Tweet-Parade (no.1 Jan 2012)

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.

Fullscreen Background Image Slideshow with CSS3 - Today we will create a CSS-only fullscreen background image slideshow. We’ll create different image transitions and also make a title appear using CSS animations.

Mastering Mouse Enter and Exit Events With CSS Transitions - Today we’re going to go over the various options for CSS transition syntax and how each affects the animation given whether your mouse is entering or exiting a hover.

JavaScript frameworks, tools and techniques to create killer applications - Web browsers are becoming more and more powerful, and JavaScript is definitely making the web an ever more interesting place. I have compiled the most interesting JavaScript frameworks, ..

Dabblet previewers - The thing that impressed me most was the previewers, the animated pie timer & the measuring rulers in particular. These helpful little bubbles that pop up when you mouse over a keyword in CSS which give a visual representation of the values.

Cross Browser HTML5 Progress Bars In Depth - As a web application developer, progress bars are great when you want to show the user that some action is happening, especially when it can take a long time. They can be animated , or static.

Connecting with API Data from Instagr.am using PHP - The process of connecting into API data via OAuth is tricky. Some of the more notable social networks which have adopted this technology include Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook. But Instagram is a very ..

Create a Full Page Background Image with CSS3 - CSS3 allows us to choose between a few different values for the “background-size” property.  The properties are, length, percentage, cover, and contain.  The value that we’re going to use first is the “cover” value, ..

Introducing the New Cursor Styles in CSS3 - In this article, we’re going to examine the CSS cursor property which, as you’d expect, allows you to change the cursor style as the mouse moves over an element. It’s become increasingly important for interactive web applications…

 

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

Responsive Video Embeds On All Devices - The problem is that we don’t know which device the video embeds will be viewed on. Will someone open up our videos on a phone? On a tablet? On a laptop? We have no control on how people are going to consume our videos.

How to make a website Responsive - In this tutorial, we’ll make our previously designed and coded retro-style website responsive. First, we’ll take a quick look at the theories of responsive and mobile-friendly web design

Design Best Practices for the Mobile Web - Mobile web interfaces take a different sort of design practice, whether they are for mobile websites or native mobile applications. With a different sort of device, and a more noticeably different screen size, we as designers must consider ..

50 Tips To A User Friendly Website - Some of these are secrets I have acquired from the best designers in the world, and some of them are standard every day practices.  Either way, these tips will improve your visitors experience on your website.

How to Build a Responsive Thumbnail Gallery - One major component of mastering responsive design is to figure out how to approach specific tasks and adjust to problems as they arise within the context of larger projects. One day you’ll be working on a project ..

20 things you can do this year to improve your user’s experience - With a good user experience now widely seen as the key attribute of many high-tech products, it makes sense to review your own products to see how you can give them ..

When it comes to Responsive Web Design, Stop Worrying about Bandwidth - When it comes to building websites in 2012, bandwidth truly doesn’t matter. And it’s going to matter even less in 2013 with the roll out of more 4G networks. Additionally many ..

Seven UX Best Practices of Community Design - The transition means that UX designers no longer design “flat sites” or interactions where the company pushes out content, but rather ones that foster rich community interaction and contribution. Designing for a community ..

Responsive Tables (2) - Webkit browsers handle both tables perfectly. Firefox & Opera handle the first version. The second version plays with/abuses the flexible box layout and only works with a -webkit- prefix.

 

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

How to protect your laptop from data theft - One tactic that we’ll get to is encryption from single files to full-drive encryption: it’s a way you can lock-down sensitive information in a way that even the FBI can’t crack.

10 jQuery Plugins to help with Responsive Layouts - Typically, you would use Media Queries to resize the overall layout, but navigation, forms, images, sliders, carousels… they all need to be optimized as well. This is why we are giving you our collection of 10 jQuery plugins

How to Create Super Easy jQuery Tabbed Containers -  Tabbed containers is an excellent way of presenting your content. Data is organized where only the current tab’s section is shown. Once the user clicks on the other tabs, its associated content gracefully appears.

35+ Excellent jQuery Animation Techniques and Tutorials - The coming of JavaScript and various web functioning libraries has made the work of interaction easier for any website. Those who are familiar with jQuery know how it helps us in creating jQuery animation. 

22 Most Popular jQuery Plugins of 2011 - Since jQuery was released in 2006, it has changed the way we think of JavaScript. And because of its simplicity, it has motivated many enthusiastic developers to create thousands of useful plugins and extends its functionality.

Islands of Thought in Macrotypography - The deliberate and exact manipulation of space is a mark of superior Design, so let’s quit with the line breaks between paragraphs on the web, shall we? These spaces cause a disruption in flow that is completely unnecessary.

20 Free Wireframe and Mockup Applications - Mockup is the visual appearance of any website whereas the Wireframe deals with the contents and the functionality of the site. One of the easiest steps in building a website is by creating a mockup and of course ..

