Tweet-Parade (no.49 Dec 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.

Using Absolute Positioning in CSS - Once you start to become more experienced with CSS, one concept that will help you greatly is use of the position property, in particular with a value of absolute. Some of the benefits of using absolutely positioned elements ..

Numbering In Style - Chances are if you want to number things in order on a website, the ordered list (<ol>) is your guy. It also is pretty reasonable that you want to style those numbers. Strangely enough, styling those list numbers isn’t a very easy thing to in CSS.

10 LESS CSS Examples You Should Steal for Your Projects - LESS, Sass and other CSS preprocessors represent an awesome way to extend CSS to be everything a programmer ever wanted. Variables, mathematical operations, mixins and a lot more make ..

HTML5 Essentials and Good Practices - This article will help you get started using HTML5 on your projects today and show you some good practices to put what you learned to good use.

Understanding CSS’s vertical-align Property - The vertical-align property is one of those features of CSS that sounds pretty self-explanatory, but can cause problems for CSS beginners. I think even many CSS veterans have had problems figuring this one out at times.

Wrapping Your Head Around Canvas: Part 5 - The WebGL portion of Canvas isn’t so much a fringe as an add on to Canvas. Since we’ve been working in the 2D API over the course of this series, we can now move on to working with 3D.

Measuring and sizing UIs, 2011-style - For years we used pixels to lay out web pages. Then, not so long ago, we were dabbling with ems to make our pages elastic. Now, in 2011, most of us are adopting a responsive approach and using fluid grids and percentages.

What You Need To Know About The HTML5 Slider Element - HTML5 brought a lot of new tags and new rules on how the old ones should be used. One of them is the range input element, or the slider. This control has been available in operating systems for decades, but is ..

 

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

5 Useful Tools For Testing Responsive Web Design - Testing responsive web design is tough job. Changing browser width and testing it across different browsers and devices is pain and adds to development time. These tools listed below will definitely aid you in testing your responsive website at ..

A few thoughts on maintaining Responsive Sites - My hope is that a client who understands the benefits of a responsively designed site will likewise understand the reason for, and the benefit of, the added time (and therefore cost).

Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs - CSS is great at adapting a website design to different window sizes – it allows you not only to tweak layout but also to send rescaled versions of the design’s images. And you want to do that because, after all, a smartphone does ..

10 steps to an engaging interactive user experience - These days, building websites or applications that attract and retain customers has become somewhat of a science. I often compare the work that I do as a UX designer to an architect.

What is Web Accessibility? - Web accessibility can sometimes be a controversial topic, but a fiery dialogue is a healthy sign of just how much people really care. While opinions may vary on specific issues, one thing is clear: Equal access to information is paramount in the digital age.

3 Things You Never Thought to Do With Media Queries - Follow along as we completely break from tradition and hijack media queries to help us test and tweak a design. You’ve never seen media queries like this before!

CSS3 Media Queries Tutorial: Part 1 - With the introduction of a whole new market of mobile devices and tablets, there has never been more of a need for your website content to display across a variety of platforms properly.

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.

Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs..  Again - as I’d been wanting to write about some fun hacks for responsive images and related parsing behaviours. I see your dirty server-based hack and raise you an even dirtier client-side hack. Evil laugh, etc., etc.

 

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

Useful jQuery Drop Down Menu Scripts - Using the CSS method, we can create interesting jQuery drop down menu designs and the navigations also becomes very graceful and effective. This exciting technology has become significantly popular these days

15 Tips in Making an Effective Call to Action - For designers, here are some tips for you in making an effective call to action. Try to take note of these points for it will not only help you create effective calls to action but it will also help you have a more successful site.

Selling Online: Design, Development, and Business Considerations - Selling physical and digital goods online has become a mainstream option for nearly every type of business. Traditional retail is moving stock online, there are endless online-only shops, ..

Web Typography: Just Four Steps Away from a Perfect web-safe Font - A web page with attractive web font and good typography can certainly attract and hold readers and visitors. By following the four steps or tips of getting the right typography

Web Design for Real People - Design thinking needs to go outside aesthetic or functional challenges and bring in solutions inspired by people. This article talks about being “people aware” and using human factors to improve user experience.

Front-end Style Guides - We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code.

15 Apps to Help You Compress Images Without Losing Quality - he online apps are very practical because they don’t require you to install anything on your computer so no space is needed. You only need a image and the process will be executed on the website.

