Design your way

New Package Design Inspiration – 32 Examples

Bogdan Sandu — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:10:05 +0000

Like the other categories I have in here, for the package design one I like to feature new items, newly created and released so you can be aware of new trends or simply new package design inspiration that could help and guide you through your design process.

You have in this article 32 examples of package design, some strange and innovative, while some not so weird looking but well designed.

Noo-Del

Grassini Family Vineyards

Mleko i Miod

Gazelli Cosmetics

5 Olive Oil

Spicebox

Jack Daniel’s Winter Jack

Padre Divino

Vi Novell

Penhaligon’s Juniper Sling

Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slims

Few Spirits

Coromandel Mussel Kitchen

SuperTrash

Bocanegra

Lithuanian Vodka Gold

Stache Chocolate

Sarmentu

Hilliard’s Beer

Ingredients Matter

Glint

Milk Chocolate Bubbles Champagne

Axfood

Alcoholic cider Side Effect

Sapori Trattoria Italiana

Etesian Gold Premium Olive Oil

LongLight

Cobs Popcorn

Suchard Prelude

La Fabbrica

Copperpot Originals

Wildly Delicious Home Brand

New Package Design Inspiration – 32 Examples

You will definitely like these articles

The Latest Website Designs For Inspiration

Bogdan Sandu — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:50:53 +0000

I watch the new trends and lately there are a lot of out of the ordinary sites which are launched taking benefit of the new web designing technologies and that is something that I encourage. I remember with horror the days when websites were made using the same few rigid frameworks and every site looked like the next one. I invite you to check out 35 of the latest website designs that I’ve collected to inspire you.

chienjaunestudio.com

kikk.be

ala.ch

annasafroncik.it

neotokio.it

appgear.com

festival.co.nz

planilandia.com

lift-mag.com

sirjohnaday.com

captaindash.com

jux.com

vml.com

adventureworld.ourentry.com.au

graydenpoper.com

ascensionlatorre.com

mccormackmorrison.com

7daysinhavana.com

dataveyes.com

kyan.com

mapltd.com

duscatolin.com.br

reserved.com

zetabe.com

malaga-creation.com

theworkcycle.com

paseodegracia.com

colazionedamichy.it

strajnic.net

zwartwitmedia.com

appex.no

winicio.com

isee.com.br

grabandgo.pt

trouwamsterdam.nl

The Latest Website Designs For Inspiration

You will definitely like these articles

Superb Examples Of Photos Taken By Professionals

Bogdan Sandu — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:50:26 +0000

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. By that, although it sounds a little bit pretentious, I wanted to let you know that not everybody can do it. Everyone can take a picture but that doesn’t make him a photographer. In this article there are 33 superb examples of photos taken by professionals in this industry.

For promotional rack card printing services, visit Next Day Flyers for fast turnaround and cheap prices.

On the wings of the storm

Karkonosze Mountains

Butterfly

Water Dragon (not photoshopped)

The Centre of Attention

Under the Lights

Goodbye My Lover

Almost winter

Sand Arithmetic

The beauty of Astari

Wings

The Moment of Deliverance

Good Morning Bagan

Acrobat

Hills

Tiu Kelep

Autumn Fairytale

Light’s Echo

Find a way

Horse Rider Battlecry

Love – entwined

Kamille

Bulb

Mist over Deadvlei

Portrait of Nazha

Dubai Marina

Autumn forest

Cucko wasp

Oseberg C

Castildetierra

Another moment from Pacu Jawi

The Return

Winter time

Superb Examples Of Photos Taken By Professionals

You will definitely like these articles

Interesting PS Tuts Released During The Winter

Bogdan Sandu — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:19:40 +0000

I managed to gather a sweet collection of 40 Photoshop tutorials, although there aren’t so many Photoshop tutorials that have been released in this winter to choose from. I was expecting a little over a two hundreds since the last article I made but that was a little bit too far from the actual number. In any case, I featured 40 interesting PS tuts that I’m sure you’ll find useful.

How to Illustrate a Realistic Guitar Using Photoshop

In this tutorial we’re going to explore how easy it is to illustrate a guitar in Photoshop using tiny shapes, gradients and subtle shadows. Using these techniques and a good reference photo you can create an amazing amount of detail and realism.

Create a Festive Cocktail Using Photoshop’s 3D Capabilities

For many of our readers, this time of year is filled with family, friends, and celebration. In this tutorial, we will explain how to create a festive cocktail using Photoshop’s 3D capabilities just in time for your New Year’s celebrations.

Ice Cube with cherry inside

Using Custom Photoshop Brushes to Create an Immersive Lighting Effect

In this this tutorial I’m going to walk you through a few steps on how to use custom Photoshop brushes along with a few vector elements to create this immersive lighting effect composition. You’ll be surprised at how easy the steps are to create this piece.

How to Create a Photo Manipulation of a Wolf in Stormy Weather

Learn how to use Photoshop to create this stormy photo manipulation! This tutorial will show you how to merge images together, adjust lighting and contrast, and create effects such as a lightning bolt and rain.

