Tweet-Parade (no.47 Nov 2011)

It’s weekend! .. Time for a brand new Tweet-Parade! A Tweet-Parade is a post filled with the best articles and tutorials of last week’s blogosphere. It’s all about webdesign, graphic design, SEO, tutorials, 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 Coding: CSS, HTML, Javascript, PhP, etc.

10 Really Outstanding and Useful CSS Grid Systems – Grids are an invisible foundation that structure the websites we develop and design. This invisible foundation makes it possible for rapid development, concise code, and a much more organized layout.

An Introduction To The CSS3 Multiple Column Layout Module - The Multi Column Layout Module has been introduced to help us create columns quickly and easily using CSS3 only. In this tut I’m going to be taking a look at some of its properties and demonstrate them t..

Helpful HTML5 Canvas Resources - HTML5 canvas tag has shook the web design industry by driving new type of technology into it. The great thing about this tag is its ability to enrich your applications and designs with awesome features without embedding Adobe Flash ..

How To Set Up A Print Style Sheet - Print style sheets are useful and sometimes even necessary. Some readers might want to store your information locally as a well-formatted PDF to refer to the information later on, when they don’t have an Internet connection.

Top 10 Reasons to Use HTML5 Right Now - HTML5 is the revolution that the web needed and the fact is, it is the future whether you like it or not — suck it up and deal.

5 Tips for More Efficient jQuery Selectors - As the name implies, jQuery focuses on queries. The core of the library allows you to find DOM elements using CSS selector syntax and run methods on that collection. Here are five tips which could help you optimize your jQuery selectors…

Developing With The HTML5 Element - In the past, displaying a video on your site meant your viewer was required to have a Flash or Java-based player installed on their system in order to watch the video.

CSS3 Animations: the Hiccups and Bugs You’ll Want to Avoid - CSS3 animation is pretty darn cool. It lets us give hardware accelerated life to our previously dull websites. However, there are some major pitfalls and practices you should be aware of

 

Usability, User Experience, Responsive Webdesign, Mobile, etc.

Responsive Image Hierarchy - Adjust the breakpoint of your media query to where it feels like your image locks-in to the desired height. There might be some “Math” [/quotehands] based off of a conch shell that can help you with this,  ..

Complexity and User Experience - The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there.

Techniques in responsive web design - The techniques in this article explain how we can leverage this powerful capability of CSS to also change imagery, alter the navigation on hand-held devices, and set up default CSS for compatibility older browsers.

How to Build a Responsive Frankenstein Framework With LESS - Today we’re going to ditch this notion and build an ultra-lightweight framework that can be implemented wherever and however you want to achieve complex multi-column layouts in seconds flat.

 

Webdesign in Common, Web Typography, jQuery, Tools, etc.

A Guide To Improve Your Website’s Readability Through Colors - Colors exist not only to make your site look pretty. Colors have a more important function – to make your site usable. A pretty site is not something to object against ..

Best jQuery Slider Tutorials to Make your Online Portfolio Stand Out - we’ve collected 68 great and very useful jQuery slider tutorials that can help you to implement an image slideshow on your online portfolio.

Useful Web Typography Tools - Typographic art has become a movement on the web. We appreciate the efforts of designers who come up with great typographic techniques and tools and share their knowledge with fellow designers.

Options for @font-face implementation - Webfont embedding is so widely supported by modern browsers at this point that there’s really no excuse not to incorporate them when appropriate in your designs. There are hundreds of free fonts available for embedding, as well as ..

Tips on Designing Layouts Focused around Content - In web design we frequently assume any layout with a spiffy logo and graphics will work out perfect. But designing for the web goes much deeper than attractive page graphics. The entire user experience comes into play ..

Which Custom Web Fonts Solution Should You Use? - Over the past few years the number of fonts available for use in web design has dramatically increased. It wasn’t long ago that we all knew not to stray further than the basic Arial, Helvetica, Times, Georgia mix, ..

10 awesome jQuery snippets - jQuery gave a new life to JavaScript coding. Thanks to this great tool, it is now possible to build powerful and responsive web pages. In this article, I have compiled 10 jQuery snippets that will definitely help you in your daily client-side coding.

