Use SlideDeck For:

• Product Tours
• Service Descriptions
• Explaining Complex Processes
• How-To Tutorials
• Feature Rich Slide Shows
• Landing Pages

SlideDeck is currently available as a customizable JavaScript Library. It takes only minutes to add to your website and is available as a plugin for jQuery 1.3+. See the usage documentation for more information.

Demo

SlideDeck has setup a sleek demo site for Basecamp. It shows you exactly how you could utilize their product. This could be super effective for employee training, new app training etc. The possibilities are indeed endless.

It’s very easy to identify and navigate through a SlideDeck presentation because of the tabs on the left and the windows that switch on the right. It’s an effortless tutorial, that puts the user in control of the speed they view it and whether they can come back to it or not.

More About SlideDeck

SlideDeck was created by a user experience design company, digital-telepathy. Digital-Telepathy stumbled into the concept when trying to simplify their own message and process. D-T uses SlideDeck to share ideas, processes and products in a clear and simple way.

Social

Twitter: Follow them

Facebook: Become a fan

The Giveaway:

How to Enter

• Follow @slidedeck on twitter
• Comment with what you would use it for.

The Details

• There will be 4 competition winners
• Contest will end this Friday at 11:59p EST.
• Winners will be announced on or before Monday

Winners

1. Zack C.
2. Juarez Filho
3. Jesse Anderson
4. Rob Simpson

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

4 SlideDeck Pro Licenses up for grabs, comment to win. **Updated with winners**

Brandstack, the creative marketplace for logos has an unveiled another way to market logo designs to the masses. Upstack. Upstack is a unique route for a person needing a logo, website, web design, advertisement or other creative service. Unlike the predecessor Brandstack, Upstack lets anyone build a team of hand-picked designers that are ready to burn the midnight oil to work on your project. Upstack manages all the processes by taking the client from the brief to the final design. This wastes no design time and spares no quality. They also do this without spec work which makes it something that isn’t frowned upon in the design world.

Brandstack is different from other crowd sourcing sites because the logos they market are from designs that didn’t sell in their agency ventures. Meaning, ideally a designer would make a client three logos and the two the client didn’t pick; he or she would fine tune and put on Brandstack to sell.

Wes Wilson, Brandstacks CEO says that the beauty of Upstack is that their designers are all at the top of their game in the respected industries: web design, print, advertisement, illustration & logo design. He also goes on to mention the best part about Upstack is: “Joining Upstack is joining the right against spec. Working on Upstack prokects, you will be paid upfront for your time & effort. Happy designers and happy clients. Happy happy joy joy.”

Some well known competitors, Crowdspring and 99 Designs also offer logos & identities at similar price. Their pay structure is different, paying the designer based on the work that is chosen. A client can ask for a logo and receive 50 or so logos that have been executed. The client then picks the winner and that determines who gets paid.

Brandstack

Company: Brandstack

Twitter: @Brandstack

Founded: April 2008

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

Brandstack gets a new sibling. Introducing: Upstack

Gavin Elliott is the creative mind behind DIBI conference. What exactly is this magical DIBI conference? We will get to that in a minute along with a promo code for the conference and a wicked competition to win a free ticket. But, first we are going behind the scenes with Gavin Elliott- you can also follow him on twitter.

The Skinny on Gavin

Gavin has some notable facts to bring him into the role that he is in today. He worked as a civil servant, a soldier in the Royal Corps of Engineers & ran his own business.

He now works at Codeworks as the Marketing & Creative Executive where he primarily works on looking after the Thinking Digital Conference and other projects within Codeworks.

What is your typical daily routine?

Typical doesn’t happen for me that often. Every day is usually different. I’ll generally get up at approximately 6.30am get things sorted and make myself a coffee (Starbucks ground coffee FTW) for the trip into the office. I’ll arrive around 7:40am and look over Twitter, I still don’t use an RSS feed and Twitter seems to work well for me. I like to get my emails sorted as soon as I sit down, so the music goes on and before 9am and I can usually have all of my replies done. I’ll check my diary to see if I have any meetings but my work pretty much is around the creative and ‘social’ side of Thinking Digital, DIBI then working with the other teams within Codeworks. I get up to alsorts whether it’s designing or writing. I’m pretty much busy all day. Head back home approximately 5pm before getting in to other projects or more writing. I love what I do so I probably seem like a workaholic.

What are the three things you could not live without?

1. My macbook and macbook pro (we’ll count those as one)

2. Basecamp (For managing my daily life and all the project I’m involved with).

3. My notebook where I draw or make notes. (I carry this pretty much everywhere these days.)

Do you find time to devote to all of your creative endeavors?

I do, I often think of ideas on the fly and quickly have to tell someone. I’ve set up various blogs over the years but am starting to tailor these back. I write quite often about design on my personal blog and have just had an article published in .net (Practical Web Design in the US). I enjoy writing and joining the Project 52 I’ll be publishing a specific post every week. Working out the time between design and writing can be somewhat cumbersome. I’ll be working on a small personal project over the next few months which the design community can use which I’m definitely looking forward to getting started on.

What do you think we will see in the design community in 2010?

