Wow, another month here and gone. Unfortunately I didn’t get to blog quite as much as I would have liked. Unforeseen events and issues with my PC and laptop prevented me from doing so. With that said, it’s no surprise that I am currently saving my pennies to buy a Mac.

The design community again impresses this month with quality articles, tutorials, freebies and some new sites I’ve stumbled on. This is by far my longest MyInkTrail. I hope you find the content as useful as I did!

Articles

1. Strategic Design: 6 Steps for Building Successful Websites

An outstanding article with a detailed look at how to successfully plan out a website.

2. Logo Inspiration: Animals, Part 2

Adelle from the new look Fuel Your Creativity (awesome redesign) showcases awesome logo designs that feature animals.

3. 40 Creative Logos Submitted by the Designers Themselves

More logo design inspiration. The Design Cubicle asks the design community to promote their favorite logos.

4. 50 Must Have Photoshop Brushes

Because you can’t get enough quality Photoshop brushes in my collection, here’s a nice, well-organized collection.

5. How Designers Charge Their Clients, Part I

The question of ‘how to charge clients’ is more than likely the toughest freelancer design question to answer.

6. Are You Making These 10 CSS Mistakes

10 CSS mistakes that you can learn from. A really helpful list.

7. Poll: Should You Retire the Word Freelancer

Sitepoint asks if the term ‘Freelancer’ does you more harm than good. Some quality points are made.

8. 16 Photoshop Actions to Add Style and Professionalism to Your Images

Within the Photoshop community brushes are so easy to find. However good actions are much more difficult to come by. Speckyboy puts together this awesome list of 16 of the best.

9. Beautiful Business Cards Found on Flickr

Eli over a Design Blurb find some quality business card design inspiration using Flickr.

10. Micromanaging a Creative

The design community looks at the situation of being micromanaged in a creative position.

11. Remember the Chrome

Arbenting looks at where Google Chrome stands after a few months in.

12. 15 Beautiful High Quality Free Fonts

Excellent selection of free fonts.

13. Steps to Choosing a Successful Colour Scheme

Tracey Grady steps you through the thought process of choosing a successful colour scheme.

Tutorials

1. Super Cool Abstract Vectors Illustrator and Photoshop

Abduzeedo rarely fails to provide awesome tutorials, this is no exception!

2. Use Adobe Illustrator to Create a Clean Website Layout

You always hear about designers using programs like Photoshop and Fireworks to draw up a web design, but Illustrator can be a handy tool for that sort of thing.

3. Create a Sketchy Work of Art in Just 10 Steps

I love the results of this tutorial!

4. How to Make a Hand Drawn Font

I’ve always had the desire to create my own font, now maybe I’ll actually do it with the help of this tutorial.

5. Create a 3D Glossy Box Logo

Another top-notch tutorial from David over at Tutorial9.

6. Mini Tutorial: Create a Swirly Masterpiece

I was curious how exactly to do this technique. Turns out it’s fairly easy and very effective.

7. This is a three part series. Installing WordPress Locally, Building Custom WordPress Theme, Exporting and Importing WordPress

WebDesignerWall breaks down the process of creating a custom WordPress theme into three easy to digest parts. This is a great series which I will definitely be diving into in more depth soon!

8. How to Create a Copper Photoshop Text Effect

I love it when text effects are done right.

9. A Scrap of Notebook Paper

This is a well written tutorial on a common technique

Freebies

1. Bright: A Free Stock Vector Iconset

Just because you can never have enough quality icons in your designers toolbox

2. Free Theme: Color Paper

Yet another free and quality theme by Liam of Function.

3. Free Watercolour Brush Strokes: Hi Res PS Brushes + Source Files

Watercolor brushes come in handy very often these days

4. Free High-Res Watercolour Photoshop Brushes Set 1

I figured I’d put the two high quality freebie watercolor brush sets together; so here’s another.

5. Freebies – Stone Textures Pack 1

Arbent has been putting together a bunch of quality freebies lately. And I love the box mockup they do for them!

6. BB Free Vectors: Birds in Flight

I could’ve used these a couple months back. Oh well, they are still awesome.

7. Free Font: Sharpy Mark

Nice free hand-written font from AJ at Phire Design

8. Free Vector Ink Trees

Hand-drawn with India ink. These are some cool vector trees!

Interviews

1. Meet Sean Hodges, Editor of PSDTuts

An interview with Sean Hodges, editor of the infamous PSDTuts

Cool New Sites I Found This Month

1. Ten Bills

An awesome new online t-shirt store for cool graphic T’s at only $10.

2. Typography Served

A site dedicated to showcasing awesome works of typography. Plus, you know I love the yellow design :)

3. The Designer’s Review of Books

Review on design books. This should be a great resource!

4. Logo of the Day

A great inspirational logo site by Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design.

5. Web Designer Depot

This site is very promising, it’s already filled with a lot of useful articles.

Conclusion

That wraps up another fantastic month in the design community. I hope you enjoyed this rather large roundup for the month of November 2008.