A Month In The Creative Community: A July Roundup
Having always been about raising up the community, the roundups we used to do, when we were Arbenting, were favorites of ours because it gave us a chance to do just that, by showcasing wonderful contributions to the online community from around the web. Hopefully, by doing so, we can either expose new people to some of the work from the past month that they had missed out on, or at least reiterate some posts that they should check out once more for measure. Either way, we wanted to do monthly versions of the roundup here on our new home at FYC, to still keep that community focus fixed on the folks we admire and respect for doing what it is they do!
We hope you enjoy the monthly editions coming at you, starting with a look back at the month of July that we have just moved on from. Here are some of the posts that we believe stood out from among the rest.
Inspiration
20 Creative Web Forms for Design Inspiration
I know lots of you love our design inspiration, so here is another dose of it. This time I have compiled together some creative web forms from around the internet. Included are contact forms, login forms, comment forms and a few others.
54 Brilliant Wordplay Logos For Inspiration
I love these logos showcased in the post today because they are unbelievably simple [well, most of them] and brilliant in their simplicity. I love words and seeing them used effectively to brand an image gives me a lot of joy. Words are very powerful and with a little imagination once can really produce fantastic logos using just words. Without my usual rambling, I present to you 54 excellent and cool wordplay logos for your inspiration.
45 Creative Advertisement Examples
After several articles, i thought, you can take a break and get some design inspirations from these really amazing advertisement examples.
50 Examples of Vintage Typography
Vintage art reminds us of a time when we were dependent less on technology and more on skill and technique. But we cannot compare the typography of 100 years ago to that of today, with the arrival of so many new typefaces, new ways to create fonts as well as new ways to get our artwork out into the world.
30 Great Examples Of Drop-Down And Sliding Menus
While building a site for a client I had to figure out the best way to display additional navigation in a horizontal menu (and not make it look like it’s 1999 again), so I went ahead and started looking for some inspiration. I’ve found many sites that had drop-down and sliding menus and I thought you’d be interested in my findings.
40 Most Creative Business Cards You Will Ever See
The title of the article explains the whole entire article, a compilation of 40 of the most creative craziest business cards you will ever see. These are some great business cards which are the perfect inspiration for creating your own business cards.
Interviews
Graphic Designer and Blogger Andrew Houle of MyInkBlog
I got an interview with the blogs creator, Andrew Houle. We discuss the impact of blogging on the graphic design and web design community, along with where he plans to bring the blog in the future. Fans of design will love this, and if you haven’t been to MyInkBlog yet I would highly recommend giving it a glance.
Interview with Colorburned Editor Grant Friedman
Creative Nerds interview with Colorburned editor and founder Grant Freidman. Grant Friedman a successful blogger and also a freelance web graphic designer. A great interview with a great blogger and designer which is a must read article.
Interview with tutorial designer Alex Beltechi
Alex Beltechi is a digital illustrator and designer from the sweet little country Romania. Beside studying design he earns money by creating photoshop tutorials for a popular tutorial site. He is excellent in designing typographic fonts and streaks into the image.
10 Questions With Roby Fitzhenry from Always Creative
Designer, Entrepreneur, Music Festival Organizer and avid Twitter-er: Roby Fitzhenry is a busy guy! I managed to track him down to ask him some questions and snag a video tour of his workspace in Bryan, Texas.
Getting To Know The Community: Chris Spooner
I’m Chris Spooner. I work as a mix of self employed designer and blogger. I enjoy producing creative design tutorials and articles for my two blogs, Blog.SpoonGraphics and Line25.
An Interview with Designer/Developer Jacob Gube
Jacob Gube is the popular figure behind web design blog Six Revisions and has a wealth of design and developments skills. I caught up with Jacob to discover a little more about his background and to gather his thoughts and opinions on a range of topics, including accessibility vs aesthetics & the future of web design.
Design
efore I start working on a website I will always ensure that I have a color scheme to work with. This is important for not only aesthetic reasons but also for creating a wonderful sense of consistency and familiarity to the website. At times clients will already have a particular color scheme in mind (say, two or three colors) or they will at least have one color they want the site to work around. If they aren’t sure then I will see what their graphical content is (logo, photos, icons, etc) for their website and see if I can find something to work with from there.
Photoshop 101: How To Use Layer Masks
In this short tutorial you will learn what layer masks are and how to utilize them for working faster and more efficiently in Photoshop.
Development
HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using
In this tutorial, we are going to build a blog page using next-generation techniques from HTML 5 and CSS 3. The tutorial aims to demonstrate how we will be building websites when the specifications are finalized and the browser vendors have implemented them. If you already know HTML and CSS, it should be easy to follow along.
Getting Started with CSS: A Practical Exercise
Learning how to write CSS is an essential lesson in any web design classroom. For you who are just starting out, here’s a beginner’s guide to help you learn the basics in proper CSS execution.
Freebies
Torn Paper Edges: 38 High Resolution Photoshop Brushes
There are a variety of brushes in this set. Some of the brushes have torn edges on 1 side; others have torn edges on all sides. This is to give you guys as much freedom in your design as possible. Feel free to download this awesome set of high resolution Photoshop brushes for creating torn paper edges and use them in your designs for free.
