Help Developer - Graphic and Web Design Blog with Collections, Freebies, Tutorials and Forums http://help-developer.com Help Developer - Graphic and Web Design Blog with Collections, Freebies, Tutorials and Forums Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:00:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en HD Todaily - 27/08/08 Hi, I'd like to start off with some news from Envato, Collis has been in touch and I now have the official launch date of ThemeForest and it is next Tuesday 2nd of September, it has been in private beta for the past three weeks but it has been anything but quiet. Me and the many other designers have been hard at it producing some very nice templates ready for launch and the Envato team have been working hard to get any problems ironed out. So it is nice to finally see it ready to go live. A couple of hours ago Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks launched Status, which is a sort of like a private twitter for groups and looks to be something that can come in very handy especially if you are working on projects with other people and need to just keep up to date with each other. If you have ever wondered whether it is better to go for a freelancer/small web design company or a larger web design studio then there is a bit of a debate going on at the moment which you may want to read. Yesterday, Calvin Cox published a post giving 7 Reasons Why It's Better to Hire a Freelance Designer or Small Design Firm Than a Large Design Company, today somebody posted about the opposite notion that It’s Better to Hire a Large Design Company Than a Freelance Designer or Small Design Firm in response to the previous post, and now there seems to be quite a hot debate going on about the topic. Apparently, Google is a badly designed site according to this post: Top 10 websites that suck but shouldn’t, although I think I am going to have to disagree with them on this one. I also came across a blog for the first time today and it seems quite popular so that's strange, it's called Function and they published a nice post with 33 New Design Blogs with Great Content & Resources, which have 33 new design blogs of which quite a few of them are new to me, I think I need to update my Google Reader a bit. Finally, I think we'd struggle to find a web designer who likes IE 6, however today bought us to the question, why are we still having to design for it as it reaches its 7th birthday.]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/hd-todaily-270808/ HD Todaily - 26/08/08 Welcome to todays edition of HD Todaily. There have been a number of articles, posts and even videos today that may interest you. Have you ever been screwed over by a client who asks you and others to do the same project and they will pick the best, then you're out of pocket, well over at arbent.net there was a post all about this problem entitled, I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For A Design Done Today…(maybe). Also this article was a nice quick and informative read, Top 7 Reasons Why It's Better to Hire a Freelance Designer or Small Design Firm Than a Large Design Company. There has been a few good posts that can be used for some great inspiration, Smashing Magazine published a list of 30 of the best High Quality Wordpress Themes, and CSSLeak put together 31 Websites Using Wood Elements, and if you are in the mood for a photoshop tutorial, check out PSDTuts countdown of 40 Dark and Futuristic Photoshop Effects. And finally if you are in the mood for a laugh then check out these rather spooky but hilarious videos of what Google will be like in the future over at Hongkiat, and remember the very funny Mac Vs PC ads well it looks like the Wii and Playstation are up to it, video below: That's it for today, as always please leave your comments or any posts, resources etc. you've found in the comments section below and I'll see you tomorrow.]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/hd-todaily-260808/ HD Todaily - 25/08/08 Hello and welcome back to Help Developer. I've spent most of the day trying to set up jQueryIsland, (it's getting there gradually) and redesigning and relaunching WordpressIsland (please check it out and let me know what you think). Over the weekend and today I found quite a nice number of items which may interest you today. And apologies for not posting over the weekend, I had a contract which I needed to do, freelancers don't have weekends off :( I did take Sunday afternoon off though to watch the closing ceremony and highlights of the Olympics, it was great this year congrats to all countries competing especially Great Britain (my country) we got 21 gold medals. And a big congratulations to Michael Phelps of the USA, 8 golds and 7 world records. My country is hosting the next Olympics in 2012 in our famous city of London and we've got a lot of work to do to compete with China's stunning performances. OK back to the design world, today on FreelanceFolder, Mason Hipp started an open thread asking freelancers to declare their Least Favorite Part of Freelancing?. And Tutorial9 published a nice tutorial on creating a great Moon Shine Text Effect in Photoshop If you are an avid user of twitter like I am becoming, then check out this post listing a good selection of twitter tools, and if you want to create something like to the left of this text then visit TwitStamp, the site allows you to create an image that automatically updates with your latest twitterings, you can add it to your site, blog or even your signature in a forum as it is simply an image. Woork have published a few great posts over the last week including; part one and two of a series introducing MooTools through teaching you basic tips and a collection of 10 Awesome typewriter fonts for web designers SpeckyBoy has put together a collection of 13 Essential Wordpress related Firefox Extensions to make blogging easy and finally, Noupe have redesigned their site. That's it for today, as I said at the top if you get chance please check out WordpressIsland and let me know what you think. Thanks and I'll see you all tomorrow :)]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/hd-todaily-250808/ HD Todaily - 22/08/08 Today I spent most of the day coding up a design for a client of mine, it was by far the nicest design I have ever coded for a client so that was great. I have also been redesigning my new site which will be launched soon jQueryIsland, I was going to use a similar design to Help Developer as you can see if you go there now but have changed my mind and am working on a much nicer simpler looking design. There have been a few things posted on the various blogs I have been following today of interest to me and maybe to you too. Fuel