MyInkTrail: Best of the Design Community – January 2011

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MyInkTrail - Best of the Design Community January 2011

The first month of 2011 has already come and gone. It was an exciting month for MyInkBlog, because the site now has a new team. We are working hard behind the scenes to bring out fresh new content for 2011.

Here are the best articles, tutorials, freebies and more from the design community for January 2011.

Articles

11 Most Popular Blog Design Styles 11 Most Popular Blog Design Styles

This post breaks down 11 popular blog styles, and has an exhausting showcase of inspiring examples.

The History of the Ampersand and Showcase The History of the Ampersand and Showcase

I’ve joked on this blog before that nothing says typography quite like the ampersand sign. This history of the symbol and showcase of examples should satisfy the inner typography nerd in most of us designers.

Curating Comment Threads Curating Comment Threads

The most current versions of WordPress include all kinds of awesome options to improve how you handle comments on your blog. This post covers much of that, and an interesting take on using a feature/bury plugin.

A Guide to Utilizing Facebook for a Freelance Career A Guide to Utilizing Facebook for a Freelance Career

This article explores the many ways Facebook can be used for business and productivity, particularly for Freelancers. A lot of useful info here.

How to effectively organize, manage and maintain your freelance design business How to effectively organize, manage and maintain your freelance design business

Brian Hoff discusses ways to increase your efficiency in an effort to make running a one person design business possible. The post is chock full of awesome advice, everything from syncing your files to writting contracts.

A Brief History of Eye-Tracking A Brief History of Eye-Tracking

Usability has always been an important topic of interest for me, that interest has grown now that I just finished reading the ever popular Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Of course we can improve the user experience only if we understand how users browse the web. This post takes a look at the history of eye-tracking, and how people utilize it.

Mastering Photoshop: Unknown Tricks and Time-Savers Mastering Photoshop: Unknown Tricks and Time-Savers

I love keyboard shortcuts! This post lays out all kinds of Photoshop time savers, but mostly it’s a nice bookmark of useful shortcuts.

HTML5 Grayscale Image Hover HTML5 Grayscale Image Hover

This HTML5 and jQuery trick will dynamically change the color of images, without the need fro image editing software like Photoshop. See it in action with the demo.

Inspiration

Beautiful Designs with Smoke Typography Beautiful Designs with Smoke Typography

Smoke typography is an awesomely unique niche. Predictably so, this is a roundup of inspirational examples of smoke typography.

Gorgeous Typography Examples in Advertising Design Gorgeous Typography Examples in Advertising Design

I must be on a typography kick this month because this post features more cool typography examples, this time within advertising design.

Freebies

7 Hi-Res Bokeh Textures 7 Hi-Res Bokeh Textures

The bokeh effect seems to be here to stay, and rightfully so, it’s a beautiful effect. Here is a collection of 7 bokeh textures that can help your next design.

Woven Fabric Social Media Icon Set Woven Fabric Social Media Icon Set

I love to add icons to my design arsenal. This is a unique set of social media icons made of woven fabric.

Vector Social Media Icons Vector Social Media Icons

It’s one thing to make an awesome set of social media icons, but it brings it to another level of awesomeness when you realize these icons are designed in vector format, meaning that you can use them at any size you wish.

Tutorials

How To Create Depth And Nice 3D Ribbons Only Using CSS3 How To Create Depth And Nice 3D Ribbons Only Using CSS3

This is a great example of the sort of graphical elements you can create using just CSS 3.

Create a Gnarly Snowboarding Themed Web Design Create a Gnarly Snowboarding Themed Web Design

This tutorial is rockin’ cool no matter how you slice it, but you add ‘gnarly’ to the title and it just goes off the charts.

Create a Cool Typography Effect in Photoshop Create a Cool Typography Effect in Photoshop

Wow, I was really into the subject of typography this month. This tutorial shows you how tor create a cool typography effect using layer styles, color blending and images.

Featured Stuff

Wordmark.it Wordmark.it

Awesome web based tool that displays a word in all the fonts installed on your system. Really useful when you need to quickly choose the right font.

Art in My Coffee Art in My Coffee

I’m not sure what to think of this art style other than it’s really unique and clever. This site is a gallery of coffee art images.

Why It's Better To Pretend You Don't Know Anything About Computers Why It’s Better To Pretend You Don’t Know Anything About Computers

Anyone who works with computers can definitely relate to this hysterical comic about why it’s best to keep you computer know-how a secret.

Design Instruct Design Instruct

This is a new design site created by the folks who brought you Six Revisions. Design Instruct is a web magazine that aims to teach designers and digital artists useful techniques by way of detailed and step-by-step tutorials.

Readability Readability

I’m not sure I’ll use this all that often, but I like the idea and it’s ease of use. Basically it’s a bookmark you can add to simplify a website to just display the content you’re reading rendered in simple nice fonts.

iPad iPad

Yeah, I’m featuring the iPad on MyInkTrail. Love it or hate it, it was a huge event. I’ll leave a review up to the talented pen of Rob Bowen for an upcoming post.

Dummy ImageDummy Image

I could see myself using this now and again when I mockup web designs. Basically the site takes in width and height values and dynamically creates a dummy image for you to use in your design. Sort of the Lorem Ipsum of images.

About the Author

Roberto Blake is a Graphic Designer and Digital Artist from Brooklyn New York. Roberto has a passion for visual arts and multimedia and is very active in the online design community. Roberto strongly believes that all designers and professionals living in the digital age can use technology and free platforms to help build their brand an online presence.

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  • http://inspiks.com loswl

    Very nice roundup, thanks for placing my tutorial on the list ;)

  • http://www.thedphoto.com/ The D-Photo photography

    great round up guys. many useful links! thanks

  • http://www.sonicprint.com Stan @ Sonic Print and Direct Mail

    Robert, nice to see a new post!

    Your post says 2010, but the image says 2011? Is this blog being updated now? Did German sell the blog?

    Contact me if this is something you guys are going to start again!

    • http://www.myinkblog.com Vincent

      Hi Stan, thank you… it was a typo in the post and has been corrected. Yes, MyInkBlog is being updated now and you should see some great new posts soon!

  • http://www.naturalhighsafaris.com/content/kenya.html Kenya safaris

    Some great resources listed there. I’ve bookmarked them all. Thanks a lot for sharing this.

  • http://kaiserthesage.com/about Jason Acidre

    Excellent list of resouces Robert and I can definitely say one of the most interesting curated posts I’ve seen this start of the year. Been reading a lot about designs lately (specifically with blog themes), I’m sure that I can get a lot of good concepts from the first post that you’ve shared.

  • http://cgnewsupdate.blogspot.com/ lia

    very usefull links, thnk you

  • http://www.raoco.net Raoco

    Thanks again for providing so many informative articles and Tutorials!

  • http://www.clippingshop.com Clippingshop

    Wonderful collection and Good to see all in one page, thanks for sharing.

  • http://cat-toys-stores.blogspot.com/ John

    Great list! Thanks for sharing it.

    “Art in my Coffee” is pretty interesting.

  • http://www.logonerds.com Business Logo

    Thanks for sharing the information about Facebook and how it can help your logo design career – it seems like every man and his dog is on facebook now :)