I’m hoping there will be a lot more collaboration between designers. I think we’re now finally starting to see the community coming together and learning from each other. In past years there have been a select few who’ve been fortunate to build strong bonds with others but now with all of the social apps we’re seeing more communication with the community as a whole. I would say that the financial climate doesn’t seem to have hit the design/development community so bad over the past year or so however a lot of companies and freelancers have upped their game to hone their skills and decide what is exactly for them and then price themselves accordingly for being a professional in that particular field. 2010 could bring some very specialised designers in to the public spotlight. On top of that we’ll definitely see a surge in mobile design.

What drove DIBI conference to become a reality instead of just a dream in someones head?

We have a lot of web conferences in the UK including the likes of dConstruct, FOWA, FOWD, UX London and Build. Generally though, the conferences never reach further than Leeds/Manchester. Build took place in Northern Ireland last year so when you look at it, conferences have never been taken further North to the likes of Newcastle upon Tyne/Gateshead where DIBI will be taking place. We have a vibrant web community in the North East of England and it is an ideal place for people to travel to. With an international airport, train and ferry links it is an ideal location.

DIBI has a unique cast of characters speaking. Most of which are very prevalent in the web design community, how is it important to make sure you get people to present who are on top of their game?

We thought long and hard about what we wanted to achieve with the conference. It’s highly prevalent that you must reach out to speakers which are either doing something new or leading various areas of the industry to new places. It’s all well and good saying that you want to set a conference up but when looking at the finer details you want to create longevity and a good sense of hype and communication with the people who will be attending. Codeworks have a long standing commitment with the digital agencies in the North East of England and regularly hold ‘Think and a Drink’ evening events on a monthly basis.

What are you trying to make your audience aware of? Is it more of a conference where you talk about current trends and happenings or something that will educate them as a whole?

Definitely education. Whilst we’re expecting lots of attendees who are on top of their game, there is always the opportunity for people to learn more. Making sure that the topics are correct for the audience is paramount, attendees expect something different which is what we’re hoping to achieve with DIBI.

Will the success of DIBI determine the if the conference will be around next year or do you already have ideas of doing another?

Codeworks have had major success with other conferences such as Thinking Digital and GameHorizon and we’ll be looking to achieve the same with DIBI. Definitely look out for DIBI being around again next year.

How does DIBI set itself apart from other conferences? It seems the age of the speakers at DIBI is less than others. What else?

DIBI is one of the first two-track web conferences that we know of. The tickets are limited to 350 and we’re hoping for an equal amount of designers and developers attending. They will then form the DIBI 350, a unique set of professionals taking part in the first North East of England Web Conference. It’s unusual to bring both designers and developers together at the same time, we hope that whilst they’re in the same place as each other, relationships can be made and collaborations can happen. With regards to the speakers, we looked around to see who was available so that we could provide a good amount of variation from other conferences. The DIBI Conference itself will be running from 9am till approx 5pm then we’ll be moving on to a Think and a Drink/After Party in Newcastle upon Tyne.

THE GIVEAWAY

Here’s where you get a chance to win a free ticket to DIBI! Now, all you need to do is put the most creative reason why you want to go to DIBI (and a valid email in the comment box) and we will handle the rest. Do you want to go to learn? Network? See long lost friends? Tell us and you have a chance to get a free ticket!

Need More DIBI?

Site: dibiconference.com

Twitter: twitter.com/dibiconf

Discount for being a reader: Promo Code: “DIBI_hohoho”

*Winner Update**

This is quite possibly the hardest choice I have ever had to make on who wins based on a comment. There were so many good ones to pick from that I couldn’t make up my mind. So, I went to a proven system to help me pick. “The hat method”. I printed everyones name out, put it in a hat and stirred them all around. The winner came out to be Paddy Donnelly.

Thank you all for entering and I hope you all get to go to the DIBI Conference!

Thank you all for participating

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

**Updated w/ winner** The Creative Mind Behind the DIBI Conference

It’s the time of the year where we all close up shop, join in some holiday festivities and visit with family. (Hopefully not too much visiting) We over at FYC wanted to extend our warm holiday wishes to you and yours & a great break. We also want to thank you for being loyal readers of FYA & other FUEL brand sites.

Speaking of FUEL brand sites, recently we launched a network wide Best Of post which you should hop over and check out. This awesome Best Of site design is from the mind of Adelle Charles and the coding skills of Doug Neiner & Dan Denney. If you like it you should let them know.

In order to get in the holiday cheer I have compiled some entertaining holiday sites, giveaways & others that you can peruse at you leisure over your wonderful holiday break.

Knit Your Own Sweater Interactive Style

A nice interactive site where you can knit your own sweater and then print/email it to friends.

We Love – Eating Pies to raise money for Make a Wish

You get to make a dedicated employee eat pie, how awesome?

Ramp Champ – Holiday In Game App (iPhone)

The beautiful UI of Ramp Champ releases a free in app Christmas game. What could be better?

MacStories Apps Tree: 540 Licenses of Mac and iPhone Apps Up for Grabs Worth $10,000+!

540 Mac & iPhone Apps that are up for grabs all you have to do is enter.

What to Get for That Nerdy, Design-Savvy, Coffee-Loving, Snowboarding, Person in Your Life

Stuck on what to get your geek for Xmas? Check this out it will help for the last minute gifts.

