There are usually two camps among designers when it comes to typeface choices.

One group has a handful of favorite typefaces they adapt to every design they create, believing that these handful of typefaces can be suitable for every situation.

The other camp believes in using a huge variety of typefaces, picking and choosing each one based specifically on the project at hand. Regardless of which camp you fit into, the typefaces below should interest you.

They have proven popular among designers the world over, and are used in designs for everything from multi-national corporations to individual books or journals.

Have we missed one of your old time favorites? Go ahead and add it in the comments area. Read more

Are you a freelance designer? Are you interested in boosting your credibility, building your client base and increasing your number of paying projects? The answer is obvious, but knowing where and how to get started can be daunting, especially during the periods of low client work (you know what I’m talking about).

Having worked with a ton of design and development professionals in the field, I’ve seen that some of the most successful, most productive and busiest contractors have a blog attached to their main website or portfolio. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. By not having a blog, you could be missing out on some serious contract work.

A blog could be one of your most powerful assets in getting your name out there and securing new jobs. In fact, considering how simple it is to get started, the extremely low startup costs and the minimum of time required to create compelling content, I’m baffled as to why designers don’t consider it a priority when running their freelance business.

Here are the top three reasons why you, the budding (or even experienced) designer, need to start a blog (and sooner rather than later).

Read more

Earlier this year, a London, Ontario-based mom noticed that her 5-month old son Emerson got really frightened when she blew her nose. She caught one of his petrified moments on video, and posted it on YouTube to share with a few friends.

Since the video was posted, it’s been viewed more than 20 million times — far exceeding her expectations. This has led to both baby and family receiving the proverbial “five minutes of fame” in both Canada and the U.S.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re really missing out. View the video below, and read on. I’d like to point out some things about this video that I feel enhance its side-splitting hilarity, and that can influence designers to continue to look for inspiration in things that have almost nothing to do with design. Read more

From time to time, an industry experiences fundamental changes that radically alter it. Along with this comes an explosion of opportunity: opportunity for individuals to stand out, for new products to emerge and for entrenched companies to be replaced. Now is such a time in the web community.

For as long as I can remember, the primary focus in web development has been on ensuring that websites render the same across all browsers. We took great effort to ensure that a client’s website looked exactly the same in everything from old versions of Internet Explorer to the latest Firefox, all at once.

In the past few years, we have witnessed growing interest in what is known as progressive enhancement, which is the technique of serving advanced features and styles to modern browsers but not to older unsupported browsers.

This approach never seemed to settle in across the board. Most agencies still strive to make their websites universal. And progressive enhancement was often regarded as an excuse to ignore annoying problems. As it turns out, web people are rather crafty and have created tools that overcome countless browser problems. Read more

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

Forms are often considered one of the most painful HTML elements to program. But form design and development has progressed by leaps and bounds; it is not nearly as hard as it once was.

That being said, while the industry has made tremendous progress, some hurdles are still in place. In the end, taming forms is possible; it just takes some work.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most used form controls and at different tools and plugins that should help you with the deployment of forms in your websites.

If you have any other tips or links to other useful resources, feel free to post them in the comments. Read more

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own… Read more

For some sites, image galleries are an absolute must. Portfolios are the first to come to mind, but galleries are also useful for blogs, e-commerce sites, and really any site that regularly displays multiple images on a single page.

Below are 25 fantastic jQuery gallery and slideshow plugins.

They’re all free (though some require different licensing for commercial use, have premium versions available, or offer paid add-ons).

We’re sure there’s almost certainly going to be something to fit whatever your current project needs.

Feel free to suggest other options at the end of this post in the comments’ area… Read more