Create a Serene Fantasy Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to compose magical scene from different stock images, how to create strong atmosphere and add interesting lights and shadows. You’ll also learn many different ways of color adjustments to get the exact images you’ve always wished.

How to Create A Detailed Cassette Tape in Photoshop

Anyone remember audio cassettes? Back in the day, when I was a kid, we were listening to music from audio tapes and vinyl records. In this step-by-step tutorial we will reinvent the tape … again! I will walk you through the process of creating a detailed audio cassette, from scratch, in Photoshop using shapes, layer styles and filters

Glossy Snow Globe Text Effect

Design a Detailed Audio Receiver Icon in Photoshop

In this tutorial we will show you how to create a detailed audio receiver icon using Photoshop’s vector editing capabilities.

Create a Minimalist Blog Layout in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will see how to create a minimal and clean blog layout using Photoshop. You will also learn some useful methods and practices for creating web layouts in Photoshop.

Create a Mobile Calendar App in Photoshop

Create an Exploding Light Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial I wanted to take a look at a couple of techniques for an exploding text effect. I knew going into this tutorial that I wanted a thick heavy font with portions that are corroding and breaking apart with various explosions, and I want some dramatic lighting to punch it up a bit.

Christmas Night. Magic scene with flying Santa

Create Delicious Cookie Text Using Photoshop

This tutorial will explain how to create delicious frosted cookies text effect. You’ll learn some useful tips for using layer styles, filters, and brushes while creating the various elements of the “cookies”.

Create an Unique Surreal Photo Manipulation with Nebula Effect in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create an Unique, Dark Surreal Photo Manipulation with Nebula Effect in Photoshop.

How to Create a Vintage Circus Poster with the Photoshop Puppet Warp Tool

I’ve marveled at the Puppet Warp Tool in Photoshop for quite some time, but I’ve never actually used it. Not that I didn’t understand how, it was just that I never had the need. So I decided to sit down and create a concept that would utilize this tool in a cool way, that would be fun and interesting. The result is this tutorial on creating a vintage style circus poster design.

Complete Guide to Creating a Blog Website Layout

Create a great website design in Photoshop! This tutorial will show you tips and tricks for creating your own blog layout. In addition to basic website template designing, you’ll learn some basics about perspective drawing, design theory, and website slicing.

Create a Stitched Web Ribbon in Photoshop

You don’t have to search the web for very long to find a web ribbon in the corner of an image. In this quick tip tutorial we will show you how to create your own.

Create an Emotional Post War Scene

In this photoshop tutorial, we will learn how to create an emotional post war scene photo manipulation. We will combine some picture to be manipulated into something unique and create scene with the feel of post apocalyptic war.

Create a Fabric Textured Web Layout Using Photoshop

In this web design tutorial we will create a portfolio web layout using fabric textures. You will be taken through the process of designing the logo using Adobe Illustrator, creating spotlights for the “services” area and how to apply textures to the layout in a subtle way that will increase the quality of the final result.

Create a Rocky Text Effect with Space Background in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create a Rocky Text Effect with Space Background in Photoshop.

How to Create a Steampunk Type Treatment in Photoshop

I’m not going to walk you through step by step on this one because there are so many repeating steps and processes. Instead I’m going to discuss each technique used to create the different elements that make up the letters. With that information you should be able to design and create your own letters using mine as a reference point.

How to Draw a Colorful Fantasy Dragon Battle Scene in Photoshop

Learn how to take a drawing of a dragon and turn it into an amazing painting. This tutorial will show you how to use Photoshop to create shapes from a hand-drawn sketch, apply shading, then finish it by applying color and texture. After creating the dragon, you will learn learn how to create the starry background scene and create a fiery dragon breath.

Create a Futuristic Bicycle Icon in Photoshop

It’s fun and challenging to create items from scratch in Photoshop. In this tutorial we will create a futuristic bicycle icon from scratch using some basic Photoshop tools.

Making of The Futuristic City

I have not made this painting from scratch. I have a passion for photography and I take a lot of references from photographs for matte paintings with realistic textures that can be incorporated into live action footage’s. I thought of developing this particular painting after watching the following photograph. It has a predominant dual color scheme which is readily very appealing and you can see a lot Hollywood movies and game visuals using that kind of a color pallet. Hence I selected this image to start with a subtle curve adjustments.

Photo Manipulate a Surreal Apple Habitat Scene

Design an Abstract Style Sword Warrior with Fiery Effect in Photoshop

How to Create a Fantasy Haven for Travelers in Photoshop

Learn how to create a secret haven in the sky! This Photoshop tutorial will show you how to create this surreal scene where boats pick up travelers and fly them to a secret mountain passage in the sky. This tutorial will show you how to blend images seamlessly and work with lighting and shadows.

Create a Mobile Task Manager App in Photoshop

Create a Dramatic Film Poster in 5 Minutes Using Photoshop

Designing a film poster is pure fun. There’s no question about it. It’s one of those projects that you look forward to as a designer. Designing a film poster can also be incredibly fast and easy… Given the right reference photos and subject matter, a stunning poster can be created in minutes. In this tutorial I will walk you through some easy steps to do just that.

