Tweet-Parade (No.35 Aug-Sep 2011)

Hello Saturday! .. And you know what that means: a brand new Tweet-Parade! A Tweet-Parade is a post filled with the best articles of last week from the various blogs around the world. It’s all about webdesign, graphic design, typography, social media and more. A broad scale of topics, but never-the-less the underlying focus is on Design.

Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics. The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter.

 

Webdesign, CSS, HTML, jQuery, Usability, etc.

Making the Transition to HTML5 - There is no doubt that everyone is talking about HTML5 these days. What isn’t as clear is who is actually using it and how it’s being used. Not surprising, really, when you think about all HTML5 entails.

Design Principles – The Philosophy of UX - In May I attended An Event Apart in Boston (AEA). AEA is a 2-day (design) conference for people who working with websites and was created by the father of web design Jeffrey Zeldman and the CSS guru Eric Meyer.

Add to Cart: 5 Ways to Improve Shopping on the Mobile Web - Shopping at bricks-and-mortar stores and shopping online provide very different experiences. eCommerce sites have now evolved through multiple generations to ensure a high-quality online shopping experience.

Improve Responsive Designs & Re-Use Images With CSS3′s Background-Size Property - I’ll admit it, I’ve been living in a CSS 2.1 world for too long. For almost my enter career as a developer I’ve only needed to use four CSS background properties.

Important Things Web Designers Should NOT be Focusing - Wise men tell us that knowing what to say is important but knowing what NOT to say is rather more important. In the same manner we should know our priorities and what the matters of insignificance are.

Rearranging Boxes: Why You Should Structure Your HTML To Be Flexible - One of the words that comes up again and again in conversations about responsive design is the word flexible. We need to create flexible layouts where we’re choreographers of our content.

HTML5 Forms input types, attributes and new elements (demos, tips and tricks) - Forms on the web. They are literally everywhere, and there seem to really be all kind of flavors for them. From day one they have been a great mean for users to input data and information ..

Improving HTML5 Canvas Performance - HTML5 canvas, which started as an experiment from Apple, is the most widely supported standard for 2D immediate mode graphics on the web.

Characteristics of a modern portfolio site - Of all of the types of websites, the portfolio site has to overcome what might be some of the most difficult hurdles. Talk to almost any designer and they will agree, launching your own portfolio site is a painful process.

Enhancing the Usability of Your Website - Usability is the approach that makes it possible for end-users to easily use a website. This approach is based on the established principles of web design and development, and also the natural intuition of human beings to do things in a particular way.

CSS3 Flexible Box Model - CSS offers several tools to help with site layout. Over the years we’ve worked mainly with floats, positioning, and margins, but let’s face it, most of us would like more. Fortunately css3 is giving us more tools for layouts. One of those tools is the flexible box.

20 Highly Effective Broken Link Checker Websites - A broken link is a link that leads you to empty or error pages of which the most common is error 404. It is the result when a web page has been deleted, no longer exist or when a site moved to a different domain.

Mobile development with HTML5 - If you read blogs that are even slightly related to tech, you likely hear about HTML5 on a near-weekly basis. Although the new web standard does not do your laundry, it has features that enable the creation of powerful applications

Automatic Image Montage with jQuery [*] - Arranging images in a montage like fashion can be a challenging task when considering certain constraints, like the window size when using fullscreen, the right image number to fill all the available space or also the size of the images in use.

5 Awesome Responsive jQuery Sliders and Image Galleries [*] - In responsive design all design components need to be able to adapt to the environment in which they are displayed and have to interact with. We create tables, navigation menus, videos ..

Easy HTML5 Video [*] - Convert any video to HTML5! Easy HTML5 Video is a free wizard program that helps you create HTML5 video for your website in a few clicks.

Build Faster Mobile Websites with ‘Adaptive Images’ - Responsive design is no longer just something you’ll find on the portfolio websites of the designers and developers who pioneered the idea. These days using media queries to adapt to varying screen sizes is well on its way to being a mainstream design goal.