Basic Candy Cane Text Effect in Photoshop

Get your photoshop on with some sweet Candy Cane Typography from Tutorial 9.

Beautiful Christmas Wallpapers For 2009

Xmas up your computer & get yourself into the holiday mood.

Free Christmas and New Year’s Eve WordPress Theme

A very clean Christmas Wordpress Theme.

Your Plans?

How do you plan to spend the “holidays” ? Eating, Cooking, Working, Partying, Sleeping? What cool gifts did you put on your list? Some cool Mac hardware or a big Monitor? Let us know in the comments and maybe you won’t get a big lump of coal.

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

Happy Holidays from FYC

Inspiration

Carsonified.com Redesign

On the July 9th 2009 we launched a complete redesign of Carsonified and the Think Vitamin blog. I thought it’d be fun to tell you the story of how the new site design evolved and came to life. It was an interesting journey. Read the rest of the re-design here.

The Death of the Boring Blog Post?

Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?

Twitter.com Redesign

The most significant change you’ll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we’ve moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. Read the full re-design here.

Envato Redesign

Our marketplaces were looking a bit tired in the visual department. After all, these are sites by a company whose middle name is ‘web design’! So we set about reinventing the wheel with a whole new look, starting from the top with new logos. The illustrations were updated by the super talented Kai Loon and we are usung the wonderful open source font MgOpen Modata…

Abduzeedo Gets a Facelift

After almost a year, we have a new design! As web designers we’re always thinking about what to change in order to make the site more friendly for those who are looking for inspiration and tutorials.

Suggested Redesign Case Studies

Redesigning Craigslist With Focus On Usability

At the time this article was written, Craigslist was ranked as the 28th most-visited English-language website in the world by Alexa. Despite the fact that Craigslist receives such a huge amount of traffic each month, it is also criticized for its design, which seems to be at least 10 years out-of-date.

Dear AmericanAirlines

Treat this as a serious emergency across your entire company. Your shortfalls in customer experience do not stop at the website. Your company is losing money every day because customers hate the way you treat them. And it appears that you are doing nothing to fix this.

Facebook Facelift

The Facebook Facelift is a self initiated project to challenge the form and functionality of Facebook. It’s streamlined, structured and linear interface is more comprehendible, enhancing the user experience and absorbability of content.

Trends

Letterpress Type

Orman Clark

MetaLab

Cellar App

Big Eye-Catching Typography

Made by Giant

Pallian Creative

Huge Inc.

Erskine Design

Four24

iPhone App Site Design

June Cloud

Tapbots

Typography Manual

Tweetie for iPhone

Tap Tap Tap

LittleSnapper for iPhone

Ramp Champ

Ego App

Interviews

The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals

Jason Fried hates lame meetings, tech companies that don’t generate revenue, and companies that treat their employees like children. A peek inside his typical workday.

Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners

Jim Coudal is a truly inspiring character. His company decided to shift from the standard model of selling their creative services to clients, to a model of creating products which they own and have full control over. And they’ve been very successful at it. Coudal Partners is proof that you can indeed create your own reality.

Luminous Art of Chuck Anderson

I think different people are born with all different kinds of strengths, obviously. As for artists, I think many people are probably born into a family of creative thinking people, therefore they grow up in a setting that encourages that kind of passion and creativity.

WANT MORE?

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

Best of 2009 in the Creative Industry

This tutorial represents the second installment of a tutorial over at our friends PSDTUTSPLUS! In part one, we learned how to create this shiny chain from scratch in Photoshop. In this tutorial we’ll take that shiny new chain and weather, distress, and age it using layer styles, textures, and lighting effects to create our final result.

As a bonus, one lucky person will win a free Premium Membership to PSDTUTSPLUS by commenting on this tutorial!

And the Winner is

Rick – Congrats!

Now, back to the show…

So let’s get started!

Step 1

Download this zip file. Contained within this file are the four files:

• chain.psd – a half-sized and flattened version of the PSDTUTS final product.
• rustpattern.png – a tile able pattern
• rust.,jpg – a rust texture image from ZENTEXTURES
• chain-final.psd – end result from this tutorial.

Open “chain.psd” and “rust.jpg” and leave “rustpattern.png” for later in the tutorial.

Step 2

First we want to desatureate rust.jpg by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+U and moving the Saturation slider all the way to the left.

Step 3

Drag rust.jpg into “chain.psd”, move it to the top most layer and name it, “top”.

Step 4

Change the “top” layer’s “Blend Mode” to “Overlay”

Step 5

Create 3 new layers and name them, “fx base”, ” fx top” and “fx bottom”
and move each one to just above it’s link counterpart as seen below.

Step 6

Select the “fx base” layer and Cmd/Ctrl-click on “base link” to get a selection.

Step 7

Change your foreground color to “333333″, fill the selection by pressing Opt/Alt+Del/Backspace and change this layer’s Blend Mode to “Multiply”.

Step 8

Repeat this process with “fx top” and “fx bottom”. For layer “fx top”, Cmd/Ctrl-click on “top link”, fill with gray and change the Blend Mode to “Multiply”. Now do the same for “fx bottom”.

