear as if it’s coming off the page, since lighter elements appear closer and darker elements appear further away.

A light source can come from any direction, but normally light comes from above. Our brains are even wired to expect this. That’s why it’s a typical practice in web design to use a 1px highlight on the top of an element to make it pop, and a darker 1px line on the bottom as a shadow.

Lines that Make Edges Pop

Icon Dock is a great example of how to effectively use subtle 1px lines to achieve depth. Nick La, the designer and owner of Icon Dock, uses 1px lines all over the place to make various design elements pop. Notice the 1px highlight that runs across the top of the main banner area. This pushes the top away from the background and gives the edge a slightly raised look.

Also notice the 1px highlight lining the bottom of the nav bar. This is a nice touch and amazing attention to detail. It gives the illusion of a slightly reflected highlight, but more importantly it helps separate the dark color of the nav bar from the shadow below. If the line was not there the bottom edge of the bar would blend with the shadow and be lost.

If we look at the bottom of the Icon Dock design we will see that the highlight/shadow combination is completed with the use of a dark 1px shadow that runs along the bottom edge of the content box.

UXBooth uses the same technique to give the green bar separating the header form the content a slightly three dimensional look. Notice the light green line on top and the dark green line along the bottom.

Make Buttons Stand Out

Buttons are another element where this technique can work wonders. Since buttons are meant to be clicked, it helps if they look as if they are raised off the page a bit. The buttons on NOSOTROS use a slightly lighter color than the background that brings it closer to the eye, but it is the 1px border around the buttons that completes the effect and makes the buttons look very clickable.

Michael Dick’s portfolio also uses pixel perfect lines to highlight the edges of the main navigation buttons. What I really love about these lines is the fact that they are broken and worn looking to match the grungy style of the over all design. Whether he did or not, it appears that Michael painstakingly erased random portions of the lines to give it this tattered look. It’s this kind of attention to detail that sets some designs apart from the rest.

1px Lines Can Be Very Groovy

Another technique for creating depth with 1px lines is pairing one light and one dark line right next to one another. This creates the illusion of an inset groove, but the key is the placement of each. As mentioned earlier, our brains are wired to assume the light source is coming from above or the top. Notice here that the dark line on top is representing the shadow cast by the top edge of the groove. The light line represents the highlight created by the bottom edge.

If we reverse the positions of the two lines, we loose our groove. Now it appears to be more of a lip that is casting a shadow.

Now let’s get our groove back and take a look at some sites that use this technique to perfection. Atebits uses grooves to separate content and uses the same technique on the main navigation bar to separate the links. This type of line work looks as if it was laser etched into the surface of the design, which is a perfect fit for the over all style of the site.

Tim Van Damme’s portfolio has grooves everywhere. Along with some gradients, the 1px lines here that make up the grooves give this design lots of depth and makes the big buttons look very clickable.

View post:
Adding Depth with Pixel Perfect Line Work

Today we’re giving you the PhotoSpin CS Flash component from, Digicrafts. FotoSpin provides a unique touch and spin control experience to the user. This component normally goes for $49.90, which proves it pays to be a WDL Premium member. If your not a member yet, be sure and sign up.

This component was developed by using the Papervision3D API. It shows a real time three dimension look and I can control the view angle of the album in 3D space.

Preset Manager

The new preset manager allows you to save the settings in to a preset file. You can reuse the preset file in different project. To see a demo, click the image below.

Other Features

• Fully customize spinning photo album
• Touch scroll control
• Prefect flipping effect
• Setup menu by xml
• Loading external images as item
• Item glow effect
• Customize mirror and shadow effect
• Customize item action
• Compatible with Flash CS 3 and Action Script 3.0
• Full API support

Download PhotoSpin CS

About Digicrafts

Digicrafts creates really cool Flash components and other plugins for Adobe products.

Read the original here:
WDL Premium: PhotoSpin CS Flash Component

Headers and footers are always a big concern in web design. These two powerful sections of a website hold great importance and are always something to worry about when designing a page. The header is the first thing the user will see when opening the page, so they must be perfect. The footer, in the other hand, was for a long time something not much appreciated, it was a section of the website almost forgotten. Lately this reality change a bit and we can find amazing footers… filled with cool information, social connections and other stuff. These days headers and footers actually show us some new and cool trends, typography and unique styles.

Here you will see a selection of great examples of headers and footers. Some are colorful, some are minimalist, others are informative and many of them are very creative, so check them out and get some inspiration.