Rubber Layouts – Combining Static and Fluid Layouts - Many web pages knowadays are using fluid layouts. While these are very useful, they do have some minuses. Imagine trying to read a fluid layout on your phone – It’s impossible.

Reduce the File Size of JPEG Photos by Up to 5x [*] - JPEGmini is a patent-pending photo recompression technology, which significantly reduces the size of photographs without affecting their perceptual quality.

The Ultimate Collection of HTML5 Tutorials and Techniques [*] - From the time when HTML5 was introduced in the market, web masters and internet marketers are extensively using it as compared to the previous versions of HTML.

The Psychology of UX: Part 4 - So glad to have you as, coincidentally, today’s topic is on MEMORY. This blog was originally posted on my personal blog and you can check it out there too. “Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.” – Albert Einstein

11 Javascript Plugins Optimized for Mobile Devices (With QRCode for Quick View!) - The popularity of mobile devices has increased dramatically within these few years. We have responsive website that transform itself to different screen size and now we have a bunch of javascript plugins built and optimized for mobile as well.

Adaptive Images - Automatically adapts your existing HTML images for mobile devices. No mark-up changes needed. Just drop it in and forget about it. Why? Because your site is being increasingly viewed on smaller, slower, low bandwidth devices.

Choose your web fonts wisely - I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve used the phrase, ‘right now is an exciting time for type on the web,‘ but amidst all this excitement, let’s not forget that there are some very important considerations we need to ..

The ultimate responsive web design roundup - Responsive design is the new darling of the web design world. It seems that not a week goes by that there aren’t new resources for doing it, opinions about how to do it or even whether to do it at all, and new sites that make beautiful use of it.

Grid Layouts in Modern Web Design - The use of grids in web design is a popular topic that has inspired many designers in their pursuit of the perfect site design. Although this concept is just a few years old, the use of grids has been ever-present in field engineering ..

An Attempted Solution To A Real Responsive Layout Problem - A couple of weeks ago I talked about some of the new layout issues we’ll need to solve when working with responsive designs. In that post I was mainly focused on the choices we need to make in structuring html to be more flexible.

Elements Of A Viral Launch Page - Google+, Hipster, Connect.me and Instagram! They all hit a gazillion users in no time at all — and you can even read all about it in everyday media today. This is every product creator’s dream.

Triggering CSS3 Transitions With JavaScript - CSS pseudo-classes and media queries (which I used in that other post to trigger the transitions) represent certain states for certain elements. These states occur after specific events on the page.

65 Useful HTML5 Tutorials - HTML5 is giving web designers and developers new capabilities that were things of fantasy with previous versions of HTML. It is the latest revision of the HTML standard.

iPhone Safari Viewport Scaling Bug - Those who create responsive design for iPhone may be aware of the viewport scaling bug in iPhone Safari. The bug occurs when you set the viewport width to device-width and rotate the phone to landscape view.

5 email marketing best practices to double your response rates and profits - So in this post, I’d like to show YOU how to maximize your email marketing by giving you 5 “holes” you can fill, starting today.

Testing on mobile devices without the hardware - Many developers don’t have physical access to a whole lot of different mobile devices, and buying a load of phones and tablets just for browser checking can be hard to justify.

Reliable Cross-Browser Testing, Part 1: Internet Explorer - In a perfect world, cross-browser testing would be straightforward. We would download a legacy version of a browser, run it, and be able to instantly test ..

Extensive Collection Of Useful jQuery Plugins For Working With Tables - jQuery plugins are quite in these days in the field of web designing and are extensively used because of their aesthetically appealing results.

10 Code Snippets for PHP Developers - The list below is a compilation of list of some useful code snippets which might help you when writing your awesome PHP scripts.

When is the Perfect Time to Redesign Your Website? - You might get a shock to read this at the start of this article, but let me tell you, there is no need to redesign your website. Very rarely will the people who visit ..

Five virtues of user interface design - UI design is by no means easy, but it is incredibly fun. You get to use your imagination to create new or improve upon pre-existing site and app user interfaces.