Step 9

Let’s go back to layer, “top” and turn the “Blend Mode” back to normal.

What we’re going to do next is create a new “Channel” to use as a “bump map” for our Lighting Effects. We’ll get to that in a moment but first, open your “Channels” by going to Window > Channels.

Step 10

Right-click any of the Red, Green or Blue Channels. and select, “Duplicate Channel…”. Name this new channel, “bump” and click back on the “RGB” channel.

Step 11

Turn the “top” layer’s Blend Mode back to “Overlay”

Step 12

Select the “fx base” layer and go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects

Step 13

Change the “texture Channel to “bump” and rotate your lighting to match the image below. (It doesn’t have to be perfect, just make sure the light source is coming from the top left) Click, “Ok”.

Step 14

Select “fx top” and hit Cmd/Ctrl+F (repeat last filter) and do the same for “fx bottom”.

Step 15

Next we’re going to create a texture pattern to give our chain some real depth. Open the third and final file of the previously downloaded zip file, “rustpattern.png”

Step 16

Press Cmd/Ctrl+A to select all and go to Edit > Define Pattern… and press “Ok”.

Step 17

We’ll go back to our “chain.psd” and select the “fx base” layer. Apply a “Bevel and Emboss” by Double-clicking on the “fx” icon at the bottom of your layers palette, or going to Layer > Layer Style > Bevel and Emboss…

Step 18

Change the settings in the Bevel and Emboss dialog box to match the image below.

Step 19

Select the “Texture” box and change the Scale to “30″, “Depth” to “9″, and in the “Pattern:” drop-down select the pattern we created in step 16. Leave the Layers Style dialog box open and move on to the next step.

Step 20

In the Layer Style dialog box click on “Color Overlay” and chance the “Blend Mode” to “Linear Dodge (Add)” and change the color to “864719″.

Step 21

The final Layer Style will be “Inner Glow” change these settings to match the image below with a color of “573f29″ Now we can click “OK” and close Layer Styles

Step 22

Apply this Layer Style to “fx top” and fx bottom” by right-clicking on “fx base” and selecting “Copy Layer Style”

Step 23

Now paste this layer style on the other 2 layers by right-clicking and choosing “Paste layer Style”

Step 24

Create a new layer above “fx base” layer as seen below and name it “shadows”. Press Cmd/Ctrl+Click on the “fx base” shape layer to get a selection.

Step 25

Press Shift+M until we have our “Elliptical Marquee Tool”. We want to subtract a portion of this selection. Press and hold Opt/Alt. We can see that the minus sign is visible which tells us we’re going to subtract from this selection. Now simply drag your marquee on both sides of our original selection to subtract it from either side until you end up with a selection looking like the image below.

Step 26

Press Shift+F6 or go to Select > Modify > Feather and feather our selection by 15 pixels.

Step 27

To fill our feathered selection with black press “D” to get our foreground and background to their default state. Then press Opt/Alt+Delete/Backspace to fill with background, and deselect by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+D.

Step 28

With the “shadows” layer selected, Cmd/Ctrl-click on the “fx base” layer to make a selection. Then go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All to create a mask layer.

Step 29

Fill the mask by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+Del/Backspace to fill with background, Cmd/Ctrl+I to invert, and then Cmd/Ctrl+D to deselect.

Step 30

Change the Blend Mode to “Overlay”.

Conclusion

Click here to see the final result!

If you liked this tutorial, head over to PSDTUTSPLUS and check out part one where you will create the shiny chain elements that we started off with in this tutorial. An extensive tutorial employing several different styles and techniques that you’ll be able to use in other designs you create!

Contest Info:

• One lucky person will win a Premium 6-Month Membership to PSDTUTSPLUS!
• Just post a comment about this tutorial below
• Contest ends on Monday December 7th (5pm EST).

Sources

The “rust.jpg” image comes from ZENTEXTURES and “rustpattern.png” was created from this texture as well.

Further Reading

Check out this other great tutorial over at Fuel Your Interface, “How To Use Textures (Better Than You Used To)”

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

From New to Old: Part Two of the Off the Chain Tutorial *Winner Update

Lot’s of things are in store for ‘FUEL’ and ‘Creativity’ in the coming new year and we look forward to celebrating by giving back even more in the future!

Have a happy and safe one! -Adelle

(To enter for your chance to win, simply leave a comment below. We will pick 20 winners at random and announce here next Tuesday. Please leave a valid email address.)

And the Wave Winners Are:

Kate
DeAnne
wh1teasn0w
Mixolidia
Dani
Seantpl
Andrew
Aaron Busse
Emily
Barbara Holland
Freddy Gonzalez
Adam Powers
Nick
Kelsey
Liga
Anders P
Michael Persson
fede
Rob Mitchell
Simple

You should all be receiving invites through the e-mail addys you provided. Thanks for participating everyone!

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

Happy Thanksgiving and a big Wave for you!**Updated with winners!

Inspiration

45+ Inspiring Examples of Vintage in Web Design

Who said old style was never been cool in web design? In fact, using Vintage photo, paper and fashion became trendier now a day. If you’re looking for Vintage Web Design inspiration, then this is what your looking for. Today we will showcase some of the best sites applying vintage concept on their layout.