10 Characteristics of a Professional Website - Good web design is about striking a balance between various elements of the website. Above all, effective design should be functional and usable. There are many factors to consider when design a website for your business.

Choosing the Right Font: A Practical Guide to Typography on the Web - Typography is an huge field. People devote years of their lives to this ancient craft, and yet there’s always something new to learn. In this article, I’ll be reviewing the major points that you should consider ..

A Short Course On How To Improve Your Website’s Typography - Typography is one of the most difficult things to sort out when designing, especially because with the amount of typefaces a designer can use, it’s almost impossible to choose the best one without spending hours on it.

10 Must have Qualities of a Website to Become a Successful Brand - Through this article you would be given a good view about the must have top 10 qualities that a website must incorporate for successful branding. Following these given pointers you would be able to create ..

 

 

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, Print Design, etc.

Logo Copyrights and Wrongs: 5 Interesting Recent Infringement Lawsuits - In no particular order, here are 5 recent (and questionable!) logo design copyright infringement lawsuits which I found to be quite interesting

5 Cheap Moves Your Brand Can’t Afford - When you buy clip art or off-the-shelf logos from a company, you’re defeating your brand’s ability to stand out before you get out of the gate. It’s important to strive for a look that feels original, not like other brands you’ve seen.

Why A Great Logo Design Is All In The Metaphor - The use of metaphor is often prevalent when it comes to logos.  Some of the cleverest designs use metaphors or symbols to represent their business, take Apple for instance.  The choice of metaphor could be representative ..

Branding and the importance of consistent design - Companies should be trying to brand their company. The benefits of branding are often long term, but include customer qualities like loyalty, memorability familiarity and at some point, your marketing expenses will ..

Adobe Illustrator: Live Trace for Better Gradient Meshes - AJ Wood shows Illustrator users a technique for using the Live Trace and gradient Mesh functions to create a colored illustration.

Why Are Fonts So Expensive? - Everywhere you look on the internet there is a freeware option available that easily competes with its licensed premium version. Let’s take a look a look at some reasons why fonts cost so much.

 

Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Content Strategy, etc.

7 Ways To Craft Your Facebook Posts For Maximum Shares - Facebook recently changed the way users interact with content on fan pages: any user, including non-fans, can now post on fan page walls and like/comment/share fan page content.

11 Reasons Your LinkedIn Company Page Sucks - To be honest, it’s very difficult to find many examples of companies using LinkedIn Company Pages to their fullest potential. This a huge missed opportunity for businesses, especially given that because many businesses aren’t ..

When social media becomes too time consuming - Social media is fun. Social media is a great way to connect with other like minded people. Social media is a great way to interact with potential clients and customers for your business.

5 Social Media Mistakes That Make You Look Like an Amateur and Cost You Sales - Social media has become a necessary part of virtually any company’s online marketing efforts. And yet the world of corporate social media is still relatively young.

The 5 Essential Elements of Every Successful Blog - Whether you’re a small time blogger or a highly respected authority, there are five main elements every successful blogger needs to focus on.  These five elements have been used since the beginning of the blogging era and ..

25 Google+ tips and tricks - Google+ unveiled itself to the public amidst a chorus of praise and adulation from techies all over the globe. Unfortunately, it also earned a good amount of scorn from individuals who were not ready to grasp the unique philosophy ..

Why A Blog Is Good for Business - Whether you’re a home-based freelancer or the CEO of a brand new start-up, a business blog is one of the most versatile online marketing tools that no small business should be without.

Perfect Blog Articles: from the Idea to the Post - this article can’t teach you what you have to write, this is really up to you and is related to your niche, market, job, attitudes, interests etcetera. The core idea is giving you a method to wrap up effective blog articles.

10 Productive Tasks You Should Be Doing On Google+ Right Now - Google+ had a hot start, but has since cooled down. For a lot of people, that means ignoring Google+. I want to warn you that is a bad idea. Although the lights are on and it seems like nobody is home ..

