Many sites that require login credentials enforce a security setting often referred to as password complexity requirements. These requirements ensure that user passwords are sufficiently strong and cannot be easily broken.

What constitutes a strong password? Well, that depends on who you ask. However, traditional factors that contribute to a password’s strength include it’s length, complexity, and unpredictability. To ensure password strength, many sites require user passwords to be alphanumeric in addition to being a certain length.

In this tutorial, we’ll construct a form that gives the user live feedback as to whether their password has sufficiently met the complexity requirements we will establish. Read more

Creating buttons with CSS is one of the most experimented-with web design techniques around. Examples and tutorials abound.

The biggest recent trend in CSS button design seems to be eliminating images, especially background images, from buttons. But there are plenty of other things designers are doing with buttons, some that do include images.

Below we’ve collected more than twenty tutorials, examples, and tools for creating CSS buttons, most of which use CSS3.

Included are buttons to suit virtually every design style. We’ve tried to focus on newer techniques here, leaving out the long-standing techniques (like the sliding door method for creating rounded corners) that most designers are already familiar with.

If you have other tutorials or examples you’d like to share, please do so in the comments! Read more

We all know texture is used a lot in both modern and vintage design, although in many cases of design produced many years ago, noisy and grungy textures were unavoidable.

When it comes to wooden texture in design, though, whether in a print product, a web or mobile user interface element, or general layout, it is always used to enhance visual appeal.

In this article, we will look at five common elements in UI design that use wood textures to do just this.

In addition to discussing these elements and admiring some rather sexy user interface designs that I collected from Dribbble, we will also be learning how to reproduce some of these effects by following mini-tutorials right here in this article. Read more

Forget the clone stamp, paint bucket and pattern presets. When it comes to creating patterns, the ability to duplicate a layer is one of Photoshop’s greatest features.

Semitransparent shapes can be very useful when creating repeated geometric “textures” of color and form.

They’re easy to create, fun to play with and best of all, they can be uniquely yours.

In searching for interesting patterns, designers sometimes pass over basic shapes in favor of more complex geometrics. But simpler is often better.

The trick is to pay attention more to how shapes interact than to how a shape looks on its own. Read more

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms available today. And for good reason.

It’s powerful enough to be a complete CMS, has every feature or function a blogger could dream of (either built in or available via plugins or custom functions), and it’s free and open source.

While WordPress is incredibly powerful and easy to use on its most basic levels, it can also get pretty complicated, pretty quickly.

Below are more than 300 resources to help you master WordPress no matter what your skill level is.

Everything from premium and free themes to plugins to WP hacks and everything in between is included. If it’s possible with WordPress, it’s likely you’ll find it below. Read more

Anyone can cobble together a few photos and textures and create a humdrum montage.

To elevate yours beyond this it takes a few simple tricks using Photoshop’s awesome array of tools.

Do it right and the style has got dozens of applications from static navigation or graphics, through to animated banners and interactive collages.

I’ve picked a musical theme, as the style works really well for band graphics or music based sites.

This tutorial explains how to create a great Photoshop montage in 19 steps, so let’s get started and have fun with it. Read more

In this tutorial, we’ll create a complex glowing wallpaper using Photoshop.

We’ll be using custom brushes, several blending modes, lightning techniques, and blurs.

The tutorial was created using free resources, so you can easily recreate it by following step-by-step. To make it easy for everyone, we have included the PSD source file at the very end of the tutorial which should be great to use for quick reference.

Go ahead and try it out and post your examples in the comments area.

Here’s a preview of the final image…. Read more

You have a picture of a stuffed penguin. It’s not just any stuffed penguin, though. It’s the latest and greatest in stuffed penguin technology, the hot item that everyone will want under their Christmas trees this year. You’ll make a fortune with this penguin, if only you can start selling it online in time for the holidays. “But wait!”, you say. “I can’t just put this picture on the Internet looking like that! It’s too big! It needs a border! It needs a drop shadow! What shall I ever do?”

OK, maybe not. Your penguin won’t lead to fame and fortune, and you can easily edit your image with Photoshop. So let’s change the scenario a bit: your client has a picture of a stuffed penguin, and a picture of a stuffed owl, and a stuffed gopher, and a stuffed wallaby, and a stuffed flamingo… You get the idea; hundreds of pictures from their Stuffed Animals from Around the World catalog.

Before you can load all of the pictures into your client’s fancy new e-commerce site, you need thumbnails with simple borders and drop shadows for each and every image. Simple, yes, but tedious. And you’ll get to do it all over again when they release next year’s line of stuffed animals. Read more