Your Creativity's writer Adelle Charles posted on her twitter about a nice collection of sketch style icons, a common occurrence in web design at the moment are designs based around handwriting and stationary so these icons could come in very handy, so thanks Adelle for finding them and thanks to ResourcePile for posting them. Yesterday we saw the best 12 Print Magazines for Web and Graphic Designers and today NETTuts posted the best web developement books as voted for by the users of the site. If you are a freelancer like me then you should really be checking in every now and then with Freelance Folder (and Freelance Switch) and today they posted a nice article entitled: "Who’s Really In Control Of Your Freelance Business?" and if you have time for a tutorial check out ProgTuts tutorial on creating a Pure CSS Accordion Menu. Finally, if you are wondering what that rather nice picture of an iMac is in the post for, then you need to check out the top 96 Kick Ass Home Office Setups from NerdBusiness if you get a spare 5 minutes, or like me last night a spare half hour :) That's it for today, join me on Monday for my next HD Todaily or during the weekend for my weekend countdown of the best sites, articles and resources from the world of design. Also its coming to the end of the month and my very popular 10 top photoshop tutorials post will be appearing next week so get your favourites in by commenting on this post, adding them to the community links, mentioning them in the forum or any other way you can think of.]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/hd-todaily-220808/ HD Todaily - 21/08/08 In the spirit of getting back into blogging I am going to start publishing a post every weekday detailing great posts, resources and general design related stuff that I come across in the day. I am going to call it HD (Help Developer) Todaily, if you have suggestions for a better name then please let me know. My favourite number is 21, there's something you didn't know about me, and the 21st of August has been a pretty good day, I've come across some great reads and have been working on some nice templates for the release of ThemeForest. Today there have been a number of interviews in the blogosphere, over at Freelance Folder, John Phillips published an Interview With Adelle Charles From Fuel Your Creativity and Fuel Your Creativity did an interview with WooThemes, who have become very popular lately as one of the leading Premium Wordpress Theme Creators and rightely so, their latest one, Papercut is amazing.

And speaking of Wordpress I stumbled across a great free theme today which CrazyLeaf Design Blog and Smashing Magazine have mentioned called Notepad Chaos and they also produced a nice list of the 10 Must-Have Plugins If You’re a Wordpress Blogger.

NETTuts seemed to have ran out of Evening Tips last night so they published a great video from the editors personal blog about using a script to force Internet Explorer to show transparent PNG files properly, check it out here. ThemeForest has been delayed, Collis said "My guess is that this will put us up for a launch mid next week, but it might be the week after", I'll let you know if there is any updates on that. Some nice reads I came across today include; DevloperFox's 13 hand-picked Vertical and horizontal CSS Menus, aComment's 9 Top CSS Essential Skills That Every Web designer Should Learn, and check out their list of developer icon sets, everybody loves a good icon countdown :) And if you are into reading design and programming magazines then check out Vandelay's Blog for the 12 Print Magazines for Web and Graphic Designers If you've come across any other great posts today then leave them in the comments or even in the Community Links section of the sidebar, and hopefully I'll see you back here tomorrow. ]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/hd-todaily-210808/ Web Design Guide hosting review site. Yes, we are geeks. :) Besides writing reviews about web hosting companies and articles (which is boring to read, let's admit), we are working on a Web Designer Guide.]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/web-design-guide/ 10 Fantastic GIMP Specific Tutorials How many times have you seen a great looking Photoshop tutorial and wished that the it existed for the GIMP? Luckily, fellow gimpers have made plenty of helpful and great looking tutorials for us to follow. Below, we will take a look at 10 Fantastic GIMP Specific Tutorials...]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/10-fantastic-gimp-specific-tutorials/ jQuery Sliding Sidebar Users of Help Developer may have noticed that the design of the site changed a couple of days ago, I have had some excellent feedback and am really pleased with how it has worked out. I am aware that some of you would like to know how I created some of the effects and new features that you see on the site so I am going to produce a few tutorials showing you how to create these effects yourself with jQuery over the coming weeks. Today I am going to show you how to create a sliding sidebar, if you want an example of what I mean then just click the button in the top right of the sidebar that says "Hide Sidebar" and you'll notice a nice sliding action to the right and the content area expanding the full width of the page, clicking "Show Sidebar" slides everything back. This was created using the jQuery Javascript library which I must say is excellent. Right so lets get started. I am going to use the popular template from the tutorial that was a huge success here on HD here to produce this.]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/jquery-sliding-sidebar/ Sneak Peak at ThemeForest Envato, formely known as Eden have been busy at work over the past couple of weeks getting their new marketplace (ThemeForest) developed and tested. I became one of the lucky testers of the new site and with Collis' permission I can give you a sneak peak. The new site is similar in what it does to Envato's other marketplaces (FlashDen and AudioJungle), it enables designers to sell their templates in one place that is used by thousands of potential buyers.]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/sneak-peak-at-themeforest/ New Design on Help Developer This morning I got up and decided that I would redesign Help Developer in one day, and I have done just that, from about 12PM till now (3:40 in the morning), I have designed and coded the brand new template that you see before you. I wanted to make the site more warm and homely hence the use of the colour brown. The new design has a number of new features which I will highlight below: ]]> http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/08/new-design-on-help-developer/