Create an abstract liquid effect

In this walkthrough, I’ll show you how to use a photograph, some 2D elements and a 3D render to create an abstract liquid effect with a real sense of motion. I got into abstract digital art through experimentation. My background is in art and graffiti, and I’m giving a nod to those pre-digital days in this image by using paper and pen mixed with photographs.

Simple Facial Manipulation with Layer Mask and Custom Brushes in Photoshop

Photo Manipulate a Surreal Sky Station Scene

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a surreal photo manipulation called “The Sky Station”. We’ll go through different techniques of manipulating, retouching, masking, using brush, coloring and much more.

Making Of Ibaloy Warrior

This tutorial will explain how I was able to make this piece. There’s nothing special about the process of making it. It was just a product of right and correct composition, color and lighting, with the exception of additional elements such as the usage of custom brush textures.

How to Create a Colorful Text Design in Photoshop

This tutorial shows creating a beautiful and vivid, typography based artwork. You will learn to combine different elements and applications effectively to complete a design task.

Making of The Confrontation

Create Convincing Text-Shaped Buildings in Photoshop

Creating convincing buildings that appear like text in a cityscape can be a challenging task. In today’s tutorial we will learn how to create building-shaped typography in Photoshop using photos that you have taken yourself.

Create a Leatherback Book Icon in Photoshop

Learn how to create this leatherback book design in Photoshop. This tutorial will show you how to draw a book and apply textures and layer styles.

Realistic Rainy Window Effect in Photoshop

Create a Fantasy Miniature World in Photoshop

Interesting PS Tuts Released During The Winter

You will definitely like these articles

Most Beautiful Wedding Photography Examples

Bogdan Sandu — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:35:38 +0000

High-end wedding photographers are true road warriors, traveling from Sydney to Berlin, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and many other points east and west to capture bridal bliss. But although this may seem as the perfect job, the truth is that photographing weddings is quite challenging and there are no second chances.

Perfect timing, light and composition and stunning landscapes; find out what makes the ultimate wedding photographs. Think of this as your ticket to wedding magic.

Are there any examples of wedding photography that you think deserve a mention? Sound off in the comments.

Author bio

Natasha is the author of the wedding blog Sour Cherry. She loves to write about wedding photography and traditional weddings from all over the world.

Most Beautiful Wedding Photography Examples

You will definitely like these articles

Best Logos In The First Month Of The Year

Bogdan Sandu — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:23:59 +0000

A lot of logos have been submitted to logo sites in this month from which I have made a selection that I am not going to keep for my inspiration only, but instead I am going to share it with you. I give you 30 logo designs for inspiration in January. Enjoy!

You will definitely like these articles

Awesomely Designed Wallpapers For Your Desktop

Bogdan Sandu — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:18:32 +0000

There are various artworks that can be set to wallpaper sizes to fit your desktop, digital drawings, photo manipulations, graphic design illustrations and 3d creations. I avoided to put photography examples, as I usually do, because I wanted to add to this article only digital creations, things that have been created from scratch. I’m sure you’ll like them and download not only one of these wallpapers, but several.

Get cheap sticker printing prices from the offset printing company, Next Day Flyers.

Fantasy landscape

Black DNA

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Left hemisphere, right hemisphere

Fiery heart

World of Warcraft: Lich King

Skyrim

Resident evil

Heroes of might and magic

Mass Effect 3

Demon

Hexagons

Diablo 3

Artwork

Alone in the dark

Tomb Raider

The elder scrolls V: Skyrim

Snow

Unreal world

Chevrolet

Mass Effect 2

Mountain castle

Heavy machinery

Call of duty: Modern Warfare 3

Futuristic Paris

Abstract

Battlefield 3

Futuristic artwork

Futuristic city

Demon vs human

John Carter

Sci-fi Spaceships

Star Wars: The old republic

Halo 4

Abraham Lincoln

Awesomely Designed Wallpapers For Your Desktop

You will definitely like these articles

New Tools And Resources For Web Designers

Bogdan Sandu — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:03:06 +0000

Web design and development represent a domain that is moving forward very fast and new tools appear each day. I made a list from all these tools and resources that have been launched since our previous article and selected the best of them, the most useful ones, to present to you. It is a list of 34 resources that a web designer or web developer would find really interesting.

HTML5 ADMIN

A fluid html5 ready template for administration sections (BackEnds) shared for your personal use.

It basically is a mix of Plugins and html structures for developers who want to spend less time on graphics and more on code, without having a UX that sucks.

Sisyphus.js

Imagine you’re filling a complex form on site, or typing effervescent and extensive comment. And when you’re almost done with that browser is crashed, or you closed tab mistakenly, or electricity is turned off, or something else break your efforts. Disgusting, huh?

With Sisyphus on site you just reopen page in your modern (with HTML5 support) browser and see all your changes at that forms. It’s lightweight (3.5 KB) jQuery plugin uses Local Storage to prevent your work being lost.