20 Fresh jQuery Animation Plugin and Tutorials - jQuery become a powerful tool to create a well featured and fine tuned website. Its importance gradually improved to the designers who are used to handle with Flash. jQuery also can save valuable time of designers.

 

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, (Web) Typography, etc.

Better typography with CSS3 experimental features - CSS3 has brought web designers a whole bunch of awesome features, including true grid & column layouts, text shadows and gradients. While we sit and hope that the web doesn’t turn back to the 90′s ..

8 Photoshop Tricks I Wish I Knew When I Was a Student - Photoshop is one of the (if not THE) most well known software used in the design industry when it comes to manipulating images and pixels.

45+ Free Online Tools To Create Charts, Diagrams And Flowcharts - Charts and graphs are the best ways to represent information and relationship between two interlinked entities. Not only do charts and graphs inform visitors about the trend or relationship ..

Getting the small stuff right yields big improvements in your type treatments - Good typography is about choosing the right typeface and point size, determining the best line length and column depth, defining hierarchy and emphasis— generally making text and display copy clear and easy to read.

How to Use Typography Effectively in Web Design - Typography is always used in whatever design one will work at. There could be similar things that one should take into consideration but there are also some different things that one should look at especially in web designing.

Illustrator’s Blend Tool: A Comprehensive Guide - In Adobe Illustrator, the Blend Tool can help you create impressive color blends. But there is more to it than you might know. This comprehensive guide can help you unlock your creative potential and teaches the features ..

Logo Design: Tips, Tutorials and Inspiration - It doesn’t matter what type of business you run. All of these businesses have one essential thing in common and that is a Logo for the business to be known by.

How The Typography is The Stone Corner for Web Designers - So we can say that typography plays vital function for web design. The large use of text in different fields like web, from large headlines and bold blocks to small body, points to the importance of typography.

Web UNSAFE Fonts – Common Issues and Workarounds - It’s almost possible to feel the wave of euphoria rolling around the Internet that’s been generated by the arrival of Web fonts. Finally, website designers can unshackle themselves from the limited range of fonts ..

Best of the Vector Web (August 2011) - This month, we showcase high quality tutorials on creating vintage vector seamless patterns, creating abstract character scenes, luminous text effects, geometric graphics, and more.

Exquisite Design Tools for Web Typography - When someone visits a website for the first time then what is the main thing that strikes in his/her mind? It’s the design and layout of the website created with typography. Web Typography plays an in integral part ..

Seven Signs It’s Time to Rebrand Your Company - There comes a time in the life cycle of many established businesses when the owner wonders if the original company name might be doing more harm than good. But how can one know for sure?

14 must-haves for your online personal brand building toolkit - Managing and growing any personal brand online can be a difficult task. For those of us looking to curate a respectable following, we simply can’t afford to miss any stops as nowadays, our online reputation means almost everything.

8 Simple and Useful Tips for Kerning Type - Kerning is fun! All right, unless you’re a serious type nerd like me, that’s definitely not going to be a true statement. However, it is an absolutely essential part of your typographical education and implementation.

What You Need to Know About Webfonts: Part 1 - Imagine if we lived in a world where there were only five voices, where one in every five people sounded exactly the same. That’s where we were with Web typography before today.

3 Text Spacing Principles Every Designer Needs to Know - Many typographic decisions are based on spacing. This is something that has always been true with printed type, and became applicable to web type with the advent of CSS.

20 Supreme Free Fonts for Serious Designers - Quality fonts are essential to make any project look great. They can either make or break your design and thus should be chosen very carefully. Yes, the internet is plastered with thousands of fonts, but how do you separate the fresh from the rotten?

Kerning Live Web Type With jQuery and Lettering.js - Today we’re following that up with a discussion on how to use Lettering.js to kern your web type. Don’t worry, it’s much easier than you think! Typography on the web has come a long way in recent years.

