Freebies

Today we bring you a great set of icons from IconShock designed exclusively for WebdesignerDepot.

These are large icons 256×256 and provided as transparent PNG files.

These icons are completely free for both personal and commercial use.

This freebie is available for WDD readers through our sister site, MightyDeals.com. Enter your email address and click on the download button below to download the files.

If you’d like to share these icons, please refer your friends to this page. See the full preview and download link after the jump.

Walter says: Scott, We received your email as well and sent you the files by email. I'm not sure why you did not get the download button...
Clients

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review for Approval Manager

Any time you’re working in a team environment, it’s likely you’ll need a series of permissions and approvals for various stages of your project.

Managing all these approvals, making sure that they’re done on time, and making sure that the right versions of everything are getting passed along to the right people can be a headache for even the most organized of project managers.

Add into the team mix approvals from clients and it becomes an even bigger hassle.

The truth is, a dedicated proofing and review system is pretty much a necessity for any designer working in a team environment. Without it, you run the risk of missing approvals from necessary team members, screwing up your entire project timeline.

Approval Manager is a great answer to this kind of situation.

Johnny G. says: Never heard of this before, it sounds like a useful tool for designers and creative folks. I thought your writing style was very...
Forms

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.

Business Card Magnets says: I heard of Moo Tools before, I think it's about the menus? Can you refresh me from that? I always encounter problems with the...
Business

Graphic design is one of those job that everyone needs but whose value perhaps not everyone appreciates.

People who don’t understand the true value of graphic designers will try to take advantage of them, especially if they’re newbies.

Others will try to calculate the time and effort involved in designing and then assume you’ll meet their expectations, however unrealistic.

This can wear on you both financially and mentally, so you have to find ways to protect yourself. Here are four ways to keep your work and your clients in check.

Have a look through them and let us know your experiences and whether you would add anything to this list.

SooDonim says: I have recently learnt the hard way that you need to be especially wary of consultants who hire you to work on a project but...
Apps

The August edition of what’s new out there for web designers and developers includes a number of new web apps, JavaScript plugins, tools for creating smartphone apps, and browser tools, along with fifteen great new fonts.

Most of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments.

And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Mailette says: You guys always hit the spot with these posts! So many great resources and hours of procrastination ahead for me now! =)  I'd...
Best Of

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

Jacob Creech says: Great collection here. Little Leg Bookmarks look awesome! Thanks very much for featuring our post on Usability Testing Myths as...
Comics

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…

Cheta Manuel says: I hate blogspot captcha. the other guy could have made pictures with kittens. They allways work. lulz :))
Adobe

It used to be that if you wanted to create an animated, interactive interface for a website, you needed to use Flash. You might be able to get away with some basic animations using JavaScript, but if you made it too complicated, all you’d end up doing is bogging your visitor’s computer down and causing problems.

Plus, JavaScript was potentially more complicated to use than Flash, at least for those who aren’t fond of coding. But, of course, Flash doesn’t always work well (or sometimes not at all) on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

Enter HTML5. HTML5 works on just about every mobile platform out there. Anything you could create in Flash can be created with HTML5 (and sometimes added JavaScript and CSS3): animations, interactive elements, and more.

But it reintroduces the coding issue for a lot of designers, who might not be crazy about hand-coding everything. That’s where Adobe Edge comes in.

Gary Hicks says: I've been developing hand crafted websites for more than 10 years -before Ultradev, the spiritual predecessor to Dreamweaver -and...