Syntaclet

Syntaclet is a bookmarklet, a bookmark which acts like a little computer program rather than taking you to a website. To use Syntaclet simply drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar (or right click and choose “Add to favorites…”). Now anytime you are on a website you can simply click ‘{} Syntaclet’ in your bookmarks bar and it will go to work making all the code on the website easier to read. It will also bring up the Syntaclet toolbar giving you some options.

Cssizer

Cssizer is a simple tool to let you edit the design of an html page in real time (As you type). You can then use the url you are given to share your design with others. A great way to experiment with css, or let a designer tinker with your css rules. An online css sandbox so to speak.

QUnit

QUnit is a powerful, easy-to-use, JavaScript test suite. It’s used by the jQuery project to test its code and plugins but is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code (and even capable of testing JavaScript code on the server-side).

QUnit is especially useful for regression testing: Whenever a bug is reported, write a test that asserts the existence of that particular bug. Then fix it and commit both. Every time you work on the code again, run the tests. If the bug comes up again – a regression – you’ll spot it immediately and know how to fix it, because you know what code you just changed.

KeyboardJS

KeyboardJS is a library for binding to keys or key combos. It can be used as both a standalone library or an AMD module

Snippely

Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize “snippets” in one convenient location. A snippet is a collection of one or more pieces of code and notes. Snippets are stored in groups for organization and quick retrieval.

A snippet is composed of a title, description, and one or more ‘snips’. You can add any number of note and code snips in a variety of different languages (more to be added). When not being edited, the snip will be syntax highlighted according to the language selected. Snips are also sortable so you can organize your snippet however you want. Since everything is saved to a local database as you work, there’s no need to worry about pressing the save button or submitting a form.

The Goldilocks Approach

The Goldilocks Approach uses a combination of Ems, Max-Width, Media Queries and Pattern Translations to consider just three states that allow your designs to be resolution independent.

csg.js: Constructive Solid Geometry

Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) is a modeling technique that uses Boolean operations like union and intersection to combine 3D solids. This library implements CSG operations on meshes elegantly and concisely using BSP trees, and is meant to serve as an easily understandable implementation of the algorithm. All edge cases involving overlapping coplanar polygons in both solids are correctly handled.

Reverie: Versatile HTML5 Responsive WordPress Framework

Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.

It is extremely easy to create your blog, CMS, brochure and any other kind of sites with Reverie. You can see some samples on ZURB and how they make these prototypes. Did I just mentioned Reverie works well with bbPress 2.0, even without styling?

Sharrre: Social Sharing jQuery Plugin

Sharrre is a jQuery plugin that allows you to create nice widgets sharing for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus (with PHP script) and more.

All sharing buttons are different, with Sharrre you can create uniform buttons to integrate with your designs. With Sharrre, the API buttons are called on demand and once, regardless of how many buttons you have.

Stitches: HTML5 sprite sheet generator

Craftyslide

Craftyslide is a tiny (just 2kb) slideshow built on jQuery. Craftyslide aims to be different, by providing a simple, no-frills method of displaying images; packaged into a small, clean and efficient plugin.

iUI: web framework for smartphones & high-end devices

iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing advanced mobile webapps. Made with only iPhone in mind in the first place (reason of i UI), we now supports most smartphones & tablets.

Flatiron: an unobtrusive framework initiative for node.js

No one agrees on frameworks. It’s difficult to get consensus on how much or how little a framework should do. Flatiron’s approach is to package simple to use yet full featured components and let developers subtract or add what they want.

Flatiron promotes code organization and sustainability by clearly separating development concerns. Each component works elegantly with or without its counterparts. Many of the components work the same in the browser as they do on the server. This is the motivation behind flatiron. At it’s core flatiron is two things:

Popcorn.js: an event system for HTML5 media developers

Popcorn.js is an event system for HTML5 media developers. Think jQuery for video. You can leave the heavy lifting to Popcorn, and concentrate on what you do best: writing awesome code.

WebPutty: simple CSS editing and hosting service

WebPutty gives you a syntax-highlighting CSS editor you can use from anywhere, the power of SCSS and Compass, a side-by-side preview pane, and instant publishing with minification, compression, and automatic cache control.

Get started with just a pair of tags in your website’s template and WebPutty will host and serve your published CSS minified and gzipped for super speed.

jQuery contextMenu

The contextMenu Plugin was designed for web applications in need of menus on a possibly large amount of objects. Unlike implementations as a beautiful site’s or trendskitchens’ this contextMenu treats the menu as the primary object. That means, that a single menu is defined that can be used by multiple objects. Unlike the mentioned plugins, contextMenu doesn’t need to bind itself to triggering objects. This allows injecting and removing triggers without having to re-initialize or update contextMenu.

TileMill: application for making maps

TileMill is an application for making beautiful maps. Whether you’re a journalist, web designer, researcher, or seasoned cartographer, TileMill is the design studio you need to create compelling, interactive maps.