Typography: Anatomy of a Letterform - Understanding the fundamental principles and concepts of typography is the first step to being a successful typographer. The most basic component of typography is the letter ..

 

Blogging, Social Media, WordPress, Writing, etc.

8 WordPress Cache Plugins To Supercharge Your Blog Loading Time - If WordPress is your publishing platform and you want the pages of your site to load faster then you should think about caching. WordPress caching is done in a very simple way as it makes a copy  ..

rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WP and other platforms - The recent changes from Google and my post about it regarding the highlighting of authors in search caused quite a few questions. How to do specific things and how to make certain elements contain rel=”author” or rel=”me”.

10 Things To Make Your Blog Successful in 2011 - Blogging is dead. I know that’s true because I read it on a blog. The truth is that while social networking and microblogging sites have grown drastically in the past year, blogs remain a central part of the global cyberspace landscape.

How To Easily Create A Custom Tab For Your Facebook Fan Page For Free - The Welcome Applet by GOSO is an easy to use free Facebook application which allows you to customize the welcome Facebook Page using a simple content management system, image or HTML.

get_permalink memory usage issues - Every post that you call get_permalink for is added to the object cache (in memory). Now, if you’re doing a get_permalink call, 9 out of 10 times you’ll need to more of that post than just the permalink, so this isn’t really a problem.

Breaking Through the Blogosphere - The truth is that this journey is different for everybody. Everyone has to figure it out based on their own objectives, their own goals, and all of that jazz.

Using Custom Post Types to Create a Killer Portfolio - Quite possibly the best addition to WordPress 3.0 was that of Custom Post Types. This took WordPress from being a CMS that can manage posts and pages to being able to manage anything the user can think of rather easily.

10 super useful WordPress shortcodes - Shortcodes are real time-savers for all WordPress users. They allow you to do complex tasks easily, just by inserting the shortcode in your post editor.

Why Brands Should Keep an Eye on Tumblr - Tumblr has more than tripled its audience in the past year —  it reached 13.4 million unique visitors in July, according to the metrics experts at comScore. It might not be a social staple to most marketers yet, but fashion retailers ..

10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress - WordPress is a massive blogging platform that is used by 14.7% of the top million websites in the world. It has got so popular because of it is easy to customise, expandable with plugin’s and applies good SEO standards.

9 Reasons Why Your Content Is Not Shared on Social Networks: New Research - Do you wonder how to get your content seen amidst a sea of information? What if you could understand why your audience shares some information and not other? That would make your content stand out from the competition.

5 Twitter Tips to Boost Your Design Business - If you’re not on Twitter, you’re possibly missing out on interesting content and people – not to mention business opportunities. Designers can take advantage of Twitter to get known and find more clients.

6 Practices That Make Your Blog Look Less Professional - In the heat of managing a blog, which includes everything from writing great content, to working with advertisers, to moderating comments, to promoting the site, one can overlook certain aspects of the site – from little things like broken links,

Take Control of your WordPress Admin Bar - With WordPress 3.1 came a whole slew of new features. Perhaps the most visually obvious one is the admin bar, which will be a familiar site to any users of wordpress.com.

20 Free Contact Form Plugins for WordPress - Setting up a web form that your site visitors can use to send you a message can be a challenging task for some. For sites using WordPress, however, this tedious job can ..

10+ WordPress comment management plugins - We’ve covered advanced commenting systems for WordPress before, but what about those bloggers who want to use the stock WordPress commenting system?

WordPress Tutorials and Resources. Roundup from DesignFloat - All the WordPress Tutorials and Resources that you can find in this roundup can be useful for increasing your blogs performance and efficiency. They will provide you with the detailed information that explains the correct way of applying all these tips and tricks.

Useful WordPress Hacks for Bloggers - WordPress has long since been a favourite choice for bloggers world-wide. We love it’s flexibility and expandability through the use of themes and plug-ins, but for those bloggers who want to customize their WordPress blog even further ..

Robust WordPress Plugins to Optimize your Site for Mobile Devices - This is a collection of free WordPress plugins for mobile and other portable smart devices. In this post you will find plugins related to reader’s end and also for the admin and webmasters.

