A Month In The Creative Community: An August Roundup
Another month has worked its way off the calendar and into the past, pushing the year towards its end, which means that it is time for the Fuel Your Creativity monthly roundup of the best that the online design community had to offer in August. With Autumn on the rise, the schedules get busy, so in case you missed any of these fantastic contributions we have taken the time to put them together for you. Even if you didn’t miss them, these are the posts, tutorials, freebies, interviews and more that we feel deserve a second look. So make your way through the list, and don’t worry about falling behind on your reading in September, we’ve got your back.
Inspiration
25 Magazine-Style Layouts for Your Design Inspiration
Magazine and news-style designs have become increasingly popular. Content management systems like WordPress have a wide selection of themes for this type of site, making it easy for the average website owner or blogger to achieve a look that is similar to a news site. In this post we will feature 25 sites that provide inspiration for magazine-style layouts.
60+ Unusual Business Card Ideas & Designs
Most business cards tend to be forgotten, which is why they are not effective. Business cards can become great interactive elements with the added ability to have custom shapes, different materials and matte finishing along with a great design idea.
20 Insane Vintage And Grungy Typographic Poster Designs
I love typography! And good for us type lovers, it’s very difficult to design something without it. Posters are no exception. So I thought I’d go find some typographic posters that are both vintage and grungy looking. I hope you enjoy them.
25 Portfolio Sites Using jQuery Amazingly Well
jQuery is one popular library, and for good reasons! It’s easy to use, flexible, and most of all there’s a lot of jQuery tutorials and plugins available out there. Today we will take a look at some portfolio sites that use jQuery and different jQuery plugins to enhance either their look, functionality or usability.
Dress Your Screens With 53 Breathtaking Typography Wallpapers
I love Typography wallpapers! Who doesn’t? Creatives especially have a thing for typography that is unlike anything you’ll see in designing. As children we are taught letters, the very letters that become such objects of affection when we grow up, that it is sometimes quite amazing to see them affecting adults like that. Letters are powerful, they are beautiful and typography is not just an art, but a religion.
Interviews
After this long stop, we are releasing an interview with a really talented artist Huseyin Ozkan. He is an Illustrator, and Animation Student and in this interview he will give an inside look to his life and jobs.
An Interview With Elliot Jay Stocks
Elliot Jay Stocks is a well known designer whose client list includes Wordpress, Blue Flavor, The Beatles, EMI Records, and Carsonified. His work is frequently featured in online and offline publications, showcased on various ‘inspiration’ websites, and used as an example to design students around the world of how accessible web design can still look beautiful.
Interview with Design Bump’s John Campbell
John Campbell is the Maryland-based entrepreneur and developer who is responsible for Design Bump, a Digg-like website that allows the design community to share content in one convenient and easy-to-find place.
Interview with Bubblefriends Creator Sascha Preuß
Sascha works as a freelance Illustrator. He creates massively cute characters and in the case of the BUBBLEARMY, evil cute characters. In this interview, he talks about his training in drawing and design. Also, we’ll discover where he finds inspiration, his workflow and work environment, his passion for drawing and character design, as well as what we can expect from Sascha in the future.
Chictopia Now : An interview with Helen Zhu
Instead of trying to fit in, Chictopia has features where I can find inspiration from people by my body type, age and or coloring. Not that I always look for those things in style, but it was nice to look around a site where there was lots of search capabilities. I also really love the Chictopia community which really has a great following. Here we talk with co-founder Helen Zhu about how she put together this unique network and how bloggers can really leverage the community.
This month’s interviewee is Sudtipos’ spokesman, who became famous for drawing and programming some of the most intricate script fonts ever digitized. Meet Alejandro “Ale” Paul, a man who likes to raise bars
Design
The Do’s and Don’ts of Dark Web Design
Dark web designs are very popular and can have an elegant and creative appeal. They are also perfect for many types of client work however, they are not suitable for every website and should be used only when appropriate. In spite of the striking visual impact that these dark designs can have, many designers don’t know how to effectively pull them off without turning off the visitor.
10 More Typography Mistakes You Might Be Making
The goal of this post is to help designers and clients understand the importance of good type skills, while avoiding some of the common mistakes. Please keep in mind that most of these mistakes are subjective and can be changed varying on the project, goals, circumstances, or for a specific cause.
8 Ways to Drive a Graphic Designer Mad
As everyone knows, graphic designers are the reason there are so many wars in this world. So to do my part to save the world from them, i made a list of things you can do when working with a graphic designer, to assure that they have a burn-out and leave this business FOREVER.
