Web Design Blog - Webdesigner Depot

19 Jan
Win $1,000 in PSD to HTML services!
Code, Contests, Web Design
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Designing a new website is great, but not everyone loves taking their PSD designs and converting them into actual, working HTML and CSS.
In fact, there are some designers who positively hate it (and often get someone else to do that part for them rather than suffer through it themselves).
A PSD to HTML service can be a huge time-saver even for designers who don’t mind coding their own designs. After all, the coding of a basic theme or template can be time-consuming even though it’s a relatively simple process.
Why not outsource it so you can focus on the creative aspects of creating websites? Read more
18 Jan
Stop American Censorship — a campaign from Fight for the Future
Infographics, Internet, News
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Two bills currently making their way through the United States Congress—SOPA and PIPA—threaten freedom of expression and security online, not to mention the American economy (and economies of countries directly tied to the U.S.).
In protest of these two incredibly dangerous and damaging bills, large portions of the internet will voluntarily blackout in whole or in part on Wednesday, January 18th. Among them are Wikipedia, Mozilla, and Tumblr.
If you’re a U.S. resident, be sure to educate yourself about the bills, their potential effects, and what you can do to stop them from passing. Call your Congressional representatives or send them emails telling them you don’t support SOPA or PIPA. Participate in the blackout, and support other sites that are participating. And most important of all—spread the word!
Check out the infographic below for even more information, and then visit the Stop American Censorship website to get involved. Read more
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17 Jan
Should designers do personal projects?
Business, Design, How to
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As creatives, most times we feel like we can do it all, or we are put in a position to do it all. We typically take on a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ mentality, that can either help or harm us.
For some odd reason, there seems to be a discrepancy of sorts when it comes to doing the work for ourselves. Some designers feel like of course we should take on that Jack-of-all-trades mindset, while others just feel like it makes sense to pass the work off and let someone else do it.
The truth is, they’re both great ideas but vary depending on your situation. How creative are you? What is your skill set? What kind of things stress you out? All these questions should be taken into consideration when determining whether or not designers should do their own personal projects.
Keep in mind, that for the purposes of this argument, we will say that a personal project is any type of work that contributes to yourself and your services. For example, we are talking about business cards, websites, etc. Read more
16 Jan
What’s new for designers – January 2012
Best Of, Design, Web Design
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The January edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, color tools, and a number of great new fonts.
Many 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. Read more
15 Jan
Our favorite tweets of the week
Jan 9-Jan 15, 2012
Best Of, Compilation, Twitter
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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
14 Jan
Comics of the week #112
Comics, Funny, Humor
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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
13 Jan
Free download: Balio Web UI Kit
Freebies, Icons, User Interface
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Today we have a great exclusive freebie from our good friends at Grafpedia.
The Balio UI Kit is an absolutely massive PSD file containing buttons, stickers, icons, pagination, menus, login forms and much much more. It’s a very high quality UI kit that can come in really handy for your designs. It’s free for personal and commercial purposes.
The set was designed by Grafpedia, where they teach you how to advance your design skills and they also constantly publish loads of graphic resources such as icons, vectors, brushes, textures and a whole bunch of other stuff. They already have 70,000 items available! Check out their tutorial on how to use this kit for designing a web layout.
The Kit is available for free to all WDD subscribers, simply enter your email address below to gain instant access and download the files. Being a subscriber of WDD allows you to get early access to freebies like these and much much more (and it costs nothing to subscribe anyways)!
We’ve included a full preview after the jump… Enjoy!
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