Read More

30 amazing packaging designs for your inspiration

Packaging is one of the aspects of design that we see the most, we get packaged products at home, work or wherever we go. The following are great example of well done packaging that add value to the product.

Read More

30 Beautiful Examples of Illustrated Twitter Backgrounds

Twitter can be a powerful tool to communicate and connect with people through words, but it can also be a great way to promote your brand through visual design. Twitter does limit you when it comes to customizing your page, but you do have full control over the background image.

Read More

35 Smart Logos With Second Thought To Make You look Twice

One more logo showcase, but in this one you really will need to look twice! Every logo is carefully picked with second thought and I think such logos are really hard to create. Get inspired, hopefully this article will help you to look different at logo creation – it’s not always just about typography, good looking font and nice animation.

Read More

50 Mind-Blowing Examples of Macro Photography

I love the amazing details you can find in these shots. When we want to we can find a whole other world, the world of the small. Its a very alien looking world to say the least but a beautiful one at that. I hope you enjoy these shots as much as I have.

Read More

Awesome Brochure and Print Design Inspiration

Print design is becoming quite influential in web design, we have seen more and more websites using big headers, lots of white space and nice font size contrasts. As I am looking for print design references for a brochure I am working on, I decided to select some nice brochures and print design examples to share with you.

Read More

Interviews

Interview With Jacob Gube, The Man Behind Six Revisions

I have had the pleasure of connecting with Jacob, the man behind the very popular design blog Six Revisions, on multiple occasions through various social sites and I recently interviewed him for SpyreStudios. I hope you’ll enjoy this interview with Jacob! Make sure you stop by in the comment section and feel free to ask Jacob questions!

Read More

Chris Spooner on Inspiration

Chris Spooner, the guy behind Blog.SpoonGraphics and Line25 was kind enough to take the time to answer some questions for us this past weekend on the topic of Creativity and Inspiration. Chris is a self employed designer, who earns a fulltime living with a mix of blogging and the odd design project.

Read More

Designer’s Studio: 7 Amazing Premium Wordpress Theme Designers Explain

The WordPress following could be compared to the one of any given religious group. By the core of this community stand the ones who have dedicated their whole portfolios and businesses to develop some of the most sold, used and appraised WordPress themes – The Premium Wordpress Theme Designers.

Read More

Interview With Steven Snell From Vandelay Design & DesignM.ag

I first connected with Steven back when I used to run Freelance Folder almost 2 years ago (Steven wrote some great articles there) and we’ve been in contact ever since. Here’s the interview I did with Steven recently, I hope you like it!

Read More

A Chat With Ace Graphic Designer Francesco Mugnai

Six months ago I returned to designing and blogging after a sabbatical of almost 5 years. As I slowly started sifting through the plethora of websites and blogs that were out there, I came across a page so blue, it brightened my whole demeanor.

Read More

Creative Interview with Richard Darell aka @Minervity

This week I had the opportunity to chat with one of my very good designer friends, founder of the well known Minervity.com, Richard Darell (@Minervity). If you are active at all on twitter you will no doubt recognize him as an extremely active member of the community as well as an excellent source of Information for Design, Tech, and Inspiration.

Read More

Design

3 Powerful Ways To Make Typography Talk On Your Website

Typography is a very powerful tool in a web designer’s arsenal. We have seen simple websites glorified in an instant with the use of proper typography. We have seen brilliant websites pale because the “type” tone they used was all wrong.

Read More

5 Helpful Tips for Design Students

Myself being a graphic design student and freelancer, I am constantly being pushed to my limits, balancing school work and client work that actually puts money in my pocket. It’s a tough challenge, but something that many of us tackle each and every day. But, what if you are a student and don’t seem to be gaining that many clients for freelance projects, leaving your portfolio full of projects that 50 other students have in theirs?

Read More

How a design blog is attractive to clients

I often find myself getting asked the question, “Does your blog bring you business, and how so if it’s mostly targeted at inspiring and helping other designers?”

Read More

Development

WordPress Theme Cheat Sheet for Beginners

There are many codes to memorize just to modify a WordPress theme, so it helps to have a mini cheat sheet if you are looking to make minor changes or even developing your own theme. This is why we have decided to list a few codes that you can probably use for reference when editing themes.

Read More

5 Rules To Write More Readable CSS Files

Complex CSS files can often be difficult to manage especially if you don’t use a structured way to write and organize their code.

Read More

jQuery for Absolute Beginners: The Complete Series

over the course of about a month, I posted fifteen video tutorials that teach you EXACTLY how to use the jQuery library. We start by downloading the library and eventually work our way up to creating an AJAX style-switcher. I’m very proud of this series; possibly more than any other that I’ve done for Envato.

Read More

Freebies

Free Peeling Paint Textures

I have collect 5 Awesome, high resolution and high quality Peeling Paint Textures. In this showcase you will find 5 awesome Peeling Paint Textures that you can use for any purpose, whether it’s commercial or personal. They’re extremely large-scale in dimension.