Development
Learn How To Create Your Own jQuery Plugin
The basis of creating a plugin for jQuery is actually quite simple. You don’t have to be a jQuery ninja, nor do you have to sweat blood to make it work. It’s as easy as script writing!
@font-face and 15 Free Fonts You Can Use Today
Fonts are a huge part of design (as we all know). Text on the web needs to be much more dynamic than in any other media. We have solutions like Cufón, sIFR, etc. but perhaps one of the better options is using @font-face in CSS.
CSS code structure for HTML 5: some useful guidelines
In this post I want to illustrate some useful guidelines about how to implement a well organized CSS code structure in view of introduction of HTML 5 markup language. They are not general rules but simple suggestions you can follow in order to improve the readability, manageability, and general organization of CSS code. These suggestions are especially useful if you have to work on complex CSS files that otherwise can be difficult to manage.
Freebies
Free tool: Symbol Signs collection
This is a collection of 50 common used signage symbols, professional designed. The symbols signs are free of charge available as an OpenType font format, allowing you to easily add symbols & icons to your sign and wayfinding design. All the symbols have been designed & created by Sander Baumann and set to the proportions of a regular typeface, so you no longer need to copy/paste the symbols into your designs.
Free Icons: Grunge Peeling Stickers Social Media Icons
This Icon Pack is chuck full of 20 Grunge Peeling Social Media Stickers free for use in your personal and commercial projects without attribution. Each icon is in .png format sized at 128×128px with transparent backgrounds. The pack comes with a .PSD source file so that you can customize your own icons.
Freelancing
3 Reasons Why Clients Don’t Choose You
It happens to even the best design firms; you send out a proposal, you have a face-to-face meeting, and then you receive the email. Thank you for your proposal and your time to discuss our project with us, but we have decided to go with another firm.
Are These 5 Mistakes Holding You Back from Freelance Success?
In this post, I’ve created a list of 5 big mistakes that could be holding you back from freelance success. Make a little progress with these, and your freelancing will see some definite improvement.
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
Bootstrapping: What it is and how to do it.
We all have great ideas floating around in our heads but how do we get them out into the world without any help and startup cost/outside help? Bootstrapping. This is a term that is thrown around a good amount with start-ups and is not something that is “explained”.
Fuel Your Branding
Brand Identity: Start an Evolution
Maintaining a consistent brand identity has one massive benefit – recognition. That recognition leads to trust. People don’t like strangers and certainly don’t like change. It upsets them, makes them uncomfortable.
Fuel Your Coding
Creating Your First Ruby on Rails Application From Scratch
Ruby is one of the easiest scripting languages I have ever seen; simple enough for non-tech people, powerful enough for advanced programmers and best of all, it doesn’t have a complex syntax or keywords to be memorized. Instead it is written in a simple English syntax. This tutorial which will help you create a basic Ruby on Rails application, without worrying too much about Ruby basics for now
Fuel Your Illustration
Below are the steps for figuring out the width and rotation of an even, radially repeating design. Note: this can be done cheaply and might look right to do it by “eye” but I wanted to figure it out because I’m a perfectionist.
Fuel Your Interface
Interface 101 – Part One: Basic Interfaces
Before we dive deep into which icons are most effective or best practices of interface development, let’s cover some basics, shall we? Interface 101 is a basic training on the terminology and theory of interface design. In the first two installment, we will discuss just what an interface actually is, and the differences between basic and advanced interfaces.
Fuel Your Photography
Four tips for capturing genuine emotion in your photographs.
Fuel Your Writing
Getting Back to the Basics With Your Writing
Many times we writers tend to complicate things. We get stuck on ideas (or a lack there of) and forget that sometimes it’s the simplest of things that make the most sense. This poster may be intended for middle school kids, but I think it speaks to writers of all ages:
Grab the Feed
good stuff! Great collection..I think bookmarking just became my new hobby..
Thanks! LOL, Bookmarking has been a hobby of mine for a while. My delicious account is packed to the brim :D
great list, thank you..
You’re very welcome :)
Thanks for featuring our Interview with Huseyin OZKAN. The list is great to make sure we didn’t miss any of the good things this month, keep the nice work :)
No problem! It was a great interview!
Wow Angie!! You did a spectacular job on this round-up!! I’ve got to say (and this isn’t something I’m saying just because I’m apart of Fuel now) your round-up is the best I’ve seen!
Wow, thanks so much Tim! I really enjoy the process of putting them together :)
An excellent and inspiring round up this month! Kudos.
I loved this round up! I found several articles that I really enjoyed, and found inspiring. Thanks for putting it together.