How to optimize your blog’s RSS feed - When optimizing your RSS Feed, you have to consider the kind of content you curate. There are several reasons why you may want to use your feed to generate clicks. You may have a product, feature or art-directed element to your ..

 

WordPress

Prevent Hotlink Images With htaccess - Hotlinking is when people use images from another site on their own site. This is a common practice which will waste a lot of bandwidth from the site that hosts the images.

40+ Awesome Fullscreen WordPress Theme Collection - A fullscreen wordpress theme adds a great dimension to your blog drawing all the attention on showcasing your work in a very simple yet powerful way!

Event Posts in WordPress - WordPress is a constantly maturing platform. Just over a year ago I wrote a tutorial about creating custom post types for events- but huge improvements around advanced meta data queries made my previous approach seem hackish.

35 WordPress Tutorials More Productive for Bloggers & Developers - We compile an ultimate list of wordpress tutorials which helpful for beginners and professional wordpress developers even some of handy tips and tricks we sharing in this useful wordpress tutorials ..

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.3 - WordPress 3.2 has been downloaded a killer 12M+ times. WordPress as a whole continues to grow and is touted to be in the approximate 14% of the web zone.

SEO for WORDPRESS - SEO holds immense value to get higher rankings on major search engines and stand out from the crowd. This article features a range of important tips for WordPress SEO, like

Some WordPress Blogging Tips and a few Common Mistakes to Avoid - If nobody tells you then you simply don’t know, as George W Bush once famously said “we don’t know what we don’t know”. So here I have put together a few No No’s to help speed up your learning curve.

8 WordPress Related Posts with Thumbnails - In this comparison, we’ll brings you the Top 8 related posts with thumbnails plugins that do just that, They also attract the viewers eye and pushes them to go through the content.

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, Loadtime, etc.

Google Analytics For Bloggers – The Definitive Guide - Google analytics is by far the most useful tool that I use on the Internet when it comes to tracking the progress of my website. They provide you will all the information you could possibly need (and a load you probably ..

10 Ways to Own Page One of the Google Search Results - With the rise of mobile search and social media, local Web-presence optimization is becoming paramount to small businesses. Local businesses need to understand how Google can drive awareness and traffic to their locations ..

Boost traffic with local search - New challenges abound for any website or business even remotely concerned with its local coverage. A key catalyst to this fundamental shift is, no surprises here, the ascendancy of Google Maps.

How To Analyze Your Content Performance In Google Analytics - In this post, I want to talk about the Content category. I will not discuss all  the reports available, but the ones I use most frequently.

How I Keep My Bounce Rate Under 2% - Keeping visitors on your website is a key component to success. The more time a visitor spends on your site, the more likely they are to follow through with whatever action you want them to take, whether that’s subscribing to a newsletter ..

Think Like Your Target Audience When Choosing Keywords - Keywords are arguably the single most important component of any SEO campaign. The keywords you select determine what search queries your site will rank for, which in turn dictates who will find your site.

Seven Mistakes That Make Websites Slow - Not so long ago, eight seconds was cited as a tipping point beyond which users would abandon a website. Then it was six seconds. Then four. Now, the rule of thumb is two seconds. The bar is high, and it’s rising all the time.

5 Press Release SEO Posts & 10 Bonus Tips for Better Google Rankings - We’ve seen the ups and downs in the Public Relations industry over the years and have helped inform many Public Relations professionals on the finer arts of SEO by speaking at events like PRSA ..

12 Free SEO Tools of 2011 to be Grateful For - A few of these tools also qualify as resources or guides, but every one of these tools has made my life just a little bit easier this year.

Are These Six Little-Known Factors Affecting Your Search Engine Ranking? - here are some of the little-known factors they use to analyze your pages and potentially affect your ranking.

 

Tutorials

Styling ordered list numbers - I’ve always been annoyed by how difficult it is to style the numbers of ordered lists. Quite often a design calls for something other than just a plain figure – a different font, size, colour, background, whatever.

Interesting Photoshop Tutorials Released in October 2011 - some amazing techniques that you can add to your own personal collection. Here are the Interesting PhotoshopTutorials that were Released in October 2011.