What Color Should Your Links Be? - Links can be any color they want, but they need to be distinct from the other stuff on the page to work. Fortunately, we’ve learned that we can leave behind blue and “underlines”, introducing colors and text attributes that deliver ..

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

10 Killer Photoshop Tips For Web Designers – 10 extremely useful Photoshop tips to boost your design speed. There can be shortcut, feature or setting you don’t know about, but not anymore.

Font Management Tips for Web Designers - Basic font management software will allow you to organize your fonts, preview and compare them easily. More importantly, it will let you activate only the fonts you need, while leaving the others deactivated.

Creating a Realistic Curtain - Adobe Illustrator has an amazing feature that allows us create many realistic illustrations. Today we will have the opportunity to practice with the Mesh Tool once again. We will use it to create an interesting damask curtain.

Typography 101: Understanding the Anatomy of a Letter - Every designer, whether you’re in print or web, should possess a basic understanding of fonts and type. Using the right typeface and understanding how a font will impact your design can add that extra pop to print and digital projects ..

JavaScript for the Absolute Beginner - Scripting is one of the most powerful features in InDesign. It can save lots of time: almost anything you can do with the user interface, you can do with scripts, and there are even a few things you can ..

 

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

The Ultimate Guide to Designing the Perfect Business Blog - So what does a great business blog look like? The design itself could be one of an infinite number of choices. However great business blog designs share common traits of success.

5 Great Strategies To Scare Away Visitors from your Website - Are you looking to scare away visitors from your website? If so, you’ve found the right article! Let’s take a closer look at some errors you can make that will get your visitors to leave without looking back.

7 Strategies to Make Facebook SEO Friendly - Facebook represents a fantastic marketing opportunity for any business via shares & referrals, however, just like WordPress and other platform based user sites, it’s critical to incorporate SEO strategies ..

7 Silly Google+ Business Page Mistakes to Fix NOW - If you’re using Google+ business pages or thinking about setting up a page soon, consider these 7 mistakes many people are making but are luckily incredibly easy to fix!

What’s The Right Length Of A Blog Post For Optimal SEO? - If you are writing through a passion for your subject, then you don’t really need to bear SEO in mind, if you’re happy having a platform for self-expression which doesn’t rely on a large amount of traffic passing through.

 

WordPress

To Fight Spam With Akismet Or With An Alternative? - Akismet is one of the most popular anti-spam measures for WordPress in particular and many other CMSes/platforms in general.The Akismet plugin is bundled with the official WordPress install by default, and it is one of the most reliable ..

How To Create Title Tag In WordPress - Depending on what page you are on you need to make sure that the title tag is different on each page. This is important for SEO because you can’t have pages with the same title tag.

11 Quick Tips: Securing Your WordPress Site - This section will going to cover the tips related to securing your WordPress site. Tips includes protecting files, login restriction, WordPress admin restriction, database protection, etc.

10 Quick Tips: Optimizing & Speeding Up Your WordPress Site - Today, we’ll be looking at how to optimize your site to run as fast as it possibly can. So, without further adieu, here are 10 quick tips for optimizing your WordPress site!

Getting Started with AJAX & WordPress Pagination - Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a web technology that allows a web page to dynamically update content without reloading the page within the browser. The website becomes more interactive and ..

Joomla & WordPress Together – a Marriage Made in Heaven - WordPress, considered to be the best blogging platform and Joomla, one of the most powerful Content Management Systems working hand in hand together on the same site would be a marriage made in heaven.

10 Tips To Optimize Your WordPress Theme - In this post, we’ll review 10 shortcode snippets that will tweak and optimize your WordPress theme. You can add all of these code snippets to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme.

 

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

Banner Advertising or SEO – Benefits of SEO vs Banner Advertising on 3rt Party Sites - Banner advertising has clearly seen better days and in my experience I found it to be a waste of time and energy with poor results. SEO on the other hand has delivered the results I was looking for.

Putting SEO in Its Place: An Information Architecture Strategy - I’ll discuss how to put search engine optimization (SEO) in its proper place in the grand scheme of things, demonstrating its relationship to information architecture.

Meta Tag Copyrighting And Optimization Tips - Meta tags provide the search engine spiders with information about a website.  The search engines are focused on providing users with the best possible search experience and want to provide them with the most relevant results.