Free Set of Social Media Icons – Rivet Social
A set of 14 riveted brushed steel icons that not only include the basics but DesignBump, DesignMoo, and DesignFloat as well! You’ll find 14 different 64px x 64px icons in this set in .jpg format.
Freelancing
How to Compete with the Agencies
I’m going to start this article by showing you a couple of my bruises. (Okay, fellas, I know what you’re thinking. But calm down. These are ego bruises.)
The ‘Hows’ of Pricing Your Design Work
Recently I have been receiving many emails from designers asking me what’s the “best practice” for pricing design work or how much do you charge for a design. I like to start off by saying there is no “best practice”, but there are a number of factors to consider when pricing your work and services. Below are 10 factors to consider when pricing a project and your design services.
More from the Fuel Brand Network
How could we focus on community, and not bring you some of the best from the Brand? The FUEL Brand! These awesome contributions from within our Network deserved another spotlight shone on them, and we felt it would be amiss for us not to mention them as well!
Fuel Your Apps
9 Reasons To Attend an App Conference – Straight From the Attendees Mouth’s
Fuel Your Apps was recently at the Awesome Inc Mini App conference. (Full write-up coming soon.) During this time the app lovers and creators had time to learn and hang out hear stories of others failures and successes.
Fuel Your Branding
Why do we feel better about some products than we do about others?
Ever notice how you feel better about some products than you do about others? Whether you’re shopping for blue jeans, a new iPhone, Nikes, or a Coke, it’s not just about having a phone, shoes or something to drink—and it hasn’t been for a long time. Jeans, athletic shoes, television sets, MP3 players, even automobiles today are functionally are all pretty much the same. They work and they’re easy to come by.
Fuel Your Coding
jQuery Custom Events: They Will Rock Your World!
Ok, maybe they won’t exactly “Rock Your World” but they might completely change the way you look at your jQuery development. At the very least, I hope this simple technique will help you build clean, reusable and extendable front-end code.
Fuel Your Photography
A couple days ago I asked a question on Twitter that got a lot of different and refreshing responses. I asked “If you had one word, what would you say makes a good photograph?”. Here are some of the answers I got: inspiration, passion, persistence, timing, perception, captivating, feeling, emotion, impact, story, and composition. Tweeple – well said!
Fuel Your Writing
How to be the Secret to Your Own Writing Success
I have failed at almost every single fiction writing goal I’ve set in the past 18 months.key-to-success. I know what you’re thinking. How is this failure of a writer going to help me get better? You get to benefit from my mistakes. Actually, it would be more accurate to say you get to benefit from your own mistakes successes. That’s what I’ve realized: we writers hold ourselves to too high of a standard.
An Added Word of Thanks
If you like this post and the other great content from Fuel Your Creativity then make sure you thank Brandstack for all of their support. Brandstack is a collective one stop launch pad for all of your beginning start-up needs. Anxious to dive into the online business market, but not sure exactly how or where to start? Let Brandstack help, from Domain registration to Logo design, and a few other key services coming soon to help you get your branding underway, without the big price tag carried by major agencies. Brandstack provides an opportunity for designers to sell their unused designs that they have spent their time creating, only to have the project dissolved or disappear leaving them uncompensated for hours of their hard work. This recovers revenue for the designers while generating savings that are passed on to the customer.
Grab the Feed
Awesome roundup, it was a busy month and I definitely missed a few of these great articles since I’m way behind in my RSS reading. Great job Angie!
It was a really busy month in the community and narrowing it down to post that didn’t just go on forever was difficult lol. Glad you found some new reading material :)
Great collection as always Angie. And thank you.
Thanks so much, glad you liked it :)
Thank you for the mentions Angie!
No problem Grant! I love those brushes!
Hey Angie, thanks a lot for the mention, nice feeling to see my post alongside such great articles :)
No problem Jon, it was a great showcase! Designing both a great looking and well functioning drop down menu is a feat!
Great round up! Thanks for mentioning my interview with Chris and including my icon set from SixRevisions!
Best,
J
No problem John! I absolutely love those icons!
Love these roundups, I always catch something that I missed that month. Thanks for including the interview I did :)
That’s why I love them too. I try to hit everyone I come across and usually find at least one article I missed. Great interview!
Good stuff Angie! Thanks for including my Logo Roundup Post! :-)
Thanks Sneh! You had some really great logos in the roundup. So many ideas I wish I had thought of lol.
Excellent stuff this month! I loved your 50 examples of vintage typography, so I tweeted it of course, and that has been my most retweeted-tweet to date. My bit.ly account says that 732 click-throughs from my tweet. I lost track of the retweets. It is a really nice collection. I Iook forward to more of your articles :)
Wow, great click-through rate! Thanks so much for the RT!
Pretty Awesome roundup! Thanks Angie.
Thanks Henry, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Great recap. So so much content in this post I have it bookmarked and will come back to it again and again and not get it all!
that is a great round up and helpful