In this tutorial, VECTORTUTS will show you how to create a fun 3D pixel font type treatment. Using a free font, gradients, and Illustrator 3D filter, you will easily create a type treatment that you can apply to many other fonts.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Recently, with the WordPress developers making their way on WordPress 2.7 (Crazyhorse), they’ve decided to post a couple of surveys (WordPress 2.7 Navigation Options Survey and WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2) for the WordPress community, allowing them to add their opinion on certain design elements of the new Dashboard and Admin Panel.

The surveys cover the following:
- Navigation sections and labels
- Where to put the search box
- Where to put the Add New Post button/favorites menu
- How to label the Future Publish/Edit Timestamp function

Popularity: 1% [?]

These three free zombie vector graphics are waiting to get their infected chops around your illustrative designs. Along with skulls and other disturbing graphics, they are a popular choice for designers and illustrators and extremely fitting on the run up to Halloween!

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When scouring the design field, searching for stand-out artistic expression and fluid composition, one area that should always catch the eye, is poster design. Moreover, concert poster design, which has produced some truly revolutionary artists and works for generations now, should be paid particular attention to. Fluidity of design is especially key in poster layouts, as there is a finite space, and numerous points to capture and pass along within these confines.

The designer must encapsulate not only the band’s attitude and tone with the work, but also impart the feel of the album or tour that the poster is announcing. And speaking of announcements, the posters must seamlessly incorporate the typography that tells the reader the names, dates, and places of import. All the while maintaining the impact of the piece, and not overworking or overfilling the area and detracting from it’s overall arrangement.

So many shining examples of this exist in the art community, and in this episode of Monday Inspiration Smashing Magazine presents 60 inspiring concert poster designs from 10 amazing artists. The links in the article will take you to sites dedicated to showcasing other wonderful works from the concert poster genre.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Over on the ASP.net weblogs, Microsoft has just announced that jQuery will ship with future releases of Visual Studio. The library will be supported with Intellisense code completion, and will work nicely alongside ASP.NET AJAX. Microsoft will also contribute tests and patches to the project, and will be shipping it “as-is”, meaning developers will be able to take advantage of all the existing jQuery libraries and samples.

Currently, developing Javascript on ASP.NET typically involves the ASP.NET AJAX framework, Microsoft’s own JS offering. While it’s certainly a powerful framework, it slots in as the Prototype of the ASP world, and lacks some of jQuery’s terseness and simplicity. On the announcement blog, Scott Guthrie identifies some jQuery samples to demonstrate the power of the library, and explain why it was chosen to be part of the platform. Scott Hanselman has an interesting demo on his Computer Zen blog, demonstrating the nature of the integration.

Similarly, Nokia will be making jQuery available on their Web Run-Time platform. The library would be distributed on all phones that include the run-time, enabling developers to use jQuery when building applications for the platform.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Digg.com is one of the most popular social networking sites, allowing you to discover and share the content all over the web. In this tutorial Design Shack is going to simulate their signup form, with unique features such as their dynamic tooltips that give you a hint on each field that is to be filled. The same approach will be adopted for displaying validation messages.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A lot of bloggers enjoys the “magazine” WordPress themes. Even if there’s a lot of Magazine themes available, nothing is better than creating your own. CatsWhoCode have compiled 6 excellent tips and tricks to help you to create a killer WordPress theme.

1. Conditionnals comments.
2. Static page as a homepage (With PHP!).
3. Multiples queries in homepage.
4. Using custom fields to display thumbnails on blog homepage.
5. Killer navigation menu.
6. Tabs.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The scrollbars on browser windows are not styled by the website itself, or even generally by the browser. They come from the operating system itself.

The desire to customize the style of these scrollbars is strong. When you are starting out, it feels like something you should be able to do with CSS. Complicating the issue, if you search around for CSS to change/customize scrollbars, you’ll probably find it. The problem is that in IE 5.5, there was proprietary browser extensions to change the look of your scrollbars with attributes like “scrollbar-face-color”. IE 5.5 is long gone, and the concept of allowing that control in CSS is gone with it.

There are situations though, where you will strongly wish you had control over the look of a scrollbar. For instance, when the scrollbar isn’t for the entire browser window. You have a small section on your page that you need to control the height of, but contains content which overflows the container. You may set the overflow of that container to “auto”, and get your default scrollbar. Depending on the design of the site, this scrollbar may look awkward and not at all desirable.

Popularity: 1% [?]