This Month’s Best: May 2008
Every month, I’ll be posting some of the best tutorials, resources, and articles related to web design and development found throughout the month. Have a look at these wonderful links I’ve managed to find this month.
Tutorials
How To Fix Video Slowing Down Your Page Load Time
A short and sweet tutorial on fixing videos that slow down page load time using jQuery and XHTML.
Photo Transfer Edge Effect
Create a vintage photo edge effect.
Create a Nature Inspired Painted Background in Photoshop
Create a Spectacular Grass Text Effect in Photoshop
CSS Decorative Gallery
Style images in your gallery with this CSS-based technique. There is also a download package associated with the tutorial.
Easiest Tooltip and Image Preview Using jQuery
Create a tooltip for links that opens a modal window with an image preview of the web page.
Become a Greasemonkey Ninja with jQuery
Easily create Greasemonkey scripts using the jQuery framework to reduce the amount of JavaScript you have to write.
Parsing Strings With jQuery
Make regular expressions/pattern-matching simpler with jQuery.
Using jQuery to Produce Rich User Interfaces
A tutorial by the wonderful folks at OnWired, on how to use jQuery to provide rich user interaction to websites.
Writing Your First YUI Application
An introductory tutorial on how to use the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library to create rich-internet applications.
Freebies and Downloads
Milky, a free vector icon set
A three part collection of beautiful vector icons. Also check out part 2 and part 3 of the collection.
50 Free Icon Sets
A list of free icon sets.
Free eCommerce icons
Useful icons for e-commerce applications and platforms, free to download.
Vertical Flyout JavaScript Menu
This is a light-weight script (weighing in at about 1.6KB) for creating a JS-based navigation menu with sub-menu items. Check out the demonstration.
Horizontal JavaScript Accordion 1kb
A light-weight, versatile script for a horizontal, accordion effect.
Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework
Whiteboard is a plain Wordpress theme that speeds up custom Wordpress theme development by giving you a "blank canvas" to build upon.
1000+ great Photoshop free brushes by PaulW
A ton of free brushes by graphics design PaulW of deviantART (Paul Willocks).
Inspiration
99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration
Flickr is an excellent community to stimulate one’s creativity. Here’s some worthwhile groups to check out.
Wooden Web Designs
A collection of designs with a wooden theme.
40 Pricing Design Examples
A showcase of excellent examples on providing user’s with product pricing.
15 Great Examples of Web Typography
A roundup from i love typography of brilliant uses of web typography.
24 Kick Ass Portfolio Designs
A collection of 24 beautiful portfolio designs.
Inspiration: Vexel Style Artwork
A showcase of excellent "vexel" artwork for inspiration.
13 Surreal Artworks
A collection of surreal artworks.
Online Tools
Design Resources Search Engine
A custom search engine that searches various design-related websites such as DeviantArt, Bittbox, PSDTuts, and Vectips.
ICONlook
search for icons using the ICONlook search.
AJAX Libraries API - Google Code
Google has launched that AJAX Libraries API which provides developers access to the most popular open source JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, mootools, Dojo. It follows the same concept as YUI, allowing you to use their readily-available, fast infrastructure for your favorite JavaScript libraries/frameworks without hosting it yourself.
Articles and Lists
100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources: Blogs, Forums and Tutorials
Web accessibility is paramount to the success of any website. If you need to brush up on accessibility concepts and theories, or would like to participate in web accessibility forums, here’s a list of great resources.
What Everybody Ought to Know About Usability and Web Design
A few tips on things to consider about usability of a web design.
5 Tips for Agile and Effective Usability Testing
Usability testing doesn’t have to be costly and tedious. Read these five simple tips on how to effectively conduct quick usability testing.
CSS Drop Caps 101 (with examples)
An introductory article of using drop caps in web design.
Design RSS Roundup 50+ Feeds
A list of 50 design-related RSS feeds; the author provides an OPML file for download in case you want to incorporate all the feeds in your reader.
8 fonts you probably don’t use in css, but should
Some widely available, installed fonts that you may consider using if you’re looking into diverging from the Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana fonts. Always have fall-back fonts though, in case the fonts don’t exist in the user’s computer.
How to Assure a Well-Formed Website
An introductory article that discusses well-formed (a concept from XML) mark-up.
Essential web browser tools for the pro web developer
A list of excellent browser-based tools such as Firebug, IE developer tool bar, and Fiddler.
Drupal versus everybody. A CMS Software review
A review of content management systems set against Drupal.
Most Viewed Photoshop Tutorials
A list of popular Adobe Photoshop tutorials.
11 Comments
Steven Snell
May 31st, 2008
Thanks for the link Jacob.
Sachleen Sandhu
May 31st, 2008
Wow, thanks for all the links!! Some of these are really useful, especially the tooltips! I have always wanted an easy way to do tooltips, but the default way never really worked for me.
adelle
May 31st, 2008
Jacob, thanks for adding a couple of my posts to your list! This is a great Roundup for May - Somehow I managed to miss some of these articles.
liam
May 31st, 2008
I try to keep myself updated with things like this, But I’ve missed so much! So glad I read this! Thanks!
Matt
May 31st, 2008
Lots of great things here, thanks for the list.
Henry Jones
May 31st, 2008
Thanks for the link. Great list!
web
June 2nd, 2008
Good points, but make it more generally
Janko
June 4th, 2008
Great list. I like when month come to an end just to read articles like this :)
Tyler @ Building Camelot
June 4th, 2008
Awesome list! Thanks for putting this together. I just added you to my reader.
Dejan Cancarevic
June 9th, 2008
very nice list, thanks
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