Read More

Abstract Grunge Photoshop Brushes & Texture Pack

Today’s first web treat is a combo pack of 5 high resolution abstract grunge painted textures and corresponding high resolution photoshop brushes.

Read More

Parting Ways: Free November 2009 Calendar Wallpaper

This post is part of the free calendar wallpaper series. Each month I create a new wallpaper featuring the current calendar. Looking at the same image over and over again is not very stimulating. Hence having a new desktop background each month should help getting your creative juices flowing.

Read More

Tutorials

Create a Twitter Icon in Six Easy Steps Using Photoshop

You do not need to be a Photoshop pro or Iconist to create a simple icon. Just have an idea of what you want to create and start from there. In this post we are showing you how to create a simple twitter icon for your blog or website in six easy steps.

Read More

How to effectively clean up a logo in illustrator with the pathfinder tool

Over the years I have been passed many a logo to “clean”. I also learned while I was in college that I was of the few that actually knew how to make a logo one shape so it would appear correctly on any background color.

Read More

Freelancing

How To Maximize Your Freelance Income

Freelancing income often seems as though it is a limited commodity. It seems limited by time, limited by ability, and limited by the number of opportunities available.

Read More

Freelancers: Do You Need a Business Plan?

If you tell someone that you’re going into business for yourself, he may ask to see your business plan — unless you tell him that you’re planning to freelance. There’s a certain assumption that freelancing is so plain and simple that anyone can do it, with no business plan needed.

Read More

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Brand Network.
Fuel Brand Network 2010 cc (creative commons license)

A Month In The Creative Community: An October Round-Up

The Grand Prize Winner will receive $500 and the People’s Choice Award Winner will receive $100. In addition, the Grand Prize Winner’s design will be featured on limited edition of @ your library tote bags!

The design must incorporate “atyourlibrary.org” somewhere so that it’s easily readable, but other than that it can be as creative as you want! Keep in mind that libraries are about more than just books—many offer career centers, classes, movies, music and much more.

Additional information can be found here.

Deadline is October 16th for submissions

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Support your library & ‘Design a tote bag’ Contest

“The reason for this move is my personal situation: I have to take care of some issues right now, and I don’t want to compromise the quality of articles on Noupe or let the website slowly fade away. But stay tuned cause i will come back soon with something new very soon. As a loyal reader of Noupe, you do not have to worry about anything. You won’t be disappointed, and you don’t have to be afraid of weird changes: Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz of Smashing Magazine are not going to turn Noupe into something completely different.

As a loyal reader of Noupe, you do not have to worry about anything. You won’t be disappointed, and you don’t have to be afraid of weird changes: Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz of Smashing Magazine are not going to turn Noupe into something completely different.”

Fuel Your Creativity reached out to Vitaly Friedman, Co-Founder of Smashing Magazine to discuss this development. In addition to being excited about this new member of the SM team, Vitaly talked about their plans for Noupe,

“Keeping Noupe a great, high-quality site that continues to serve the design community is of the utmost importance to us at Smashing Magazine. We have no intention to make it a “B-Version of Smashing Magazine” or to ever let it fall to the bottom of our list of priorities.”

FYC congratulates everyone at Noupe and Smashing Magazine and we look forward to all of the great things that are sure to come from this combination.

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Just Announced: Noupe Has Been Acquired by Smashing Magazine

About the Site

Mographics move us. There are some things that can only be communicated in motion. Cue Fuel Your Motionography, a site dedicated to everything mographics. We know that motionography goes beyond animation and flipbooks. We’re here to give you the tips and tools to nail that title sequence and to take your show reels to the next level. Looking for ways to add a new spin to post effects or VFX? You’ve rolled into the right place. FYM features articles on the latest trends and the hottest programs to check out to make you the motion master you’re meant to be. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Michael John, Co-Editor

When not making music under the moniker Masmöd, Michael John, a.k.a. The Sage That Drips the Flava, is hard at work bringing you the creative content you are looking for in order to be on top of your motionography game. As the Co-founder, Creative Director, Developer and Photographer at Colorcubic, a multidisciplinary design studio based in Portland, OR, Michael eagerly brings his years of experience in creative arts to the position of Co-Editor of Fuel Your Motionography. He’s one of the creative geniuses bringing you relevant articles, tips and tricks, reviews of the hottest tools and apps as well as interviews with the top creatives in your craft, picking their brains to give you insight into what makes them the motion masters that they are.

Follow on Twitter: @mjohn_motion | @fuelyourmotion

Christy Lai, Co-Editor

It’s almost easier to list the creative things that Christy Lai doesn’t have experience in… Okay, we’re done. This classically trained artist boasts a mile-long list of artistic endeavors that include drawing, oil, acrylic, watercolor painting, sculpture, typeface design, violin, piano and breakfast. When not partaking in one of those genres, Christy can be found creating eye-catching designs for clients in many industries through her job as Co-founder and Creative Director at the multidisciplinary design studio Colorcubic, which she founded with Fuel Your Motionography Co-Editor Michael John. As Co-Editor of FYM, Christy is charged with posting the mograph content you want to see: reviews of the latest and greatest apps, articles on what’s hot in the field as well as interviews of the geniuses who create those hot things.