TileMill is built on a suite of modern open source libraries including Mapnik, node.js, backbone.js, express and CodeMirror. Every map you make in TileMill is mobile ready. By leveraging the portable, fast MBTiles format, each TileMill map looks and works great on the web and offline.

jQuery Org Chart: data visualising in a tree-like structure

jQuery OrgChart is a plugin that allows you to render structures with nested elements in a easy-to-read tree structure. To build the tree all you need is to make a single line call to the plugin and supply the HTML element Id for a nested unordered list element that is representative of the data you’d like to display.

Hovercard

A free light weight jQuery plugin that enables you to display related information with the hovered label, link, or any html element of your choice.

Skeleton: A Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone. Skeleton is built on three core principles.

Skeleton has a familiar, lightweight 960 grid as its base, but elegantly scales down to downsized browser windows, tablets, mobile phones (in landscape and portrait).

money.js: JavaScript currency conversion library

money.js is a JavaScript currency conversion library, done right – with no dependencies, in just over 1 kb.

Designed to work seamlessly with data from the Open Source Exchange Rates API project – but can be set up to use any data source and base currency in just a few lines. And it works as a NodeJS/CJS and RequireJS/AMD module, too.

Slider.js: Slideshow with jQuery, CSS Transitions and Canvas

Slider.js is an easy-to-use customizable Javascript library to create image slideshows.

Slider.js relies on latest web technologies: the power of CSS Transitions to perform awesome and efficient effects and the HTML5 Canvas to perform some non trivial transitions.

jQuery.suggest: inline autosuggest jQuery plugin

jQuery.suggest, a simple inline autosuggest jQuery plugin. It takes an array of terms as haystack and suggests the user the first item that matches what has been typed to this point. The suggestion is updated with every keystroke. Tab or Enter will accept the suggestion and update the input field accordingly.

Lungo.js: The first Mobile Framework that uses the actual features of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript

Features:
- Design and make applications for iOS, Android, Blackberry and WebOs.
- Designed to take advantage of the features of current mobile devices.
- Capture events like Swipe, Tap, Double-Tap…
- Distribute your app in “Mobile Stores” or in websites.
- No need images, everything is vector.
- Implement HTML5 features like WebSQL, Geolocation, History, Device Orientation and more…
- No webserver required.
- Implement native looking with (on iPad & iPhone).
- Fully customizable.
- You can use Lungo Sugars to sweeten your apps.
- Build apps, games, catalogues and everything else you can imagine.

Gridlover

Gridlover is the tool to establish a type system with modular scale and vertical rhythm to build upon.

Gridlover keeps sizing type tidy and logical. Font sizes are calculated by stepping up the font size by the scale factor. For a detailed explanation, see More Meaningful Typography at A List Apart. Elements in Gridlover are always kept aligned to a baseline grid

Minimit: jQuery plugin for galleries, slideshows, carousels, slides

Minimit Gallery is a highly customizable jQuery plugin that does galleries, slideshows, carousels, slides… practically everything that has multiple states.

Using Minimit Gallery you have more time to focus on the ideation and the dynamics of your interface, all the logic functionality instead is managed by the plugin. It’s designed for advanced Javascript/Jquery programmers because you need to code all the animations and the css of the gallery.

Amazium Framework

So what is Amazium I hear you ask, well you may have been hearing the term “Responsive Web Design” being thrown around the past few months, which simple means a website that can adjust to your screen size without having to make a separate website!

This came about from the simple fact that a lot of people have been making demos of this responsive web design but none seem to be using 960 grid system with 12 columns, and because of this the author was forced to make his own.

MQFramework: A responsive CSS framework

A responsive CSS framework, MQFramework utilises the @ media property to allow you to design your sites for browsers of all sizes. Based on a 12 column grid, MQFramework degrades perfectly down to mobile screen sizes.

MQFramework is designed for five different screen resolutions. But with that comes the challenge of displaying the information you require.

validate.js: Lightweight JavaScript form validation library

Lightweight JavaScript form validation library inspired by CodeIgniter. No dependencies, just over 1kb gzipped, and customizable!

Formee: Fresh baked forms for your websites

Formee is nothing but a framework to help you develop and customize web based forms. Did you use to spend a lot of time aligning fields and calculating margins and paddings in a quest for a perfect form? No more!

Don’t worry about having your form being rendered differently in the major browsers. It fits into your project, it’s flexible enough to adapt to the width you have available for the form. You can easily change between a stylish form or a minimalist one. It comes with the basic needed for you to put your touch in it.

SimpLESS: Simplifying website programming

Writing LESS is cool and lightning fast if you compare it to good old CSS and besides, it trains your thinking in solving functional problems. So far so good, but in the end the web needs a CSS file to show your website as it is. Either you embed a javascript file to live-transform your LESS-Code into CSS in your browser or you find out how to precompile your files into standard CSS.

New Tools And Resources For Web Designers

You will definitely like these articles

35 Interesting And Useful WP Plugins Released In The Last Five Months

Bogdan Sandu — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:49:48 +0000

I’ve been wanting to publish an article like this since November but I waited a little bit for developers to launch other new interesting and useful WordPress plugins besides the ones that I gathered till then. There are a few types of plugins that you often see, for examples the ones related to social networks, but most of the ones that you’ll find here have a very particular utility and plugins like them are not seen very often.

