CSS Hunt » Tips

15 Excellent Slideshow Presentation in Web Design

admin — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 06:02:41 +0000

20 Beautiful New Year 2011 Desktop Wallpapers

admin — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 03:59:26 +0000

The New Year is the day that marks the beginning of a new calendar year, and is the day on which the year count of the specific calendar used is incremented. In many cultures, the event is celebrated in some manner. Many cities across the world celebrate the New Year.

Here i have a showcase of New Year 2011 Wallpapers to decorate your desktop. Enjoy!

8 famous design & development blogs

admin — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 13:37:30 +0000

If you come on a blog with a specific emotion, you may like it best if it caters you with the apt ambience. I’ve scrounged the web to enlist twelve blogs that strike you with such effects as the chill, thundering, or sometimes the freshness of the morning sun. The links below sport the aura of dynamic weather conditions.

Feel the chill, thunder or the sootheness. Lets Go.

1. Smashingmagazine

Sunshine on a snowy day glows the Smashing Magazine

2. Net Tutsplus

It’s tedious and humid at the Nettuts.

3. Noupe

Heavy showers on the Noupe.

4. Speckyboy

Speckyboy seems silent before the storm.

5. Tutorialzine

The Tutorialzine is struck by the deep dark total eclipse.

6. Web Designer Depot

Scorching summers set in the webdesignerdepot.

7. Sixrevisions

Sixrevesions seems to be surrounded by atomic dust.

8. Queness

Dark fog all around and Rainbow on queness.

4 nice Javascript base Desktops

admin — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 13:10:23 +0000

Here are some nice examples of Javascript base Desktops love to see again and again and have worth to use please reply feedback if you like these.

1. Comet Desktop

The backend is written in Perl and Mysql. The front end consists of a heavily modified qWikiOffice, ExtJS, and various libraries and widgets created by programmer. Visit here

2. Jsdesk

This is a ‘Web 2.0′ Ajax PHP/MySQL desktop website that uses the extjs code library. Visit here

3. Jquery Desktop

Desktop powered by Jquery. Visit here

4. Sencha Desktop

Demonstrates how one could build a desktop in the browser using Ext components including a module plugin system. Visit here

10 Mini Websites with Javascript Animation

admin — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:03:52 +0000

Have a look at these beautifully crafted javascript animated vcard websites. It’s simple, beautiful and simply inspiring!

20 Best Examples Of Single-Letter Logos

admin — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:45:39 +0000

Logos are either purely graphical or are composed of the name of the organization.We created inspirational logo posts a few times but you know logo inspiration never ends.Everyday wonderful logos are created by really talented artists so we have to follow logo galleries.Today’s logo post is a specific one.Single Letter logo designs.Single letter logo designs are as you understand is created with only one letter and below logos are the brilliant examples of single letter logo designs.hope you lke the collection.

Antarctica

hanover zoo

Maverick’s Custom Trousers

Hampster

Alfredo Baez Photography

Jazz Castle

Modini

Painting Company

Orangee

Bluefish

Ashley, Singer

Bee

Tonys/SeaFood

Water Drop

Utensil labs

Shrink Media

Endicott Gulls

Genie

Northridge Homes

Abird

Design a Skin-Textured Typography Scene

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:30:03 +0000

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a 3D-looking textured text effect in Photoshop without the need for any 3D tools or applications. All we need to be able to create our text effect is a good idea of perspective so that we can modify light distribution with the help of color correction tools (Burn Tool and Dodge Tool). The techniques and concepts you’ll learn here can be used to apply any kind of texture (not just skin texture) to any text for simulating depth and lighting precision.

By:Sebastiano Guerriero

Author: Sebastiano Guerriero

Sebastiano Guerriero is a 23-year-old Italian Graphic Designer who’s spent the last two years studying graphics by himself. He’s the author of WeGraphics, a blog that publishes graphic design tutorials, articles about Graphic Design, and graphic design freebies. You can follow him on Twitter (his username is @wegraphics).

Tutorial Resources

Scratched Metallic texture by WeGraphics
Skin texture
Meat
Fork and knife
Doughboy font by Typecode

Step 1: Create a New Document in Photoshop

Let’s start by creating a new document in Photoshop. Since I want to create a graphic that can be used as a desktop wallpaper, my document’s size is rather large, 1920×1200 pixels — but you are free to choose the size of your canvas to best suit your needs and preferences.

Step 2: Create a Radial Gradient to the Background

Apply a radial gradient to the Background layer using the Layer Style dialog window; double-click on the layer to access the window. From the Layer Style dialog window, select “Gradient Overlay” and add a gradient with the Style option set to Radial, and the gradient going from a light red (#e45f5f) to a darker red (#7a2424).

