As an undergraduate of my university’s advertising program, every year, I’d have some sort of Super Bowl function that was centered around watching the commercials. After all, as an ad student, this was kind of a big deal and would be absolutely relevant to the next week of classes.

We would laugh at, be upset with, and critique most of the million dollar spots. Even though I was more interested in designing and directing print ads, I figured it couldn’t hurt to contribute to an upcoming topic and knock back a few brews.

Either way, once the final quarter ended and the winners celebrated by dumping Gatorade on their coach, I always felt unsatisfied. I know football isn’t my sport of choice, but most times the commercials were lackluster (and the half-time shows have been the pits). Most times I found myself making excuses for the commercials; “oh, that’s great for their target audience” or “oh, it was only a 15 second spot.”

Then it hit me one day after discussing the commercials with my baby-boomer mom. We were just talking about a pretty terrible commercial when she responded, “Yea, y’know commercials just ain’t what they used to be.”

While she probably said it flippantly, today, she is absolutely right—advertising as we know it just isn’t the same, and it’s truly on it’s last breath. Here’s my take on why…

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You never know when you’re going to get a client with a super tight deadline. You never know when you’ll be struck with a great idea, either. You can’t avoid it, so you need to try to stay as prepared as possible.

As iPhones and Android phones sweep the cell phone market, most designers have one or the other (except for me, I’m still with Blackberry). The greatest thing about these phones is the ability to access extremely powerful applications now available in the palm of your hand.

There are a flood of average apps out there that are helpful to designers and videographers, but the truth is they often just throw preset filters on top of your pictures and videos.

Sometimes those are cool, but some of us really need something powerful—we have the perfect idea that requires more than just a simple filter or we really need to create something without access to our regular computer.

Today, we are coming to you with a round up of the most POWERFUL apps developers have to offer to get your design work done with ease and quality. Read more

As a site developer, web designer or site administrator, you’ve probably had to go through the process of choosing between platforms. But maybe not recently—if you’ve been designing and developing web sites for very long, chances are you’ve already got your favorite go-to platform that you always use. And if your go-to content management system isn’t already Drupal, maybe it’s time to take another look.

The downside is, Drupal is huge. There is a steep learning curve and it can be a full-time job just looking through all the contributed modules to find exactly what you’re looking for. It is not a happy-go-lucky, “set it up right out of the box” platform.

But the upside to all of this is, Drupal is huge! There is nothing you can’t do with Drupal. Want to run a blog? Done. Want to run a blogging community? Done. Share links and photos, run classified ads, show Twitter updates and statuses, sell products, upload and share files, play movies, even manage a wiki? Done, done, done, done and done!

At the risk of sounding trite (and please forgive this slightly over-used phrase)…Drupal is as Drupal does…And Drupal does it all. So what makes Drupal stand out so much? Many things, but we’re going to focus on just the most important aspects right now.. Read more

[Editor's note: This is a sponsored review for Parallels 7]

One of the long-standing complaints about Macs is that there are more limited software options than for Windows-based PCs.

While the gap has closed in recent years as Macs become more popular (and let’s face it: there are some awesome Mac-only programs that PC owners are rightfully jealous of), there are still programs you can only run on a PC.

And even if the programs you want are available for the Mac, what if you already have Windows licenses for them? Do you really want to spend hundreds of dollars on buying the exact same version of your software, just for a different platform? Can you even afford to do that? Probably not.

Sure, you could use Bootcamp, but that means every time you want to run a Windows program, you’ll need to reboot your Mac. Not the most ideal solution if you’re in the middle of a project. Especially if you use a mix of Mac and PC programs for your work. This is where Parallels comes in… 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

The usage of fixed position elements has grown in popularity and become a common element on the web.

This technique involves fixing some element in the browser while the rest of the page scrolls. Most often we find this done on header elements including the main navigation for a site. This is also a popular approach on single page sites where the in page navigation needs to be ever present. We also find various elements of web pages locked in place using such techniques.

There are many situations we can find where fixing an element in the page is a good thing, but it all comes back to a single purpose. In almost all of these situations the fixed element keeps a critical part of the page in front of users at all times.

The importance of these elements varies, but to some degree the fundamental goal is to keep some part of the page perpetually in the view port.

As you consider using this technique I highly recommend you carefully consider why and how you do so. Keep in mind that whatever part of your page doesn’t move will automatically draw lots of attention. So be sure you are putting it to work. Let’s dive in! Read more

We’ve covered advanced commenting systems for WordPress before, but what about those bloggers who want to use the stock WordPress commenting system?

Not everyone wants to manage a third-party comment system. And those are the users who will find the comment plugins below really useful.

Below are eleven plugins that can handle everything from adding tweets about your posts to your comments section to stripping out potentially malicious code to preventing spam comments.

There are also plugins that help increase user engagement and usability for your commenters. Let us know in the comments what your favorite comment-related WP plugins are, whether they made the list or not! Read more