Direct From Google: How To Build A Quality Website In 2012 - However, if we listen closely enough, we’ll have all the knowledge we need to build a site that Google loves.

 

Tutorials

Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: 30+ Creative And Useful Tips - I have rounded up a collection of very useful Adobe Photoshop tutorials from around the web from the month of October 2011. You’ll find everything from Creating Convincing Text-Shaped Buildings ..

Lateral On-Scroll Sliding with jQuery - we are going to show you how to create a “slide-in on scroll” effect. The main idea is to laterally slide in elements depending on the scroll position of the document.

How To Create a Cubist Style Logo Design in Illustrator - Not only will we be creating the actual design in Adobe Illustrator, but I’ll also be describing the whole logo design process in this tutorial, from the initial sketches right through to finishing off the final design.

How To Create A Sexy Vertical Sliding Panel Using jQuery And CSS3 - More and more we see people using horizontal sliding panels on their websites. And they usually look very nice! Some will put a contact or login form in there, others will put some information about them and their website, ..

Fresh CSS3 Tutorials - CSS3 makes our lives better because everything that touches CSS3 shines with gradients, fascinating animations and rounded corners. You’ll agree that CSS3 makes any website’s design awesome and remarkable.

How to Style iOS Sliding Checkboxes with jQuery – A lot more iOS app development hitting the mainstream. As such their techniques in design and user interfaces are sure to trickle out among the mass of web designers. I’d like to spend some time examining the iOS slider switches.

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

‘Client is Always Right’ Approach towards better Design Experience - Do not let communication gap take over the project. The fact remains that the client knows his product more than anyone else so talking about the product in detail with your client will help you a lot in designing accordingly.

10 Reasons Your Freelance Career is Failing - If your freelance business isn’t where you want it to be, then it’s time to own up to your choices and make a change. Here are 10 reasons your freelance career is failing. If you want to turn it around, then it’s up to you.

How to Get More Clients Faster With Templates - you need a system for contacting leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying clients as fast as possible. Communication templates can help you do this. These communication templates are email-based, which you can copy, ..

25 Tips for Avoiding Communication Problems - Miscommunication is a huge obstacle to building a successful relationship. And, since freelancer/client trust is based on relationship–miscommunication can be a huge problem for freelancers.

How to Tell a Client No - As a designer you must posses this skill, and yes, it is a skill. It can be one of the hardest things to do if you are not a very assertive person. Yet it is a vital part of becoming a successful design who does great work.

Can you trust your web designer? - Web design and development (two separate arts) is a skilled profession, that requires time to perfect and is charged accordingly. Projects can take weeks or even months to complete, this time comes at a price.

 

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

Inspiration vs. Imitation - Every now and then I get a really lovely email from an aspiring letterer that is about to publish a passion project of his or her own. They tell me my work was an inspiration and that they can’t wait to share their creation with the world.

Minimalist Web Design: How Minimal is Too Minimal? - When we start to realize that more is not necessarily better, and that we can get by with less stuff, we try to simplify by removing unnecessary elements so we can focus on what’s truly important.

The Process of Creativity - In one way or another we have all experienced that classic “aha” moment. Be it in our own experience or through those genius minds we love to follow in shows, movies or books, the light bulb moment of mental clarity is an iconic expression.

Why designers are holding themselves back - Have you every been in the situation where the client keeps requesting tweaks to the design or changes in functionality? As you sit moving boxes around the page, the budget is slowly draining away and you’re no longer sure whether the project ..

Design It to Build It: What to Consider When Designing for the Web - When it comes to the actual construction of the site, the only things I really take from the mockup is anything that I can’t create with CSS, the rest is just a map to guide me.

How To Achieve Simplicity In Design - Simplicity is getting at the core of something and understanding what that thing truly is and then making every part consistent with the core. Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

Spotify, Android, Apple TV, And The New Appathy - Apps are coming at us from all directions, and they’re getting both more sophisticated and simpler–the app economy is booming. But as everyone and their dog makes something they deem fit to call an “app,” the supply will arrive like a flood.

Designing for the Mind - In this article we’ll take a look at some principles that make the aesthetics of design attractive to people, and explanations on why they do. The more you become conscious of how design works the better you are ..

Clear Indications That It’s Time To Redesign - Redesign. The word itself can send shudders down the spines of any Web designer and developer. For many designers and website owners, the imminent onslaught of endless review cycles, coupled with an infinite ..

 

 

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