Overview

Another month in the books. MyInkBlog’s 1 year anniversary is creeping up dangerously fast, I’m still brainstorming how I’ll be celebrating that. Till then, enjoy this month’s roundup of the best stuff from the design community.

Articles

Urgent! How to handle those last-minute design requests

This article is stacked with great advice for handling last minute requests from clients. Everything from time management to pricing.

10 Tips for Working With Clients Remotely: Part 1

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on working with clients remotely. The two posts include 10 great tips for keeping the lines of communication open and avoiding some of the common pitfalls that long distance business relationships can cause.

Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices

Breadcrumbs are an undervalued tool that helps with navigation and usability, plus they can improve a site’s visual appeal. This post breaks down the use of breadcrumbs and shares a bunch of quality examples.

9 Solid Logo Design Tips for Beginners

Logos are perhaps the toughest thing to do well in graphic design. This post gives you 9 simple tips to improve your logo design skills. We would all do better to remember these.

10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know

I gotta admit a couple of these I hardly even knew about. I definitely plan to utilize a bunch of these in my sites. You should to, check out these rarely used HTML tags.

8 CSS Tips For Better Linking

8 fantastic tips on how to improve usability with the links on your site. Learn how to add icons based on the type of link, add tootips, and other useful tidbits.

10 User Friendly Tips for Good Content Heavy Web Designs

I’m a sucker for articles with advice for better usability. I think it’s an intricate part of professional web design. Matt over at Spoonfed details 10 usability tips for content heavy site and polishes the post off with great examples.

Screencasts

Using CSS3

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks gives a fantastic preview of some of the features that will be available for your disposal when CSS3 is more widely usable and some that you can use now using progressive enhancements. I’m really excited about this glimpse into the future, this is definitely worth the watch.

Why is the Blogging World so Nice?

The guys at From the Couch examine and start a discussion about what makes the blogging world so nice and so willing to give away things for free. It’s a dynamic question and the comments they receive are spot on.

Compilations

30 Beautiful Logos

Every good MyInkTrail needs a logo roundup. This is an awesome compilation from the guys at Abduzeedo.

22 Extremely Detailed and Beautiful Icon Sets

This is a beautiful compilation of some of the most detailed icons sets available. Fun to look through, a great collection.

50 Monochromatic Website Designs

A roundup of 50 awesome examples of what you can do with monochromatic designs. The selections are grouped by color which makes them very interesting to browse through.

Grid Based Design Toolbox

Adelle compiles a huge list of the best resources for grid based designs. A must have bookmark, for anyone using grids, or planning to.

50 Brilliantly Photoshopped Movie Posters

These are awesome. It was fun to look through this list and check out the great designs and reminisce about the movies themselves.

Tutorials

Image Rollover Borders That Do Not Change Layout

A css trick for displaying image rollowver borders that don’t screw up the layout of a grid of images that all border one another. The trick is to make the border an inner border, check out how.

Create a Milk Bottle with a Funny Cow Label

I had to add this tutorial if for no other reason than I thought the cow illustration was hysterical. The tut also features tips on how to use some of Illustrator’s 3D rendering tools.

How To Create an Awesome Vector Skate Deck Design

I absolutely love the geometry and color palette used in this tutorial. Chris shows you some great techniques while creating this stunning design.

Creating a Typographic Wallpaper

This tutorial shows you how to create an impressive typography poster in a few steps. Cool end result.

Freebies

Free Texture Tuesday: Leather

I haven’t found a use for these quite yet, but I’m sure I will at some point. Another quality freebie from Bittbox to keep your designer toolbox.

Texture Thursday: Paint

Paint spills and splatters are always handy. I added this one to my collection.

Cool Stuff

Line 25

This is a new site from Chris Spooner of Blog.SpoonGraphics. It’s got a slick design and features ideas and inspiration for the design community.

Bring Down IE 6

I’m on board with any project whose goal is to rid the design world of IE 6. This is a cool page, with some tips on how we can unite to phase out the troublesome browser.

Your Logo Makes Me Barf

This site is good for endless hours of entertainment, I was laughing hysterical going through all the different logos and comments!

Site Inspire

This is a very clean and well organized website gallery site I found this month.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

This poster is so cool. Anyone into design and typography will really appreciate it. I’d love to have a large print of this design for my office.

Final Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed this roundup! Til next month.