10 Nouveau CSS3 Text Effect and Web Typography Tutorials - One of the spheres CSS3 has changed dramatically is web typography. Text styling and neat effects can now be achieved without using any JavaScript or images at all. This post presents 10 ..

Brand New and Extremely Awesome jQuery Plugins - This selection of plugins is targeted at the designers and developers who want to extend their sites, create amazingly interactive websites that are attractive and accessible to the widest range of browsers.

40 Best Typeface Combinations in Web Design - When it comes to prints or Web Design, typography is one of the most important part. So selectng the right type of typography for your web design is one of the most crucial part.

Weekly Freebies: 12 Free CSS Sprite Generators - CSS image sprites allow you to dramatically reduce the number of HTTP requests on a site by combining many or all of the images on your site into a single file. This file can then be used in conjunction with CSS background ..

6 Elements Of A Trustworthy E-Commerce Web Design - There are no hard rules about designing for e-Commerce, but there are plenty of fundamentals to follow to ensure you are garnering the trust necessary to be successful.

 

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

Is the traditional business card dead? - The discussion has raged for quite some time – is the traditional business card dead? Do people, in the age of the web and technology still need to kill trees for a silly little piece of card stock to hand out at events or when ..

7 Essential Stages of a Logo Design Process - Effective logo design is both an art and a science. It’s an art because it’s a product of a sustained creative effort and it’s a science because it needs to closely align with the objective of the clients ..

8 Things I wish I knew About Logo Designing - A logo is a statement of uniqueness and logo designing has emerged as an independent job sector. With growing demands for logos that would be unique and stand out from the others, one really needs to lose reign on creativity.

10 Brand-Building Steps For Beginners  - you are finally going to “get into” social media and use it to build a brand for you or your business. But you’re not a geek and you’re not with a big corporation that already has a social media team or a fairly savvy marketing department.

Typography With Perspective: Learn to Wield Illustrator’s Perspective Grid Tool - Today we’re going to take a look at how to use the Perspective Grid in Adobe Illustrator. This awesome and fairly new tool allows you to automatically flow vector elements ..

11 Ways To Add Depth To A Design - Adding a sense of depth to a design can make that design seem more realistic and increase visual interest. Building out the 3rd dimension pulls the viewer into the design and can help you set up entry points and control flow ..

Focal Points In Design Layout - Successful design in publishing, advertising, web design, illustration and anything else that ties together elements depends on drawing in the reader and leading their eyes across the page.

 

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

Using Social Bookmarking Effectively To Promote Your Site - social bookmarking is not only about promoting a website or product. It is indeed a useful tool to increase the number of users visiting the site, nevertheless, it is not considered to be a good practice to make use of  ..

A Look Back: The Top 20 Blogging Tips Posts of 2011 - As a special thank you to all of our faithful readers here at BloggingTips.com, we present to you a list of the top 20 posts for 2011. These posts have been listed in order of popularity — based on the number of comments, in descending order.

Why WordPress is Best Blogging Platform? - I’m not going to discus why BlogSpot is good but certainly not the best but will focus more on answering Why WordPress and why you should use WordPress as your Blogging platform.

7 Ways To Get Traffic To A New Blog - I strongly believe that engaging in conversations and networking with other bloggers is very important. I find it’s much more important to build a sense of community than monetize your blog or try to get a nice Page Rank.

How to Grow Your Blog with the Rule of 10 - Getting your blog off the ground is hard. You might spend weeks, maybe even months before you get your first comment. If you watch the analytics, you may even notice people showing up on your page.

 

WordPress

How to optimize plugin loading - So, what plugin authors can do to make their plugins better, how to optimize their loading, resource usage and with that speed? Before I list recommendations for this, here is a small analysis of how plugins are loaded.

How to Stop WordPress From Adding <p> Tags? - if you like to have total control of your code, this feature can become a significant pain in you’re neck. In order to prevent WordPress from automatically adding <p> and </p> tags in your code

[..] 7 Unique Alternative & Non-Traditional Uses for WP - What initially started off as an effective blog publishing platform, is now being used for various other web development services, apart from blogs. 7 other ways in which WordPress development can be utilized.

How to Find Out Which Plugins are Slowing Down Your WordPress Site - It’s easy to tell if your site has performance issues. A sluggish website is oftentimes a sign of plugins that are misconfigured or demanding a lot of resources. However, for the average WordPress ..

How To Create Custom Taxonomies In WordPress - Let’s take an in-depth look at how to create your own custom taxonomies in WordPress, including a few advanced development examples that you can begin using in your WordPress themes and plugins today.

How To: Add Taxonomies to Your Custom Post Types in WordPress - Custom Post Types are not new to WordPress, they’ve been around since version 3.0 and have really changed the “WordPress as a CMS” game ever since. Custom taxonomies though, have ..

 

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

10 Guidelines for Writing Usable and SEO Friendly Content - Effective search engine content can be termed as the content that appeals both to readers and search engines. It can be quite tricky as you are basically writing articles and reviews for readers, but at the ..