WooCommerce

Transform your WordPress website into a thorough-bred online store. Delivering enterprise-level quality & features whilst backed by a name you can trust. Say hello to WooCommerce.

Ultimate TinyMCE

Are you a visual person? Do the four letters “HTML” send you running for the hills; but you still want to create beautiful blogs like the pros? Then this is the plugin for you!

Ultimate TinyMCE will expand the default array of buttons in the visual tinymce editor, giving you the power to visually create your pages and posts. No need for mucking about in HTML and CSS.

Facebook Comments by Fat Panda

This plugin is a drop-in solution for replacing the default WordPress commenting with the Facebook Comments widget. It is far-and-away the easiest to use plugin available – just try it and see! Check it out:

Zero configuration to get it working – just install and activate
Using SharePress or Facebook Comments for WP? Import settings automagically!
Supports XID for maximum compatibility with legacy Facebook widgets
All of your old comments are retained!
Comments are printed in hidden blocks to maximize SEO

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time. Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site.

Advanced Random Post Thumbnails Widget

Advanced Random Post Thumbnails Widget displays thumbnails grabbed randomly from posts. Each thumbnail is hyperlinked to the post it is taken from or optionally hyperlinked to its post’s category. The widget is easy to configure. Visit Appearance > Widgets and drag the Advanced Random Post Thumb widget to a widget area.

Widget options include:

Images are automatically grabbed from random posts.
Can be set to grab a post’s first attached image or first displayed image.
A custom post field can be used to set the image to grab.
Each thumbnail hyperlinks to the post it represents.
Each thumbnail can be made to link to its post’s category.
Thumbnail sizes can be easily specified.
Margins between images can be set.
Image positioning/centering is a cinch using left and right buffer columns.
Easily set a thumbnail to display for posts that lack images.
Will display up to 20 random images.
Can be configured to select images from all categories, specific categories or just one specific category.
When a single category is used, optionally displays the category of the posts the thumbs are selected from. Title displays above the thumb gallery.
Title text typography is configured from a drop down box.
Title text can be set to link to the category it represents.

Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

A simple and intuitive, yet elegant and fully documented Google map plugin that installs as a widget and a short code. No limited plugin editions or limited functionality! This is the full version of this free and premium plugin, which comes packed with useful features:

Intuitive and user friendly interface, which makes it very easy to configure Google map. No complex configuration options. Facebook style interactive interface for managing multiple map markers
Help tooltips enabled, which makes your configuration hassle free
Google-like directions: driving and walking direction, miles and KM, print functionality
Info window can display marker’s street view within itself.
Plugin is fully documented. If help tooltips are not enough, you can always refer to the full documentation about each of the settings
Short-code builder available, which integrated with post/page editor. In other words, you do not need manually to type the short-code in the editor (But you can if you want to).
The plugin auto generates unique ID for each map. In other words – unlimited maps! You do not need to specify and maintain unique map IDs explicitly when dealing with multiple maps on the same post/page.
The plugin offers extensive configuration options for Google map marker, controls, size, KML files, location by latitude/longitude, location by address, info windows, traffic/bike lanes and more!
Support for custom overlays: Panoramio photos on the map (http://www.panoramio.com/), bicycle lanes and traffic info.
User can get directions to the locations on the map (markers)
Widget enabled.
Cross browser compatible
Loads geographic markup from a KML, KMZ or GeoRSS file hosted remotely.

Backup Scheduler

With this plugin, you may plan the backup of your website.

You can choose:

which folders you will save;
whether your database should be saved;
whether the backup is stored on the local website or sent by email (support of multi part zip files)

WP Marketplace

WP Marketplace is all, what you’ll need to build your own marketplace. WP Marketplace is packed with all necessary features you must need to build a e-shop for your single product or a full featured complete market place like codecanyon.net or themeforest.net with very easy management. WordPress Marketplace plugin is compatible with any WordPress theme. You don’t need to change anywhere after your install. It’s just ready from all side for your use.

WordPress Markerplace Plugin Key Features:

Easy administration
Sale digital product securely
PayPal Integrated
License Based pricing
User-role based discount management
Product Demo option
Auto post new product to facebook
Auto post new product to twitter
Auto post new product to delicious
Integrated Feature Management and Pricing Table (coming soon)
Front-End Store Management (coming soon)

Simple Galleria for WordPress

Simple Galleria for WordPress is a jQuery image gallery based on WordPress native galleries. You just need to associate some photos to your posts and to use the [ gallery ] shortcode.

Background Manager

Background Manager is a powerful replacement for the default WordPress background manager.

It allows you to create multiple image sets, from which a random image is selected and displayed as the website background. The images can be uploaded from your local computer, selected from images available in your Media Library, or import them from other plugins and third-party sources.

EP Social Widget

Very small and easy to use widget to display social icons on your site. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google Plus and RSS feed

WP Easy Gallery

WP Easy Gallery is an easy to use WordPress gallery plugin that allows you to create and manage multiple image galleries through a simple admin interface.

