MyInkTrail: Best of the Design Community, September 2009

MyInkTrail, September 2009

It’s was a busy month for me personally, so I want to apologize for not getting this up sooner, but better late than never I suppose. This past month I found lots of cool new things and sites, so the ‘Featured Stuff’ section has plenty to chew on. I hope you enjoy this month’s compilation, check it all out below!

Articles

10 Ways to Customize and Personalize Your WordPress Blog

Pro Blog Design takes a look at 10 possible ways to improve your blog through customizations. There is always something more that you can do to improve your blog, so I love posts like this.

From Client Contact to Design â€“ A Group Interview

A design community interview that reveals the design process from contact to design. I love gaining insight like this from top designers.

10 Things to Remember Before Launching a Website

A quality check list from Niki of Design O’Blog of 10 things to remember when launching a site. It’s always wise to run through a checklist like this before you go live.

Top designers discuss why they blog

A design community interview that asks top designers “why they blog.” Answers from designers like Chris Spooner, Jacob Cass, and yours truly.

How to Get Noticed on Twitter

Some real practical advice about how to get noticed on Twitter. Everything from being conscience of when you tweet to not being shy.

Beautiful Post Thumbnails: Top Examples & Best Practices

Liam from Function puts together this wonderful compilation of best practices and quality examples of post thumbnails. Each example is features really helpful tips about what works.

Tutorials

How to Create Eroded Metal Text with Photoshop

The final result of this tutorial speaks highly enough for itself. In addition to designing something really cool, you’ll learn about patterns, channels, gradients and more.

How to Create a Golden, Vector Compass in Illustrator

Another cool result. This tutorial helps you learn technique, precision, and probably some patience.

Zee Logo in Illustrator

Fabio Sasso never disappoints with the tutorials he puts out. In this tutorial you’ll learn some handy illustrator techniques for creating a custom logo, plus be sure to check out Abduzeedo’s slick new design.

Quick Global Swatches In Adobe Illustrator

This tutorial teaches you how to create global swatches in Illustrator. I’m not ashamed to say that I never knew this trick, so I’m really glad I found this in my reader this month.

Sproing! â€“ Make An Elastic Thumbnail Menu

This tutorial shows you how to make a cleverly interactive thumbnail menu with a little css and jQuery.

Interviews

Freelancer Interview: Jon Phillips

An interesting interview with Jon Phillips of Sprye Studios. If for no other reason you should check out this interview to catch Jon’s rant on designers calling themselves rockstars (a nice perspective from someone in a rockband).

Freebies

Twi-Birds Icons

I know, I know, there are more than enough twitter icons out there, but c’mon you have to admit this set has some character.

178 Free Icons: WooFunction Free Icon Set goes Live

Another killer icon set from Liam. This one features 178 professional quality icons for free… hooray!

Compilations

How The Webs Most Popular Blogs Looked When They Launched

A look back at how a lot of today’s most popular blogs looked like when they first started. I can’t get over how far A List Apart has come, thankfully they went away from that orange.

40 Super-Neat JavaScript Plugins

This compilation makes for a handy bookmark for when you need to find some interactive javascript plugins.

20 Free High Quality Script Fonts

I found some fonts in this list that I hadn’t seen before. It’s definitely worth a browse to see if you can add anything to your designers’ toolbox.

22 Web People In Ten Years

A design community interview that asks designers what they think they’ll be doing in 10 years.

Featured Stuff

Tut Engine

A new tutorial search site that archives thousands of good design tutorials.

Building A Website – Time Lapse Video

This is a fun time-lapse video of Chris Spooner building a website. You won’t learn a lot because of the speed of the video, but you will get an idea of workflow and it’s always cool to see how other designers work.

Fuel Your Blogging

A new site from the Fuel Network. This one is run by Tim Smith and features good advice and inspiration on blogging.

Artua features a lot of very high quality icons free of charge. They also offer design services, their portfolio will do the talking.

This new site offers up a bunch of interviews from top designers. (Insert shameless self promotion here… ) For one of their posts they asked me a series of questions, To Tweet Or Not To Tweet.

This is a slick typography site that aims to promote open-source type that will improve the selection of useful webdesign fonts.

About the Author

Andrew is a primary contributer for MyInkBlog. He is a full time web developer for Niagara University. When he's not working there, he's a blogger, twitter'er, wordpress'er, silverstripe advocate, blessed father and husband.