Practika is a free set of 11 practical and useful high-quality icons, designed by DryIcons, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons are available in resolutions 64×64px, 128×128px and 256×256px, in 32-bit transparency PNG. These icons can be used for a variety of purposes — in particular, in portfolios and in corporate designs.

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This post is a collection of over 30 websites that showcase the color blue in all its shades and boldness. What do you think of all these blue websites?

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Mozilla Firefox has always been considered a “user-friendly” browser, but with all the customizable extensions, it has become probably the most “developer-friendly” browser as well. We have collected the best FFX dev scripts available, and installing them takes just a few clicks. And don’t forget; make sure you have downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0 as well!

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Photoshop is often the right tool for web design, especially if you’re creating a design using numerous images and brush effects. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a complete grunge home page design. We’ll design the header, sidebar, body, footer, and style everything to work together in a heavily textured and worn design.

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Thirteen versions and twenty-one years after the very first Illustrator, Adobe is rolling out beta versions of Illustrator CS4. After so many iterations, you might wonder what Adobe could possibly do to make Illustrator CS4 worth the cost of the upgrade. In this preview, I am going to highlight the most noticeable changes with big scoops of screenshots and video to give you a real taste of the new Illustrator. Note: this preview is done on the Windows version of Illustrator CS4 Beta.

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Show your love for good ‘ol WP!

I’ve seen several creative WordPress fan art lately, which brought  me to think if there are any official or unofficial collection of all WordPress logos on the net.  If you’ve got any WordPress fan art yourself, you may want to consider writing the WordPress team to submit it for all the world to see, or use, or whatever… maybe to just brighten up their day.

The WordPress fan art above was from WordCamp Philippines. Matt was quoted to “really like this art work”, though I’m sure he favors every fan art made for his WordPress work.  We’ve seen this fan art on t-shirts and bags… they really rock!

What makes me wonder though is “can people copy these logos on shirts”, some of them really are cool and would be great to wear a few myself.  Is there a way to ask permission to use them?  hmmm…  of if you would like to make fan art, would that require a permission from WordPress? double hmmmm…  wonder how that works? anyone?

Set your browsers and travel to this fan art page … and this one too.

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Snook read Dave Shea’s article on CSS Sprites using jQuery to produce animation effects, he felt like playing around with things to see what could be done but accomplish it with a simpler HTML structure (no need for adding superfluous tags) and simpler code, too.

Changing the position of the background image felt to be the best approach to creating the type of effect we’re looking for. Snook has shown us Background-Position plugin and published an article “Using jQuery for Background Image Animations” about how to use it. The script to put this altogether is really straightforward. The animation needs to run when the user moves their mouse over and out of the navigation. The key thing to note is that any animation is stopped before attempting to animate again. This avoids animations queuing up from repeatedly moving the mouse in and out of the element.

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JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages in web development. It’s simple, yet very powerful, and the number of ways that it can be used are almost limitless. That’s why it’s so important to gather advice from those who have gone before you. Here are 10 tips from well-respected web developers within the JavaScript community.

1. Don’t Overlook Binding – Christophe Porteneuve
2. Use JavaScript libraries instead of Flash or other animation – Dave Shea
3. Write JavaScript with micro-templates – John Resig
4. Bind Methods To Objects – Ayman Hourieh
5. Rely on event delegation – Andrew Tetlaw
6. Know when to use event delegation – Chris Heilmann
7. Make AJAX responses cacheable – YUI team
8. Put scripts at the bottom of the page – YUI
9. Don’t use the Eval constructor – Julien Lecomte
10. Assignment versus equality operators – Peter-Paul Koch

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