Matt Mullenweg

kulturbanause

Carsonified Events

Komodo Media

Biola Undergrad

Kari Jobe

Mark Forrester

Story Pixel

SimpleBits

Finch

FreelanceSwitch

Squaredeye

Aenemya

Enviramedia

Lionite/portfolio

NewConcept

Roome

Ali Felski

Jayme Blackmon

mosaiko

Edgepoint Church

Branded07

yodiv

Cabana Digital

About the Author

Gisele Muller is someone that recently discovered a new career online. A person that really likes technology, design, photography and creativity. An eternal geek wannabe, tech fan and a communication lover! Current location: Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil. Twitter: @gismullr

Originally posted here:
Headers and Footers that Grab You Coming and Going

The end of 2009 marked WDL’s first full year in existence, and what a great year it was. We feel that we’ve put out a lot of valuable content that has been helpful to our readers who we greatly appreciate. So before we start publishing new content for 2010, we thought it would be interesting to take a look back at the year that was for WDL by listing some of our most popular articles from 2009.

These popular articles are not listed in order of popularity, but rather date of publication.

30 Most Incredible Textures for Vintage Style Design

One of the most important aspects of a good vintage style design is the use of authentic looking textures. Since most of you probably don’t have time to browse the local antique shop, and your grandmother’s attic is miles away, we’ve put together a list of some of the best vintage textures we have ever seen.

40 Super Sleek Fonts for Clean Web Design

Creating grungy designs can be fun, but sometimes a site requires a cleaner approach, one where artsy design elements take a back seat to clear presentation of content. Typography plays a big role in this type of design.

The Best Social Media Icons All In One Place

The ability to easily bookmark or share content on popular social media platforms is now a must have feature for web sites. It’s also important that this feature isn’t over looked by web site visitors. So it’s always a good idea to use icons when linking to social media sites. They get peoples attention and the logos are immediately recognizable.

All the Small Icons You’ll Ever Need

Big highly detailed icons make great eye candy, but small icons can be very useful when designing websites. They are great for styling lists and giving links visual flair that is eye catching and meaningful. It’s amazing what can be said visually in a 16 x 16 pixel area. In this post, you will find a large collection of small icons that should fit most of your design needs.

10 Best Content Management Systems for Designers

There are a lot of content management systems out there, but many of them are overly complicated and require a certain level of technical expertise. However, there are a select few that focus on simplicity and ease-of-use, but still give the designer flexibility in templating features and customization. In this article, we have listed ten of these CMS’s. Some of them are well known, while others you may have never heard of, but deserve a look.

20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Design

When you are creating a website (or hiring a web/blog designer to create one for you), there are specific items you need to be aware of. Things that normally wouldn’t cross your mind. For the average person who wants a website or blog for their business, they are after one very important thing – sales. Now, they may tell you that they want the big flashy logos, or the overdone textures/gradients, but it is the job of a well skilled web designer to steer their clients in the right direction.

404 Error Pages for Your Viewing Pleasure

Error pages are easy to create, so there’s no excuse to avoid them. Even with the most solid website, you never know when someone might mis-spell a URL link and hit a page that doesn’t exist. Be prepared when that happens to you, even if by no fault of your own. Let these great error pages be your inspiration to creating your own.

Most Used and Abused Web Design Trends of All Time

The year is 1999. You’ve just watched the Matrix, and it’s blown your mind. You sit down in front of your computer to work on a web design and then create or download an animated Matrix background for your Geocities website. You’re so cool. Fast forward 10 years, and you say to yourself, yikes, what was I thinking?! We’ve all been there. As a matter of fact, I’m personally guilty of copying many of following trends.

The Definitive Guide to About Me Pages

One of the most important and least used aspects of any website is the “About Me” page. It’s not enough to have an interesting site and great product if your visitor can’t find a way to relate to you.

Web Design Trends for 2010

Although this list isn’t a drastic departure from what was popular in 2009, it marks different trends that will be expanded upon and made better as a result. As you think of how you will incorporate new trends into your designs, focus on the main idea of each trend. Be encouraged to dabble into these trends so that you become part of the movement.

The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design

There’s a lot that goes into creating a web design, but I believe it can be broken down into four main components. If you’re able to execute on all four, you will have a hit web design on your hands. However, if you come up short on one, the entire design will suffer.