Follow on Twitter: @clai_motion | @fuelyourmotion

A Round up of New Articles to Check Out

• Curated: Typography In Motion – part 1
• An Untapped Market
• 3D Movies: The Good, The Bad, The Future?
• The Little Station That Could
• The Most Expensive Music Videos Ever Made
• Curated: Top Motion Reels for October
• Using the Canon T1i for Asset Gathering
• There’s a Credit Crunch, Not a Creative Crunch

Visit the Site or Subscribe to the Feed.

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Fuel Your Motionography Launches!

Inspiration

50 Incredible Examples of HDR Photography

HDR Photography, you either love it or hate it. I have read comments reflecting both sentiments and honestly I can understand both sides. Here we find beautiful dreamlike colors and tones, almost a magical quality to it.

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34 Excellent Punctuation Inspired Logo Designs

The 34 logos showcased in the post use punctuation as a design element. Some logos feature commas, colons and semicolons while others use exclamation marks, question marks, brackets and parentheses. I found they were very creative and thought I’d share them with you. Enjoy! :)

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8 Designers Who Never Fail to Inspire

As creative people we are always looking for that spark of energy or that person who’s work never fails to get our heads thinking in a new and more creative direction. I have profiled eight people/design groups who I always look towards for inspiration with both product and graphic design.

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25 Inspiring Examples of Abstract Vector Design

After recently posting 20 amazing examples of vector artwork we share 25 inspiring examples of abstract vector designs! Check them out and be inspired!

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Incredible Miniatures by Thomas Doyle

From time to time, we run into some artists that really catch our attention, and to do that, an artist must stand outside the box, and come up with something entirely fresh and awesome and that’s just what Thomas Doyle did.

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Interviews

Interview With Rod Hunt

Rod Hunt is a talented illustrator that creates amazing retro-isometric styled vector landscapes and characters. He has an extensive portfolio featuring work from Maxim, Vodafone, BBC, and many more.

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Interview with Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen

He’s been called “the guru of Web page usability” by the New York Times and “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine. Through his Alertbox newsletter and useit.com website, he has been educating hundreds of thousands of web designers around the world since 1995.

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An Interview with Graphic Designer, Brian Hoff

Brian Hoff is a one of those folks in the design community that make logo design look effortless. His logos are sleek and elegant. A fantastic acid test for a logo is how well it displays in black and white. Given that Brian’s logo gallery is entirely in black and white, yet looks stunning, I’d say he gets an ‘A’ on that test. Oh yeah, he is also a very good web designer and blogger.

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Tomasz Opasinski Interview

Tomasz Opasinski is from Poland, works in the United States, and has a long history with numerous creative agencies. He’s currently employed as Senior Art Director at BLT & Associates, Inc. He’s mastered Photoshop, digital illustration, design, and continues to experiment whenever time allows.

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Interview with Illustrator Vera Oosterhof

Vera Oosterhof is an 18 year-old illustrator hailing from Rottum, Netherlands. She attends Minerva: Academy for Arts in the Netherlands, and hopes to pursue a career in graphic design and illustration in the near future. A member of slashTHREE, Oosterhof has strived to create fantastic artwork while maintaining a good reputation in the art community.

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Design

The Difference Between Art and Design

The subject of what separates art and design is convoluted and has been debated for a long time. Artists and designers both create visual compositions using a shared knowledge base, but their reasons for doing so are entirely different. Some designers consider themselves artists, but few artists consider themselves designers.

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Preparing InDesign Files for your Print Service

Often times when it comes to preparing files for a printer it can get really complicated really fast. Often times when I’m creating a design there are a lot of elements that I use in a file, most of which are images and fonts. It’s so complicated to remember EVERYTHING you put into a file so I discovered this cool trick you can use in InDesign to help package up all of your information for you!

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Development

Essential Tips to Help You Become A Proficient Debugger

Here you will find a few Essential Tips to Help You Become A Proficient Debugger, increase the quality of your developing skills, and the knowledge needed to write cleaner and more organized strings of code.

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CSS: Design Out Of The Box

Are you tired of your typical columned and boxed layout? It is time to learn how to break out of the box and do something creative.

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Freebies

178 Free Icons: WooFunction Free Icon Set goes Live

With this set we’ve gone for a more refined, Mac OSX style Icons (almost) – which seem to be really popular with web designers recently. We’ve also gone for a (smaller than usual) 32 x 32px size, with a few of them available also at 16 x 16px. The pack includes 178 transparent .png files.

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Vilhelmia Vector Font – Exclusive Free Download

The download of Vilhelmia (Behance Link) comes as a Illustrator file, fully editable as you see fit. It will provide a solid framework for your own remix or use as is. Comes in two styles, solid tint style and graduated tint style.

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Freelancing

10 Ways To Make Your Freelance Business Fail

If you’ve ever thought to yourself this business would be perfect if it weren’t for all of my clients, then this post is for you. We’ll give you a list of tactics that will drive those pesky clients away and quickly lead to your ultimate goal: freelancing failure.

Read More

31 Podcasts That Keep Freelancers in the Loop

The last thing you want to do as a freelancer is get out of the loop. You want to stay up to date with your skills and the best way to run your business as a freelancer.