Elastic Image Slideshow with Thumbnail Preview - Today we want to show you how to create a simple elastic slideshow with a thumbnail preview. The slideshow will adjust automatically to its surrounding container and we can navigate through the slides by using the ..

Create a Business Icon from Scratch an Adobe Illustrator Tutorial - Business icons are one of the most poplar vector illustrations. As with all vectors in general, business icons are scalable which makes them perfect for use in web design.

Get to grips with CSS3 multiple background images - Now, we have CSS3 and the ability to apply multiple background images to any element we like. In this tutorial, I’d like to take you through creating a 404 page design using multiple background images.

Hover and Click Trigger for Circular Elements with jQuery - Today we want to share one possible solution to the circle hovering problem. We’ll create a plugin that will take care of the ‘mouseenter’, ‘mouseleave’ and ‘click’ events to be triggered only on the circular shape ..

30+ Mindblowing Vector Illustration tutorials - This article contains a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials. Some are intermediate level and some are advanced tutorials that include coloring processing, character sketching, pen tool tricks for tracing line art sketches, ..

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

The secret to saving an underpriced design project (and avoiding it next time) - Did you underestimate the amount of time you needed? Did you run into an unforeseen complication? Did you go outside of the scope of the project? Were your terms of completion too broad?

20+ Helpful Google+ Brand Page Resources for Freelancers - In this post, I identify over 20 resources on Google’s new brand page feature. I’ve sorted this information into categories so that you can easily find the information that is most useful to you.

Why is Networking Important for Web Designers - The issue of networking is given importance and explained elaborately in this article. It also tells you about the tips and benefits it gives us which can be used further in our own work.

6 Tips for Effectively Dealing with Client Demands - We’ve all had that client. The one who comes to you with a huge, complicated assignment and proceeds to be a gigantic pain in the rear about it. They do things like neglecting to answer their phone or email, change their ..

10 things your clients need to know - The usual suspects crop up in every project. Whitespace, making the logo bigger and of course, ‘The Fold’. We’re going to touch on a few of these topics and give you some pointers and links to help communicate effectively with your client for a more peaceful project.

All About Deadlines - Probably nothing else in the freelancing experience creates as much stress as deadlines. If a freelancer tells you they are up against a deadline, then you know that it’s time to back off and give them some space so that they can get your work done.

Startup secrets that big business needs to know - But Hoffman’s tips have a relevance beyond startups, and there’re plenty of lessons from his past that are just as useful to established companies as they are to budding entrepreneurs.

10 New Guidelines for Web Designers for 2012 - To capitalize on the earning potential of web design industry there has been surge in the number of custom service web design providers. However, only a handful of freelancers are able to sense the change in the industry ..

 

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

How to Think and Communicate Visually - Visual storytelling is nothing new. We only need to look to the earliest signs of humanity for proof—simple paintings on the walls of caves tell the story that people are a visual tribe. Today, it seems, communications must be visual in ..

What Good Does Design Do For Business? - Investing in the design process can be a sustainable business advantage, because it tends to lead to five things: creative collaboration, innovation, differentiation, simplification, and customer experience.

The Big Think: Breaking The Deliverables Habit - It’s not about deliverables. It’s about results. Understanding why this works depends on understanding the real role of the designer and the deliverables they create.

An Overview of Defensive Design - All over the Web, at any given moment, something is going wrong. It’s not an issue we take lightly, yet it still occurs! No I’m not here to talk about our over dependence upon third party tools or IE6 (specifically), I’m here to talk about site glitches, and how to avoid them.

Mobile email: Six tips for building a campaign that works - The mobile email numbers are even more indicative of a seismic shift in web behavior. comScore found that while web-based email declined significantly throughout 2010, mobile email surged 36% from the prior year.

Design: How to Remove Subjectivity from the Process - tons of great ideas but it is more difficult to get to commit to singular points of focus. In either case great design starts with a set of clearly defined parameters, and adhering to them throughout the design process.

40 Free and Useful eBooks for Developers and Designers - we are showcasing a collection of more than 40 Free e-books particularly for the designing fraternity. We hope you like this assortment and find it useful too.

 

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 me @gonzodesign