Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot Read more

Recently I picked up an old design book that I hadn’t touched in a while, and it reminded me of a design principle that many of us put into practice probably only subconsciously, if at all.

The book deals with designing for print, but I thought it would make a great topic to discuss in the context of web design.

The principle of proximity calls for related items to be grouped visually, creating less clutter and making for a more organized layout. Items unrelated to each other should be placed further apart, to emphasize their lack of relationship.

I’ll discuss details and some ways in which this can be implemented effectively, but this definition should suffice for what we’ll discuss in this article.

The correct use of proximity, in conjunction with other design principles, has a big impact on the user experience and, ultimately, a website’s overall success. Read more

Brush fonts are hotter than ever and we are seeing them more often on professionally designed websites.

Thick, bold and beautiful… their relaxed, casual feeling and sexy curves make them a perfect fit for designers who want to break the mold and steer away from the typical serif and sans serif font choices.

Some of them crossover into the script font world, while retaining their thick lines and curves.

These types of fonts are also now widely used for logo designs and packaging as they easily bring added interest and creativity.

Here are 20 beautiful brush fonts that you may wish to use in your designs. Most of these fonts are not free, but may be worth the price for your project. Enjoy… Read more

Despite people’s expectation of change and movement on the screen, CSS and HTML have few controls that allow you to design interactivity, and those that exist are binary.

A link is either one color or another. A text field is either one size or another. A photo is either transparent or opaque. No in-betweens from one state to the next. No transitions.

This has led to most web pages feeling abrupt, with elements shifting and changing ungracefully.

Yes, we can use DHTML and leverage the jQuery library for transitions, but this requires a lot of code for something that should be very simple.

What we need is a quick and easy way to add simple transitions to the page and in this article you’ll find useful information about CSS transitions and how to use them. Read more

The ampersand is one of the most unique typographical characters out there.

Typography designers can exercise a lot more artistic freedom in the design of the ampersand, ranging from very traditional representations to those that bear little resemblance to the original form.

But many designers have little knowledge about the origin and meaning of the ampersand. The ampersand has a long and rather interesting history, though.

And with all the variations available out there, there are a whole host of design possibilities presented by this particular character.

Read on for more information, a history of the ampersand, and a gallery of ampersand designs from a variety of different typefaces. Read more

Apple products are well known for their simple and elegant design, and they are favored by many designers.

Their products are often seen in web design, particularly on portfolio websites, and these products are also popular subjects for icon design.

In this post we feature more than 35 sets of high-quality icons inspired by Apple and its products.

You’ll find iPod icons, iPhone icons, iMac and MacBook icons, as well as a variety of others. This post includes dock icons as well as those intended web design or other types of design.

As is always the case whenever dealing with freebies, be sure to check the license and terms of use before using them. Read more