Read More

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A Month In The Creative Community: A September Round-Up

That’s right, it’s that time of year again! Giving Web designers a chance to deliver one of its famous five-word speeches, The Webby Awards today kicked off its 14th annual call for entries. The early entry deadline is October 30, 2009.

Winners will join past Webby honorees like Jimmy Fallon (“Thank God Conan got promoted.”), Ariana Huffington (“I didn’t kill newspapers, OK?”), Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (“Creativity is a renewable resource.”), and World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee (”Free… open… Keep one Web.”) in broadcasting their speeches via the Webby Awards YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/webby), which has received 1.5 million video views to date.

“The Webby Awards give winners – from up-and-coming designers to marketing strategists to acclaimed actors and directors – a chance to shine in a global spotlight,” said David-Michel Davies. “We’re looking forward to honoring the innovators who are pushing the Internet forward in exciting new directions.”

Reflecting the Internet’s vital role in environmental protection, organizers also announced the debut of a Best Green award, honoring the sites that promote green living, business, tools and causes. For the first time, The Webby Awards will also honor the media strategies behind interactive advertising campaigns with two new categories – Best Use of Social Media and Best Use of Online Media.

So get your nominations in before it’s too late by visiting The Webby Awards website!

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14th Annual Webby Awards 2010 Call For Entries

About the Site

Your loyal readers hang on your every word. You have a bunch of subscribers who think you’re great and can’t wait to get your next post in their inbox. Heck, WE think you’re great. Fuel Your Blogging is here to make you even better. We know, we know, you’re already a kick-butt blogger who knows your stuff. We’re here to make any new blogging stuff even easier to come by. The latest news and trends, the advice on how to increase your already impressive readership. Both of them. Chats with fellow bloggers who have made it big. Done. We bet we’re going to be BBFFs (Blogging Best Friends Forever) in no time.

Tim Smith, Editor

The beauty about the world of blogging is that you can do it from anywhere and it can be about anything. Just ask Tim Smith, Editor of Fuel Your Blogging, who provides you with relevant, up-to-date and must-have content for every blogger. He’s got tons of stuff up his sleeve, including the hottest tips to improve your content and readership, write-ups on the best apps and platforms and interviews with blog royalty. Starting with an extensive background in graphic design, Tim has made a name for himself through his freelance design business and his own blogs such as “The Creative Lab.” Tim plays basketball and watches movies during the day, but at night becomes his alter ego: a dancing machine.

Follow on Twitter: @timothybsmith | @fuelblogging

A Round up of New Articles to Check Out

• Fuel Yourself Wallpaper
• Quit. Or be great.
• Create Content That Your Readers Will Care About
• Twitter Rolodex: 15 Blogger Tweeps & Tweets
• Balancing Blogging and the Rest of Your Life; a Student’s Perspective
• To Blog or Not To Blog
• Non-UX Designers Can Pay Attention to User Experience Too!
• What Is Fuel Your Blogging?

Visit the Site or Subscribe to the Feed.

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Fuel Your Blogging Launches!

Billings is the time tracking, billing, and invoicing software that changes the game completely for all of the folks struggling to conquer their accounting matters. This extremely easy to use, award winning software takes care of so many of your billing needs that you will never look at doing your financials the same way again. With invoicing and account statements all readily awaiting your minor input and template selection, the once time consuming process of preparing this paperwork has been revised in a revolutionary and time saving manner.

Billings also keeps track of your client’s payments, and allows for billing single or multiple projects to your client at a time. Billings will manage the account information for each client, not only notifying you when a client’s payment becomes past due, but by also allowing you to set up a recurring billing cycle for your client which will automatically alert you when their payment initially comes due. When Billings tallies and tabulates your payments, it also tracks your taxes as well.

Project management, an important area of the freelancing lifestyle, has gotten a few more helping hands to improve your performance in this realm through Billings. With built-in time tracking software that easily allows you to start and stop the timer throughout your system, and even tabs out the total cost of the time spent on the project when an hourly amount is provided, this software manages your projects with grace and style.

With a handsome interface and so much flexibility of control, it is easy to see why Billings has become such a popular staple among the freelance community. It even has a bevy of built-in reporting functions to give the user a quick financial overview of all the managed data that it has tracked.

With its built-in integration to work with other programs such as Daylite, Merlin, and more, Billings establishes itself as the innovative billing and invoicing software leader that it has proven to be. From its initial launch to the latest version, Billings has become a popular Mac application whose stability and flexibility continue to set this software powerhouse apart from other programs in its playing field.

The Giveaway

After having the opportunity to try out this application, we are very excited to be able to offer two of our readers the chance to take this software home with them. The fine folks over at Marketcircle have graciously given us copies of Billings 3 to giveaway to two lucky readers so that they can see for themselves what all of the fuss is about!

To win, simply leave us a comment in the section below, and make sure it is attached to a valid e-mail address. And in a week from today, we will announce the names of the winners. It is that easy. So be sure to get entered before time runs out on this fantastic opportunity for freelancers!

The Winners Announced

Congratulations to our two winners of the Billings 3 giveaway:

• William Barrera
• Teo

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Billings Review and Giveaway **Winners Announced