With the development of web fonts during the past couple of years, we as designers have a really exciting time. There are many excellent fonts that make body text on the web even more readable. Here at XLD Studios, we are using the excellent Proxima Nova font, but it isn’t available for free. Many others are though. Here is a collection of five excellent free web fonts for body text, all available through Google Web Fonts.
Hey folks. Today I wanted to share a theme that we are working on releasing very shortly for purchase at ThemeForest. We are currently going through the final phases of testing it to make sure it works well in different set-ups and once that’s done, it will be on its way to ThemeForest.
In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of the frontpage. Let us know in the comments what you think about it.
A few days ago I found a new favorite resource when doing mockups. Often enough you need a placeholder image just to occupy some space while positioning elements and not necessarily when showing clients (don’t use these placeholders for that).
Placehold.it is a service that generates nice and tidy placeholder images on the fly (which can be formatted too if you like). By just using the format and their domain as your image URL, you get a nice-looking placeholder, much better than a blank image tag.
<img src="http://placehold.it/350x150">
Personally, I’m a big fan of ways to save time when coding, especially when it comes to common interface elements and features. Having used various CSS frameworks before I have just started to include the Bootstrap framework, made by a couple of Twitter employees. Let me share with you why. Read More »
Fonts can seem like an infinite resource to keep browsing through. While the vast free font sites such as Dafont contains tons of them already, it can be hard finding these really nice free fonts that can be used in your design projects. In this article, I have rounded up ten modern fonts that are suitable for any design.
Just click on the preview image or the title of the font to go to a site where you can conveniently download a package of the font. All of them are free in at least one variation while some are free in some weights and payware in others. Read More »
It’s the time of the year when we see a lot of bundles. Even though this usually is for computer apps, here is a nice bundle from Mojo Themes that include 15 themes for just $29. Naturally I like the idea of a custom website any day built from scratch, but there are many companies starting out or personal projects where a template is a really good start.
So with that, I’d suggest that you take a look at the Mojo Themes Bundle because it expires in just a few days!
Today we are briefly examining 10 notebooks and sketchbooks that are perfectly suited for you as a web designer. While you might do a lot of work on the computer, it can be nice to sit back with a notebook or sketchpad and get the rough design going with a pen and paper.
Our collection here includes both different and similar types of notebooks and sketchbooks so make sure you look at them all to find the one(s) you like the most!
Here’s another very nice freebie resource. When looking for patterns to use in your designs, have a look at Subtle Patterns which has a large database of user-submitted patterns that all tile perfectly and that you can download as Photoshop files. What I especially like about them is that you can download everything as one big Photoshop pattern file to save some time!
Visit Subtle Patterns and search and see what you might be able to use on there for your next project.
Having access to the graphical elements of iOS is very nice when doing mockups in Photoshop for web apps or full iOS apps. Thanks to Teehan+Lax we can now enjoy an updated version of his iOS GUI PSD now for iOS 5.
Just head over to his website and download the Photoshop file.
I found this last week over on Smashing Magazine. They have a freebie design resource called the Facebook Fan Page GUI PSD. Basically, it is a layered Photoshop document containing all the Facebook user interface elements that makes it easy for you to design graphics for either Facebook walls or tabs.
What makes this helpful is that you get to design your graphic while seeing right away how it looks on Facebook’s design. What’s more, they are promising that with every change to the Facebook UI, this file will be reproduced 24 hours later.