by anne.sofie on May 13, 2013
If you want to add a retro or vintage touch to you design there are many great Photoshop tutorials that will help you learn how to do it.
The technique of using retro and vintage designs is often used for designing posters, collages and as parts of graphical elements. Though these designs often seem simplified, it takes a great amount of work to achieve the right nostalgic look and feel. In order to get the design just right you need to find the perfect harmony of colors, grunge elements and of cause time typical textures and fonts that put together adds up to a design that takes you back in time. A great tool for adding a vintage style in your design is Photoshop vintage brushes that will help you get the job done more easily. Check out this article to find tons of free Photoshop vintage brushes to choose from.
In this post, I have found a huge number of incredibly inspirational retro and vintage Photoshop tutorials you can use for perfecting your next design. No matter the era you want to replicate these Photoshop, tutorials will help you achieve the techniques you need to add vintage and retro design elements to your design. Enjoy!
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In this showcase, we are going to explore some of the best real estate website designs to inspire you. Real estate is valuable, and it is usually an expensive purchase. Home buyers often do copious research online before acquiring a new home or property. In our present age, gathering information is typically done on the internet so a powerful and captivating website design could make or break a sale.
The same goals are shared by all real estate agents. They all like to build a lucrative real estate business and become the “go to” guys in their locality. To be able to achieve these goals, they should be able to fulfill the four basic needs of the consumers. All consumers like to be able to search the hottest real estate listings and access the statistics of the local market in order to know how it is doing. In addition, they also like to know the worth of their homes and/or learn more about the locality. This would include finding the best neighborhoods and schools.
The best real estate website design should be able to fulfill all of the basic needs of consumers, in addition to being user friendly. It should be designed in a way that makes the content accessible easily to sellers, buyers and those that are only interested in knowing the community.
In the more than 35 top real estate website designs I have featured in this post, I hope that you will get a better idea on why top Realtor websites are up there. Enjoy browsing and should you need more information, just click on the “More Info” link I have provided with each website. Also, please join the conversation! Do you think I have included most of the best real estate website designs in my compilation? If you have any thoughts or suggestions on beautiful real estate websites, talk to us by sharing your comments below. I also encourage you to go to Splashmagazine and browse their collection on real estate website templates.
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by ronalea on May 5, 2013
Running a modern and user-friendly website entails many technologies and tools. One of the technologies that we see used more and more is jQuery plugins and for websites that have complex forms I would say that jQuery calendar date picker plugins is a must. These plugins can be used to extend the capability of your website forms often making it simpler and less error prone for users to choose dates. In addition, some websites have fully featured calendars integrated and jQuery is also quite useful in this case. jQuery calendar plugins are typically interactive and rely on ajax to provide a responsive interface.
Some of the advantages of using the jQuery is that, it is lightweight, flexible, and then it offers cross browser support. In addition, there are many high quality jQuery tutorials on how to integrate jQuery on your website, why getting started is achievable.
In this post, I have collected some of the best jQuery plugins for displaying dates and date pickers. Try to explore the collection and I am sure you will find a script for your needs. In addition, you should investigate some of the other cool possibilities with jQuery. One of the most popular categories is sliders and jQuery carousel plugins that we see used on most websites these days. Please do not forget to share this article to your friends and type your comments if you find it useful. Enjoy!
by ronalea on May 5, 2013
If you want to display your website content in a straightforward, easy to follow and organized manner, a good option is to use grid-style WordPress themes. These are the kind of themes that take a structured grid layout, which by their arrangement, is very easy to navigate thus giving the users a great experience with the website.
In this article, I have collected many amazing WordPress themes with grid layout to make it easy for you to make your choice if you are looking for a theme that you can use for your blog, or portfolio website. Portfolio themes often use grid layouts but if you plan to build an online portfolio I recommend you check out this collection dedicated to WordPress portfolio themes. Here, you will find both premium and free items so you have a leeway to take either of the two options.
As you will see, these themes take the form of grid frameworks and they really provide an easy way for developers to plan the placement and the flow of the content. Thus, it is not only convenient on the part of the visitors to navigate the site but they also mean better for the developers. All because of the simple, organized, predictable layout that gives more prominence to the content than to the graphic elements. This is much like traditional WordPress themes with a simple and minimalistic design. Check the themes out and share with us your thoughts. Enjoy!
With WordPress Pinterest plugins you can integrate your website with one of the fastest growing social networking services right now. Pinterest allow users to create pin boards where they can pin images they find online. The ease of use and fully visual interface have made Pinterest a favorite among creative people and marketers quickly learned that pinning high quality product images works well. In fact, Pinterest is one of the most trafficked websites online and consumers like it for finding shopping inspiration and creating wishlists.
For most online business owners, bloggers and marketers there is a huge benefit related to getting content, product images, logos etc. into as many social feeds as possible. Getting shared, commented on, liked, re-pinned, and even have your Pins tweetet increase the reach and awareness and it is free. Question is however, how do you get other people to share your content and make it go viral among the more than 48.7 million hungry buying users on Pinterest?