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, etc.

4 Ways Blog Comments Help Your Internet Marketing - The nature of a blog (be it business or personal) is inherently social. It is a place for you to express your opinions, share information, educate an audience, and build a brand.

Targeting Local Keywords - For businesses that operate on a local level (restaurants, salons, mechanics, etc), targeting broad keywords for their SEO is probably not the best option. Why would you want to target a national keyword if you’re just trying to appeal to people in your town or zip code?

How to Validate CSS3 - The other day someone on another post asked a question about validating your stylesheets. This person is concerned with the fact that the validator views vendor prefixes as errors.

15 Useful Domain Age Checker Tools - The age of a website’s domain has a great impact and is considered to be one of the most important factors in achieving a good ranking on major search engines. It also serves as one of the basis in pricing your site when you ..

Hacking Google Analytics: Ideas, Tips and Tricks - Web analytics is a powerful tool made accessible to all of us through awesome free software such as Google Analytics. These tools are designed to satisfy the general needs of every kind of website out there.

A Detailed Guide To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post in WordPress - If the content is the King, we can say SEO is the Queen. 1WD has already brought you a lot of articles on SEO to help you optimize your blog and make it search engine friendly so you can increase your traffic and your sales.

Why Your Site Needs to be the Center of Your Inbound Marketing - I’ve come across a few blog posts in the last couple of weeks where the blogger was recommending that site owners abandon their company site and move all their efforts into social media marketing.

How to work out your SEO competition - So I’ve always liked the idea of just diving into a project to get the wheels turning, after all so many people over-analyse everything before getting started and end up getting nothing done.

 

Tutorials

Top 70 Adobe Illustrator Icon Tutorials - Icons aren’t the simple little things that were a few years ago. Nowadays they look more like tiny illustrations and they are pretty complex things. Although that sounds a little bit overwhelming, designing icons in  Illustrator ..

How To Code a Blog Theme Concept in HTML & CSS - We’ll build the page structure with clean HTML, then style up as much as possible using CSS styling to create a lean website design that still replicates the original concept.

Create a clean retro badge in Adobe Illustrator - In this tutorial we are going to create a clean retro-looking badge/burst in Adobe Illustrator. These are great for adding to a website, advertisement, etc to help the text stand out.

25 Cool Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - When it comes to Adobe Illustrator, internet is full of interesting and impressive tutorials but checking each and every tutorial is a tedious task. Thus we have collected a list of most recent and important Illustrator Tutorials.

The Best Adobe Illustrator Tutorials for Beginners - Adobe Illustrator is an amazing tool. With its user-friendly interface yet astonishingly complex capabilities, it is an ideal program for professional and recreational illustrators alike.

How to Create An Ajax-Based HTML5/CSS3 Contact Form - Contact form is deadly essential for any website, as it acts as a messenger which passes the opinion or enquiries of visitors to webmaster. There have been countless contact forms on the web but unfortunately ..

Professional Retouching Tutorial: Dodge and Burn (Part 2) – You’re ready to jump into the next step in your professional workflow, Dodging and Burning. You may know the Dodge and Burn tools (O) alter local exposure, lightening or darkening your image in brush strokes.

Infinite All-CSS Scrolling Slideshow - Just for kicks I wanted to see if I could make a row of images animate across a page and repeat indefinitely. Turns out it’s really not that hard.The way I did it was to make one big long graphic where the first part ..

Click action Multi-level CSS3 Dropdown Menu - Pure CSS3 menus are very popular. Mostly – this is UL-LI based menus. Today we will continue making nice menus for you. This will multilevel dropdown menu, but today submenus will appear not onhover, but onclick action.

 

F*cking Brilliant, a great Read or just magnificent Tips!

Don’t ignore these warning signs of a bad design client - We have all heard horror stories about clients. Some take advantage of freelancers, some are unwilling to listen, and some are just outright disrespectful. No freelance designer should have to work with somebody like that.

