Custom Website Design

Sometimes it’s amazing how realistic a Photoshop creation can look. In this post we’ll feature 35 tutorials for creating realistic effects in Photoshop. Some will show you how to illustrate an object from scratch, while others teach how to edit photos with realistic elements, such as water or snow.

Create a Realistic Blackberry Style Mobile Phone from Scratch

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A lot has been written about the recent release WordPress 2.7, and I think most WordPress users and developers understand that this release adds some significant features that open up some new options for theme development. I did a little bit of experimenting with one of the changes and I wanted to write a brief tutorial that demonstrates a real-world situation for taking advantage of a new feature.

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Although most websites use dark text on light backgrounds, but sites with dark backgrounds with light text can be very striking when executed effectively. In the past, I’ve published two collections of great dark designs (see part one and part two), and here is part three.

BrandStorm

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2009 is almost hear, and that means it’s time for the last monthly roundup in 2008. This month’s edition includes links to a wide variety of design and development-related blog posts, and some inspirational resources as well. if you’re looking for a good roundup of all of the best content from the past year, see Noupe’s 2008 Most Popular Design Posts, Tutorials and Resources.

Web Design and Development:

10 Ways to Cut Down Web Development Time - Six Revisions

How to Make Your WordPress Title Tag SEO Friendly - WP Recipes

8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks - Smashing Magazine

Top 29 Free UX Tools and Extensions - UX Booth

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Christmas may be over, but you still have a chance to get a great gift for yourself. A few weeks ago we ran a giveaway from Jumpeye Components that provided 3 lucky winners with an unlimited license for FlashEff. With a strong response from readers, Jumpeye is now giving away five one-year Premium Plus licenses ($149 value) to their new online, flash banner maker, BannerSnack.

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Lighting effects are often used in modern web design to give a site an interesting and different look. Several months ago I published 40 Photoshop Tutorials for Lighting and Abstract Effects, which includes plenty of tutorials that can help you to get this type of look in your own work. Now, I’d like to share this gallery of sites that are putting those techniques into practice.

Color Charge

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Several months ago I published 50 of the Best Church Websites, which has been one of the more popular posts on the blog. Since I published that collection I’ve come across many other noteworthy church sites, so I thought I would add a second post on the topic.

For those who never work on church websites, these are great sources of design inspiration in general. If you do work on church sites, I’m sure you’ll appreciate these as well.

College Park Church

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Alen Grakalic of Templatica has graciously offered to give away three one-year memberships to his club that provides members with templates to use on their own websites.

If you’re not familiar with Templatica, there are two options for using/buying the templates. A one-year membership costs $24, or you can buy individual templates for $5 a piece. All of the templates use valid XHTML and CSS coding, and have been tested in all major browsers. Alen is a skilled designer and all of the templates will give a website an attractive and professional appearance.

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in this post we’ll feature 40 Illustrator tutorials for working with shapes in various ways and for a variety of purposes. As you’ll see in these tutorials, shapes can be used for plenty of real-world purposes in every day design.

Simple Organic Shapes the Illustrator Way

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From time-to-time there will probably be situations where you could use some help or guidance with CSS during your web design and development work. While there are plenty of great CSS resources available, I would like to point out 10 that can be very helpful resources in these situations.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is sort of a combination of social media and a forum. It is a niche specific site focused on programming and development (CSS is just one of the topics being discussed). The purpose of Stack Overflow is to ask and provide answers to questions for programmers. Anyone can post a question (you don’t even have to create an account) and then other members will be able to provide answers to your questions. Other users can then vote up or down on the various answers so it’s easy for everyone to identify the best ones.

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