With the Layer Style window still open, you can move the center of the gradient by simply clicking and dragging over the canvas. Notice that if the Layer Style dialog window is closed, you won’t be able to move the gradient. I’ve moved the center of the radial gradient to the top left of the canvas.

Step 3: Add a Texture to the Background

I love to “dirty up” the backgrounds of my compositions a little bit using grunge and paper textures. So let’s download a texture from my Scratched Metallic textures set (the free sample will work fine) and paste it into our document. Alternatively, feel free to experiment with textures of your own, or check out the Freebies section here on csshunt.com.

Press Ctrl/Cmd + T to activate Free Transform mode and scale down the size of the texture to fit our canvas.

Set the layer’s Blend Mode to Overlay and reduce its Opacity to 20%.

At this point, I think the focal point of the composition needs more light. So create a new layer and move it between the Background layer and the texture layer. Grab the Brush Tool (B) and set it up so that you have a large, soft, white brush with Hardness at 0%. Then, just click once on the canvas to create a round brush stroke. Reduce the Opacity of the layer in case you think the light effect is too strong.

Step 4: Adding the Text

We can now add the text. It’s essential to choose a good font. The idea is to work with a skin texture, so a round, bold font is what we need to obtain for an awesome and high-impact composition. After surfing through many font directories like dafont.com, I’ve found a free font called Doughboy that is perfect for our graphic. If you want to use that font, download it and install it.

With your chosen font, write something onto the center of the canvas using the Horizontal Type Tool (T). Make the font size fairly large because it is the main element of our piece. The word I wrote was simply the word “Skin.”

The first thing we have to modify is the text’s color, so right-click on the text layer in the Layers Panel and select Blending Options from the menu that appears.

In the Layer Style dialog window, add a pink linear color gradient going from #ab6e6e to #d19494.

Secondly, add a soft drop shadow (color should be #3f0202).

Step 5: Adding the Skin Texture to the Text

The process of applying the texture to the text is very simple and can be used to apply any kind of texture to any kind of text. The technique I will share with you is based on the concept of light and shadow distribution.

Let’s start by downloading the texture and pasting it into the canvas.

Resize it and locate the texture above the letter “S”. We will work on one letter at a time. Take in mind that if you resize the texture, you will add finer details to each letter.

By setting the texture layer’s Blend Mode to Overlay, you can preview how the texture will affect the letter.

To mask out the extra parts of the texture, Ctrl/Cmd + click on the text layer to select around it, and afterwards, add a layer mask onto the texture layer by pressing the Add layer mask button in the Layers Panel.

Step 6: Create the 3D Effect on the Type

To create the illusion of perspective so that the text will have depth, we won’t be using 3D software. We will only rely on two powerful Photoshop tools: the Burn Tool and the Dodge Tool (O) to manually paint the illusion of depth.

The Burn Tool is used to darken areas of objects on the canvas. The Dodge Tool does the opposite; it lightens up areas that you apply it to. They both work like brushes and in fact, you are free to use the brush library with them.

We will start using the Burn Tool to darken the edges of the letter. Dark edges give the idea of depth. Gently paint over the areas indicated by the red arrows using a large, soft brush with the Exposure at around 50%.

Reduce the brush size and increase the Exposure. Paint over the edges again, and you’ll see that, this time, the effect will be more visible. By varying our strokes and options, we will be able to create realistic highlights.

Continue using the Burn Tool until you’re satisfied with the result. Here is what I ended up with:

To give the letter even more depth, switch to the Dodge Tool and paint over the center of the letter (indicated with red arrows below).

Step 7: Apply the Texture to All the Letters

Use the same method we used in Step 5 and Step 6 to add textures to other letters, as well as to give them depth by using the Dodge Tool and the Burn Tool.

Step 8: Split Up the Letter “i”

At this point of the process of designing this piece, I had an idea: these letters look like food. In particular, the letter “i” makes me think of a small salami — Hey, I’m Italian, and food is a big part of our culture!

So what I wanted to do was cut the letter “i” to make it look like it is split open. There’s a complication to doing this, though: each letter is a combination of 2 layers, the text + the texture. To divide a letter in two parts, we have to create a single layer for that letter.

Let’s do that now. First, hide the visibility of all the texture layers (for the moment) so we can focus our attention on the text layer.

Rasterize the text layer by right-clicking on it in the Layers Panel and then choosing Rasterize Layer from the menu that appears.

Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and select the “i”.

Press Ctrl/Cmd + J so you duplicate only the “i” on a new layer of its own.
Next, we will remove the letter “i” from the original text layer. Again, select the letter “i” (or go to Select > Reselect), switch to the text layer and press Delete. What you should obtain at the end is a layer containing the letters “s”, “k”, “n” and a separate layer containing the letter “i”.