33 Creative and Beautiful Logos

Logo design, like any other design process, sometimes requires some inspiration to spark creativity. If you’re in need of some logo design inspiration, here is a collection of 33 creative and beautiful logos. These all have varying styles, but possess the same high quality.

30 Website Navigations that Make You Wanna Click It

The navigation might be the single most important aspect of a web design’s usability. Without a navigation, you would be stuck on the home page for a very long time. I believe a navigation or menu must be easy to use, but this doesn’t mean it has to be boring. In fact, it helps to add a little flair to your navigation. It entices visitors to click and hang around your site a little longer.

Read more from the original source:
The Most Popular Articles of 2009

Logos do not always have to include some type of symbol or icon to be effective. When done well, using type only to create a logo can be very effective in representing a company. These types of logos often cause particular typefaces and letter styling to become synonyms with a brand. Here we’ve rounded up 33 brilliant type-only logo designs for your inspiration. Be sure to click the images to learn more about each logo.

See the original post:
40 Brilliant Type-Only Logo Designs

If you’re one of many web designers suffering from an icon collecting addiction, you should probably skip over this article. It might be too much for you to handle. However, if you’re addiction is under control, read on. In this article, we’ve rounded up over 200 icons that are big, beautiful and have lots of detail – and with such a wide variety of subject matter in these icons, you shouldn’t have trouble finding some that you will want to use or add to your icon library.

Cemagraphics Dock Icons (17 icons)

Gentle Romantic icons (5 icons)

Lovely website icons (8 icons)

Designer’s tools icon

Shopping bag icon

Leica Camera Icon

iMod (146 icons)

Moleskine Helvetica Icon

Magic tablet (2 icons)

Outdated icons (8 icons)

Red Moleskine

Lightroom or Aperture

Playground icons (9 icons)

Canon 400D + lens 17-85mm (2 icons)

Moleskine Helvetica Icon

Massive Media Icons (3 icons)

Archigraphs Collection Icons (10 icons)

Hrvoje Bielen Icon Set (9 icons)

Moleskine Icons (8 icons)

Archigraphs Cars Icons (7 icons)

See original here:
200+ Big and Beautiful Highly Detailed Icons

As a web designer, you would think that the major Internet browsers would’ve come to some sort of agreement on standards and best practices after all this time. In reality, browser compatibility is a minefield of confusing conflicts and picky platforms that refuse to play nice with each other. Here are some useful tools and tips for riding out the waves:

Tip: Create a profile of your target audience.

You could easily spend hours optimizing your pages for every browser from the first iteration of Mozilla forward. At some point you have to ask yourself, who is using this?

Does your website cater to contractors and DIY homeowners who may use their cell phone for texting, but are more comfortable surfing the net on a PC? Are you trying to reach C-level execs who have their iPhone surgically attached to their hand?

Think about their native technology environment, and prioritize your compatibility efforts based on the technology your audience prefers. The idea is to shape your message to their medium, or browser in this case.

Tip: Do not guess about what your audience is using.

Research and prioritize intelligently, and be prepared to back up your decisions with facts. Everyone loves seeing statistics.

Let’s say your client or your boss asks you to make the website compatible with their pet platform. You need something more compelling than, “Your browser is out of date; you should upgrade.” Let them know you mean business. “Your browser currently represents .5% of global browser users,” carries the weight of authority. And you can back it up.

Fun W3Schools Usage Statistics as of November 2009:
95% of browsers have JavaScript enabled
90% use Windows family operating systems
62% use Windows XP

Tool: W3Schools – Browser Share Statistics

W3Schools has the latest numbers for browser share past and current. They offer a monthly breakdown of the most popular browser platforms, including which versions garner the lion’s share of users. Firefox and IE ( versions 6, 7, and 8 ) are the most common browsers. At the back of the pack, Google Chrome has captured 8.5 percent, with Safari holding 3.8 percent. These statistics are extracted from W3Schools’ log-files, but W3Schools monitors other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures.

W3Schools – Browser Share Statistics

Tool: W3Schools – Browser Display Statistics

This breakdown will show you what screen size visitors will most likely use to view your website. You can also see how colors will be viewed on your site.

Surprising, most computers are using a screen size of 1024

Here is the original post:
It’s December! Can I Have Your Help?

Originally posted here:
Create an Explosive Color Swath: Photoshop Tutorial

See the article here:
Add Dramatic Color to Photographs: Photoshop Tutorial!