July 27, 2009 — Fireworks was originally created as an image editing and web design application by Macromedia, for quick web mock-ups, and optimizing images for the Web. It has since been transformed into a powerful environment for designing and prototyping applications that integrates easily with Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop &ndash making it, perhaps, the most powerful (that’s controversial) and versatile graphic editor. Read more…

July 26, 2009 — Choosing a domain name for a new client is a difficult task. Domain names are the crux of a website’s existence. A bad name can create a negative impact on branding and the ability to strengthen the domain value. A good domain name is essentially priceless (tacky but true) in name, branding, ease of understanding, and catchiness. Read more…

July 25, 2009 — This post is a second part of the article Clever PNG Optimization Techniques that we posted last week. As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format. As a Photoshop (or any other image editor) user you might think that there is not that many options for PNG optimization, especially for truecolor PNG’s (PNG-24 in Photoshop), which doesn’t have any. Some of you may even think that this format is “unoptimizable”. Well, in this post we’ll try to debunk this myth. This post describes some techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images. These techniques are derived from laborious hours spent on studying how exactly the PNG encoder saves data. We’ll talk about grayscale, how to use fewer colors for optimization and also about reducing detail to minmize the file size. You may want to take a look at the following related articles: * Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques * Clever PNG Optimization Techniques Read more…

July 24, 2009 — Space has many beautiful mysteries hidden inside. Many people have tried and are still trying to uncover those mysteries. In this inspirational post, we present beautiful photographs from space explorations: nebulas, comets, stars, planets, etc. Hopefully, these beauties will inspire you to create beautiful artwork, Web designs, graphics, wallpaper, illustrations, etc. All of the images are linked to their sources. Click on them to get the high-resolution versions. Read more…

July 23, 2009 — Comments sections are neglected on many blogs. That is definitely a bad thing, because comments represent interaction between you and your readers. In this article, we’ll have a look at 10 great tips and hacks to enhance your blog’s comments section and give it the quality it deserves. Read more…

July 22, 2009 — There are things that can’t be showcased too often. For instance, beautiful blog designs. We have presented hundreds of beautiful blog designs in the past and now it’s time to provide our readers with a fresh portion of tasty design inspiration. Read more…

July 21, 2009 — The development of iPhone applications has recently become a hot topic in the design community; everybody tries to come up with some creative idea, port it into a stylish iPhone-alike application and sell it to thousands of users through the iPhone app store. However, many of these applications are poorly designed and therefore miss the chance of providing users with a truly useful product that users would find worth recommending to friends and colleagues. Read more…

July 21, 2009 — The beauty of code snippets is their ability to save you time when developing a site. Whether you keep a file with your own often-reused snippets or turn to one of the many online repositories, snippets can really speed up your site development. Read more…

July 20, 2009 — CSS is almost certainly one of the best developments in web design since the first graphical web browsers were adopted on a wide scale. Where tables created clunky, slow-loading pages, CSS created much more streamlined and usable web pages. Plus, CSS has allowed designers to achieve a number of different styles that used to only be possible with images. Read more…

July 19, 2009 — A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. Read more…