One of the most classic ways to make visitors on a website share content on their social accounts, such as Pinterest, is simply to add a social share button. For Pinterest this is called a Pin-button. When a visitor clicks on a Pin-button they are easily allowed to pin one of the images of the current page to one of their boards.
With WordPress it is easy to integrate Pinterest and tap into the potential by adding plugins that will enable Pinterest content sharing convenient for the user. These plugins enable “pin worthy” images to be added easily on their boards so that users can freely share it and engage their friends to do the same.
In this article, I have collected 10 of the best Pinterest Plugins you can install in your WordPress site to help visitors share your content and add it to their boards.
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By using WordPress portfolio themes, you can get a top notch online portfolio set up fast to show of your skills, products and clients. WordPress portfolios comes in many different designs and layouts and can serve as a valuable communication and marketing tool for various industries. Often however, we see online portfolios used for showcasing creative work by designers, photographers and so on.
The fact that it is super easy and cheap to get started with WordPress makes it an ideal publishing platform for small business owners and individuals. As you can see below there are also a great supply of portfolio style themes and plugins you can use for building a professional portfolio website according to your needs and design preferences.
In this article, I have put together a large collection of excellent portfolio themes for WordPress and I am sure it will be a great help to get you started. Many of the themes have responsive layouts, and I generally recommend you opt in for one of these. You see, responsive themes use CSS media queries to adjust the layouts to match screen sizes on smartphones and tablets.
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by anne.sofie on April 30, 2013
Mastering Adobe Illustrator does not necessarily have to be difficult – at least you can ease into it by using tutorials that step-by-step introduces you to a number of new Adobe Illustrator skills.
Though you are skilled at working with other design elements such as Adobe Photoshop or Flash getting your head around Illustrator will take some time however, to make sure the time invested is well spend you might want to get some help understanding the basics.
To understand the main differences between Photoshop and Illustrator you should know that Adobe Illustrator is a graphic driven software that are based on vectors while Adobe Photoshop is based on pixels. While vector graphic designs can be altered in size to fit everything from a stamp to a billboard without compromising on quality, you can only resize an image created in Photoshop ever so much before the image seems pixelated. This makes Illustrator the perfect tool for creating logos, icons, scalable graphics and fonts as you can resize the image to fit your needs at all time.
Being able to master Adobe Illustrators is an asset if you are working professional with design. However, keeping up with all the new features and finding the time to refine your skills is probably not on page one of your to-do list of the day though it should be. To make it easier for you to quickly understanding the basics of a new feature, I have compiled a large collection of more than 75 Adobe Illustrator tutorials that covers a broad range of the tutorials available. Enjoy these tutorials!
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by Lars on April 25, 2013
WordPress menu plugins helps you get more control of the navigation on your WordPress website both when it comes to look and feel, functionality and administration. One of the recent web design trends is to use responsive layouts to make websites mobile friendly and this also introduces new requirements to website navigation design. In addition, we have seen more and more website that use mega menus to ease navigation and promote important content more effectively.
Navigation is one of the most important parts of web design and it is not as easy to get right as most people think. Making sure visitors navigate effectively and find what they are looking is a top priority and design and functionality must be perfectly aligned with the content.
There are many cool WordPress navigation plugins you can use to set up the navigation style and menus you want. I have collected more than 35 plugins and categorized them into the following categories: Responsive menus, not responsive menus, menu widgets and admin menu plugins. I hope you find the WordPress menu plugin you are looking for.
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by Lars on April 24, 2013
A growing tendency recent years has been to keep it simple. This trend has generated a number of interesting design elements such as flat style metro icons that is an important and prominent feature of the trendy minimalistic and simple interface web design.
Unlike prior popular icon design involving shadow effects, edges and heavy use of 3D effects the simple design of the flat style metro icons can interact with most kinds of web designs. Minimalistic and simple websites and metro style designs are great examples of this. WordPress themes with Metro style design are great if you like metro and they also look great with some of the flat style metro icons you can find in this post. In addition you can find a lot of ready to use metro scripts for adding metro style and functionality to your web pages.
For this article I have found quite a few flat style metro icon sets you can browse through and perhaps find a set that fits your needs. Please leave me a comment on which icon set you like the most. Enjoy!
by Lars on April 22, 2013
Color is one of the most decisive elements in any kind of design and the color palette used have a huge effect on the mood of the viewers. Experienced designers know exactly what colors to use for waking up certain emotions and feelings in people.
One of the initial steps when designing websites and creating graphic designs is to choose the right color palette. This will work as the foundation for coloring any design element during the work, which is why, creating a cool color up front palette may be a bit challenging. One of the popular ways to get started is to look for color inspiration e.g. in stripe patterns and colorful websites or simply use a color tool.
Finding the right tool to help you choose the right color palette is however not that easy. While the color schemes might be basic the tools on the other hand offers many different services. Some gives you the opportunity to create and share your own unique colors, palettes and patterns while others let you preview your color combinations in real time.
Luckily, there are many different tools for choosing the right color palette. I have found quite a few of these tools to help you save time so you can focus on choosing the right color palette. Enjoy the color hunt! [click to continue…]