5 Ways to Stop Dreaming and Start Building Your New Business Now - As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve had my share of new business ideas and (nerd alert!) I find it fun to think about them. Many don’t last longer than it takes me to say, “Hey, it would be cool to (insert idea du jour).”

11 Rules to Work By - Rules are meant to be broken, right? Sure, you can break rules whenever you want, but just remember there are consequences. Over the past 10 years I’ve broken a lot of rules, and each time I did it resulted in a negative consequence.

The Lost Art Of Design Etiquette - Endless layers in Photoshop. Overstuffed image folders. That jQuery plug-in that has 12 files associated with it. Hundreds or thousands of individual pieces go into making a website.

Do Your Worst - In the beginning as designers, there was a time where we all had to get our feet wet. We decided that we wanted to make our maiden voyage into the unknown, and we all had that similar experience of digging our toes in the sand and taking that first step.

We Do Not Need You To Design Anymore - This isn’t a rhetorical question or one that I am using to start drama. I thought of it because yesterday I came across 99designs and their new logo store. For just $99 you can get a logo and although most of them ..

Designers vs Coding - “Do I need to know how to code?” is a question that comes up with sure-fire consistency in design circles. I’ve seen it asked by so many, from uncertain design students in classrooms worried about their chances of landing a job, to seasoned professionals ..

HTML Only – The Significance of Proper Markup in Web Design [*] - Content is the reason why anybody actually visits a website. Some of us visit or find sites just for pure design reasons, but the majority of surfers, shoppers and readers only view websites for the content.

What Clients Look for in a Designer? - With the increasing number of businesses these days, there is also an increased demand for designers who will make logos, billboards, magazines and others for them. These things are valuable ..

Ten Things You Should *Definitely* Know About Ecommerce - Imagine you decide to quit your job, move to a cozy, small town, and set up a shop of your own. It’d be great. Nothing flashy, of course; something nice, like a fine hats shop.

How Doing Less Work for More Money Saved Client Work (or) How I Finally Became a Professional Designer [*] - This has been the best year of client work I’ve ever had. Which wasn’t all that difficult, really. I’ve had some abysmal experiences working with clients in the 8+ years I’ve been a designer.

How do we stand out from our competitors? - Keep your communications consistent and memorable. First impressions really do count so you need to ensure your visual identity is sending the right message. But branding is more than just logo development

Why Success Always Starts With Failure - ”Few of our own failures are fatal,” economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford writes in his new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. This may be true, but we certainly don’t act like it.

Making Communication Valuable - Design without functionality is useless. With the resources needed to design websites, videos and graphics at the fingertips of those who crave them, the value of communication today is evident.

Landing Pages That Convert - You’ve done everything possible to drive traffic to your pages, BUT you still don’t have sales (or leads or phone calls or whatever it is you wanted from that traffic). Or you’ve actually gotten traffic, but they just aren’t taking action.

9 Small Changes to Your Design Business That’ll Boost Profits Immediately - When you’re running a design business, it’s always important to keep track of your profit margin. But sometimes increasing profit can be difficult.

Think You’re An Industry Leader? Not So Fast - Rather than strategizing against competitors, you should empathize with your customers. Everything else falls into place afterward. A hyper focus on user experience has disrupted many industries.

Stupid, Stupid Client - I was speaking with an interaction designer at Thinktiv the other day. He’d been managing a particular client engagement, and was remarking on the inability of that particular client to remember a design decision from day to day.

Thank you, Wow and Done – The only 3 metrics you need - There’s a lot of talk about metrics, measurement and ROI in social media. While I agree that numbers are important, it is easy for numbers to be misleading. They’re nice to have and they can be reassuring but what are they actually saying?

Three (Almost) Foolproof Sources of New Freelance Clients - Life can be a bit of a roller coaster for freelancers. Whether you’re a copywriter, web designer, or anything else, getting regular contracts that can pay for your bread and butter is a priority.

 

I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know  .. To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @gonzodesign_