Features include:

Upload unique thumbnail image and set custom dimensions
Include multiple galleries on a page/post
Set the ‘sort order’ of images in the galleries
WordPress ShortCodes for easy content integration
And much more…

Social Connect Widget

This plugin will help you to display links to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr and RSS (Feedburner) feeds with nice little icons.

These days it’s essentially a necessity to operate hub pages on the major social networks, both as a way to improve a sites SEO and to communicate with users and customers across a range of mediums. This plugin will help you to display pretty links to your WordPress Blog or Sites Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr and Feedburner (RSS) pages.

Wysija Newsletters

Sending newsletters from WordPress has just gotten a lot easier. Our editor let’s you drag and drop your articles, images, dividers and logo into your newsletter. Pick a theme and change its fonts and colors directly while you’re editing. Managing your lists and subscription forms is straightforward. Configuration is dummy proof.

Features:

Pick a theme. Modify its design
Simple one column design. Looks good everywhere, mobile phones included
Drag & drop your articles, free form text, images and horizontal lines
Get stats for each campaign: open, clicks, unreads
Put a subscription form as a sidebar widget or in your pages
Import your lists like a breeze. Manage them without pain
Segment your lists based on opened, clicked & bounced
Your site’s users have their own synced list
Quick and easy configuration
WordPress Multisite ready
We offer quick support
Free version is limited to 2000 subscribers

Pricing Table

WordPress Pricing Table plugin will help the admin to publish pricing table on WordPress page or post content. WordPress Pricing Table plugin has full featured but easy to use administration option to create pricing table.

Features:

Drag and drop package(column) re-ordering
Drag and drop feature(row) re-ordering
Unlimited package(column) support
Featured Column option highlight best price package
2 diff table template “green” and “gray”

WP Tabular – HTML Table Generator for WordPress

WordPress Tabular Plugin is a very easy to Table Builder Plugin for WordPress. WordPress Tabular Plugin has Complete GUI for creating and sorting rows and columns without writing any html. Also WordPress Tabular Plugin packed with many table templates, where you can select any template to show a table at front-end. As well as regular short-code, It will provide you js embed and you can use the js code even in another site to embed the table. Tables are exportable in xml, html and csv format.

POST2PDF Converter

This plugin converts your post/page to PDF for visitors and visitor can download it easily. You can add a download link above/below every posts/pages.

Media File Manager

You can make sub-directories in the upload directory, and move files into them. At the same time, this plugin modifies the URLs/path names in the database. Also an alternative file-selector is added in the editing post/page screen, so you can pick up media files from the subfolders easily.

Lazy Load

Lazy load images to improve page load times. Uses jQuery.sonar to only load an image when it’s visible in the viewport.

Easy Social

Ever get tired of having a different plugin for each social media site or having one with so many options you never get it configured? The Easy Social Media Plugin was designed with you in mind. After you activate the plugin just enter your information into a few fields, place the easy social widget where you want it to appear and your done.

After each post you will have buttons so your visitors can share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ & Stumbleupon while the widget gives you links back to all your social media sites.

404 Redirected

404 Redirected allows WordPress admins to have control over their dead links and redirects from inside the admin panel. 404 Redirected records all URLs that users have visited and allows the admin to easily create 301 and 302 redirects to valid pages on their site. Redirects can also be created based on the best possible match for the URL the visitor was most likely trying to reach.

This is a Related Post Links Plugin for the WordPress. It basically displays links to a given number of Posts that are related to the current single post using any of the Tags (or Categories) you have set. Just turn on the automatic post footer setting or drop the widget on your sidebar.

Simple Pagination

Simple Pagination allows to set up an advanced pagination for posts and comments. You have an easier navigation on your WordPress.

Simple Pagination has 6 stylesheets for the pagination : CSS 3, Flickr, Digg, Sabrus.us, Green and Grey

InboundWriter

With the InboundWriter plugin, writers and bloggers get real-time SEO intelligence streamed directly into their WordPress editor. See what words and phrases your target audience is searching for and sharing online, and how well those words rank on the search engines.

InboundWriter goes beyond traditional SEO by providing real-time scoring and automated guidance and recommendations on how to best structure your posts for maximum online search engine visibility or which terms are most valuable from an advertising perspective. Just follow the steps to create blog posts that deliver a significant increase in search engine traffic or your potential Google AdSense payout.

Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator

A plugin to make embedding videos, generating thumbnails, and encoding HTML5-compliant files a little bit easier.

The plugin adds several fields to any video uploaded to the WordPress Media Library. Just choose a few options and click Insert into Post to and you’ll get a shortcode in your post that will embed a flexible Flash & HTML5 video player with a preview image into your post.

Affiliate Link Cloaking

Affiliate link cloaking can hide affiliate links from visitors so that you don’t worry about visitors remove your affiliate id and visit product website directly. It also can be used as link shrink plugin. It can shrink link and make it to be short url/short link. When visitors click shrinked link, it will redirect to your original link.