Why Should You Conduct a Full Link Audit? - Once a year, I have to prepare myself for the process of running a full link audit on my site. Is it fun? Not by any stretch of the imagination, but it is important nonetheless and helps shape my link building campaign ..

Measuring & Tracking Success of your SEO Strategy - Although every business is unique and every website has different metrics that matter, the following list is nearly universal in appeal. Note that we’re only covering those metrics critical to SEO ..

The Best SEO Practices and Tips 2012 - the best SEO Practices have not really change that much, as the most important ranking factors pretty much remained unchanged. At its basics, you need to know that there are only two essential elements for good SEO, ..

 

Tutorials

Best of Tuts+ in December 2011 -  a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Realistic Letterpress Effect in Photoshop – In this tutorial we will show you how to create a super easy and realistic letterpress effect using Layer Styles in Photoshop. The process is super simple and I am sure that you won’t take more than 45 minutes to achieve the same result.

Getting started with HTML5 geolocation - The W3C Geolocation API allows for scripted access to geographical location information associated with a device’s browser. In this article we’ll first cover how to access this API and then dive into some examples of ..

Thumbnail Proximity Effect with jQuery and CSS3 - how to create a neat thumbnail proximity effect with jQuery. The idea is to scale thumbnails when hovering over them and also scale their neighbouring thumbnails proportionally to their distance.

CSS3 multilevel menu with transition and animation - In our new tutorial we’ll create a new nice CSS3 menu with interesting behavior, where I use css3 transition and animation. This is UL-LI-based multilevel menu.

Top 50 Graphic Design Photoshop Tutorials from 2011 - In this yearly round-up we have collected the best of them. It covers Illustrating & Painting, Photo Manipulation, Poster Design, Text Effects, Abstract Drawing and finally, Special Effects.

40+ Fresh And Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Tutorials are one of the best ways to learn and practice new tricks using Illustrator’s various tools. Learning through a step-by-step AI tutorial not only assists you in twisting the tools.

Vector slider control with illustrator - In this opportunity we are going to show how to create a complete GUI set slider using Adobe Illustrator. For those who are not familiar with the GUI term, it goes after the words Graphical User Interface and as its name suggests it.

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

8 Metrics Every Freelancer Should Measure at the End of the Year - One of the best things you can do for your business – whether you’re a solo shop or a multi-national concern, is to stop at the end of the year and take a look at how things went.

Lessons Learned Running a Small Business in 2011 - When looking back at your own year, I’d encourage you not to look for when things went “wrong” as such, but simply to think of how things may have gone differently. That’s what I’ve done. If I were to go back, I may well do ..

Is There Ever a Graceful Way to Ask Clients About Their Budget? - But it’s often awkward to bring up the topic of budget. Some clients aren’t sure about what they actually have in terms of budget, certain freelancers may feel greedy asking for more information about money and so on.

How to Manage Clients in Web Designing Business - In any business, customers are the most important stakeholder that can make or break your business. The case of doing business online is more sensitive with regards to customer relations.

Juggling Between Freelance Designer and Business Owner - Freelancing has slowly become a more affordable career path for many web designers and developers. But it’s not enough to just create pretty websites in HTML/CSS.

7 Common Mistakes Made by New Freelancers - In this article we’ll take a look at 7 mistakes that many new freelancers make. The purpose is to help those of you who are in the process of moving into the world of freelancing, or considering it.

8 Strategies to Get Your Business in a Distraction Free Zone - Physical and mental distractions are stunting the growth of your freelance business. In line with getting focused on my writing career for 2012, I’ve vowed to cut out as many distractions as possible, at ..

Un-resolutions to Make 2012 Your Best Freelancing Year Yet - Everyone will be writing posts about New Year’s resolutions, so how about one with un-resolutions? That is, instead of talking about what you should be doing, how about we talk about what you ought to stop ..

 

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

Crafting the Front-end - Identifying oneself as a craftsman or craftswoman (let’s just say craftsperson from here onward) will likely be a trend of early 2012. In this pre-emptive strike, I’d like to expound on this movement as I feel it pertains to front-end development, ..

Six Tips for Using Psychology in Online Marketing – Today we are going to cover some very important tips for using age-old psychological triggers in  marketing. You will boost your conversion rates, lower buying resistance, and increase the value of every visitor that comes to your website.

Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows - Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. We’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows ..

5 Practices for Securing User Confidence - As UX designers, we are customer advocates. We design systems, products, and tools that are as beautiful as they are usable. We bend technology into new forms to compensate for gaps in human abilities.

Jumping the Hurdles of Brainstorming - Usually, brainstorming sessions happen within a group so that individuals can feed off each others ideas. However, for the majority of us, brainstorming and creative innovation is a solitary task.

Can Sociology Improve Your Designs? - Whether graphic designer, web designer, user interface designer, or any other profession that ends in the word designer, your job is to make art that others will enjoy. This logic behind this creative industry goes hand in hand with the principles ..

 

 

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