Drop-shadows and gradients are two of the most common design elements on the web.

You’ll find them accompanying many different styles. They’re handy effects for web designers because they’re attractive, useful and easy to create with any graphics program. But they have a dark side: they’re frequently abused.

Using amateurish drop-shadows or gradients is almost as bad as affixing a scarlet letter to your shirt to let the world know you’re a beginner or a hack. Even subtle, barely noticeable mistakes can create tensions that undermine otherwise beautiful and effective designs.

In this article, we’ll look at what drop-shadows and gradients do, we’ll talk about how to use them effectively and we’ll look at some examples of mistakes and how to fix them.

On behalf of myself and the entire WDD team, we’d like to wish you a very happy, healthy and successful 2010!!!

Thanks for your support in 2009; we hope you learned a few good things here while having fun and getting inspired at the same time.

The next year will be also full of great content and inspirational posts, and we’ll cover a bit more of the technical side of design as well.

And there’s ‘one more thing’… we’ll be launching another website in early 2010… stay tuned to our RSS feed and follow our tweets @DesignerDepot to be the first to know.

We wish you much success in your design career in the year ahead and all the best to you and your loved ones… Here’s to an awesome 2010…

Artists are usually ahead of the curve when it comes to being green.

The artists featured here exclusively use recycled and/or trash to make pieces of contemporary art. These artists practice the art of “upcycling”, or literally turning everyday trash into creative treasures.

While Andy Warhol may have made the idea popular with his famous Campbell’s soup can exhibit, today’s trash artists bring more of an eco street cred to their art.

Some create compositions from recycled plastic bag or themed works for art galleries, while others create entire theme parks with trash, and even furniture from recycled materials.

There seems to be no end to what kind of art you can create with the most cost-effective medium available; trash. Here are some stunning examples of trash art…

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