Affiliate link cloaking also tracks the hits and unique visitors of each link. You can find which cloaked links perform well and which need to be modified or removed.

Custom Field Suite

Visually create custom fields that can be used on any edit page.

Now with Gravity Forms integration!
Field Types:

Text (api returns text)
Textarea (api returns text with
)
Wysiwyg Editor (api returns html)
Date (api returns text)
True / False (api returns 0 or 1)
Select (api returns array of values)
Relationship (api returns array of post IDs)
File Upload (api returns file url)
Loop (repeatable fields!)

Add Movie Trailers and Games Trailers to your site

If you like to add movie trailers, game trailers or TV trailers to your blog or create your own IMDB site, Cinemabase can help you do that. One professional plugin that will add movie trailers to your site

oEmbed HTML5 audio

This plugins adds possibility to place audio files into posts and pages using the oEmbed technology used by WordPress for other purposes (YouTube videos etc). Audio files are embeded using HTML5 audio tag, with Flash-based backup player for MP3 format for browsers that don’t support either HTML5 or MP3 format (Internet Explorer up to version 8.0, Firefox and Opera).

SEO Facebook Comment

SEO Facebook Comments embeds a Facebook Comment Form on your blog and also looks at each of your blog posts searching for Facebook Comments already posted. All new found comments will be added to WordPress Database.

Gantry Template Framework

Gantry is a comprehensive set of building blocks to enable the rapid development and realization of a design into a flexible and powerful web platform theme.
Gantry is packed full of features to empower the development of designs into fully functional layouts with the absolute minimum of effort and fuss.

Features:

960 Grid System
Stunning Administrator interface
XML driven and with overrides for unprecedented levels of customization
Per override level control over any configuration parameter
Preset any combination of configuration parameters, and save custom presets
RTL language support
Built-in CSS and JS compression and combination
Flexible grid layout system for unparalleled control over block sizes
Optimized codebase with speed, size, and reuse core tenets of the framework design
65 base widget positions
38 possible layout combinations for mainbody and sidebars
Source-ordered 4 column mainbody
Many built-in widgets and gizmos such as font-sizer, Google Analytics, to-top smooth slider, IE6 warning message, etc.
Ability to force ‘blank’ widget positions for even more advanced layout customization
Flexible parameter system with ability to set parameters via URL, Cookie, Session, Presets, etc.
Table-less HTML overrides
Standard typography and WordPress core element styling
ini-based configuration storage for easy portability
Automatic per-browser-level CSS and JS control

Facebook, Twitter & Google+ Social Widgets

Simple plug-in that displays the most important social widgets from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ below your posts. Very easy to setup: just activate

Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner

The recent Timthumb.php vulnerability (discussed here) has left scores of unsuspecting bloggers hacked. It’s the perfect combination of not so easy to fix for the technically disinclined, and easy to find and exploit for the malicious – resulting in a disastrous number of compromised sites.

The Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner plugin will scan your entire wp-content directory for instances of any outdated and insecure version of the timthumb script, and give you the option to automatically upgrade them with a single click. Doing so will protect you from hackers looking to exploit this particular vulnerability.

SEO Auto Linker

The difference is that you no longer have to try and guess what links will appear. Specify keywords in a comma separated list, type in the URL to which those keywords will link, specify how many links to the specified URL per post, and then specify the post type. SEO Auto Linker does the rest.

WebsiteDefender WordPress Security

The WebsiteDefender WordPress Security plugin is a free and comprehensive security tool that helps you secure your WordPress installation and suggests corrective measures for: strengthening passwords, securing file permissions, security of the database, version hiding, WordPress admin protection and lots more.

Key security features:

Easy backup of WordPress database for disaster recovery
Removal of error-information on login-page
Addition of index.php to the wp-content, wp-content/plugins, wp-content/themes and wp-content/uploads directories to prevent directory listings
Removal of wp-version, except in admin-area
Removal of Really Simple Discovery meta tag
Removal of Windows Live Writer meta tag
Removal of core update information for non-admins
Removal of plugin-update information for non-admins
Removal of theme-update information for non-admins (only WP 2.8 and higher)
Hiding of wp-version in backend-dashboard for non-admins
Removal of version in URLs from scripts and stylesheets only on frontend
Reporting of security overview after WordPress blog is scanned
Reporting of file permissions following security checks
Strong password generator tool to protect from brute force attacks
Integrated tool to change the database prefix
Disabling of database error reporting (if enabled)
Disabling of PHP error reporting

35 Interesting And Useful WP Plugins Released In The Last Five Months

You will definitely like these articles

New High Quality Drawing Illustrations – 31 Examples

Bogdan Sandu — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:54:51 +0000

I see a lot of drawing illustrations when I research for material to put on Daily Design Inspiration and a lot of talented designers and artists come to my attention. I will feature some of their work in this article, let’s name them the most representative illustrations from their portfolios. You should check out all the creations these people have in their portfolios cause it might inspire or help you create similar drawings or characters.

It’s not too late to work on calendar printing projects for 2012. Check out Next Day Flyers for great calendar printing prices.