You can now make all the texture layers visible again.

Select both the “i” layer and its texture layer in the Layers Panel and then merge them into one layer (Ctrl/Cmd + E).

Use the Pen Tool (P) in Paths mode to create a path that includes the top part of the letter “i”.

Press Ctrl/Cmd + Enter to convert the path you just made into a selection.

Make sure to have the “i” layer as the active layer in the Layers Panel. Use the Move Tool (V) to move the selection up, separating the upper and lower portion of the letter.
Also, if you press Ctrl/Cmd + T (Free Transform mode), you can rotate the selected area slightly to the right so that it looks like it has just been sliced. If you want to rotate the bottom part, the method will be the same.

Step 9: Fill the Insides of the Letter “i” with Meat

To support the idea of depth, we need to fill the bottom part of letter “i”. To do so, download this image of a piece of steak and open it in Photoshop.

With the help of the Pen Tool, make a selection on top of the steak (shown below).

Copy and paste the selection in the main canvas. Use Free Transform (Ctrl/Cmd + T) to rotate and resize the meat to match the dimensions of the letter.

Step 10: Accent the Piece with a Fork and Knife

We can add even more details to the scene. I’d like to add a fork and knife element to the piece to reinforce the idea of the letter “i” being sliced open. Download this image containing a fork and a knife. Use the Pen Tool (P) to extract the cutlery from their background and then place them in our main document.

Since both the fork and the knife are too flat, duplicate the layers and set the duplicated layer’s Blend Mode to Overlay in order to increase their colors’ contrast. After doing this, remember to merge each original layer with the duplicated ones because we have to move and rotate the 2 objects, and it’s more comfortable to work with only 2 layers.

Step 11: Modify the Fork

Place the fork at the bottom of the first letter using the Move Tool (V). We want to modify the fork to create the impression that it is poking the first letter (“S”). So add a layer mask to the fork layer, grab a round, black brush with the Hardness at 100% and mask out the upper part of the points of the fork.

Next, select the layer with the letter “S” on it in the Layers Panel. Grab the Burn Tool (O) from the Tools Panel and use it to darken the small areas where the fork should be poking into the letter. This way, we create the idea that the points of the fork is poking into the inside of the letter.

Step 12: Increase the Contrast of the Composition

The last step is to increase the contrast of the entire composition. There are several ways to obtain this result, but what I will illustrate in this tutorial is the use of a Gradient Map adjustment layer to boost the contrast. To create this adjustment layer, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. Set up the Gradient Map adjustment layer so that the gradient is going from white to black. Move this layer on top of all the other layers and, finally, set the Blend Mode of the layer to Overlay and Opacity to 20%.

Tutorial Summary

Finito! We’ve finished! We created a text effect that involves superimposing a texture onto it, and then refined our work using the Burn Tool and Dodge Tool. We performed a couple of photomanipulation techniques, including slicing up a letter into two pieces and filling the insides with some meat, as well as making it look like as though the first letter is being punctured by a fork.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. I recommend experimenting with your own textures and fonts to create your very own textured, 3D type. (And if you do, don’t be afraid to leave a link showing your work in the comments below.)

Download Source Files

skin_textured_typography (ZIP, 15.10 MB)

7 Tips to Help Freelancers Who Charge by the Hour

admin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:30:37 +0000

Freelance work is a numbers game. There’s only a tiny hourly cost margin between prosperity and ruin. It is a hard decision how you actually need to charge for your work. I don’t think there’s one answer to it. And neither do I think you should blindly follow anyone’s advice when it comes to how you should charge.

The best way to start is to look around and see what your competitors fellow freelancers in the same niche tend to offer–that’s what your client is likely to be used to. The next step is just trying different frequently used models. Knowing the market and knowing yourself can help you make smart choices about your hourly rate and income before you hang out your shingle.

Yes, there are many disadvantages in charging hourly, but I know from experience that in many cases you will still have to charge an hourly rate. So, in case you are trying to learn how to properly charge per hour, here are seven essential tips and tricks!

1. Do Some Research

Overcharging for freelance work will obviously turn away customers, but undercharging will undervalue your work, make it difficult to make ends meet, and drive freelance hourly rates down for all of your peers.

Before quoting your first hourly rate project, do some research on similar freelancers in your area. Ask around openly and cruise Craigslist. If necessary, pose as a prospective client and ask a competitor for an estimate–this sort of reconnaissance work isn’t rare for freelance startups.

2. Know Your Lower Limit

Now that you know how much others charge, how well will the going rate meet your personal needs? You can figure this out on pencil and paper, but FreelanceSwitch provides a thorough and convenient hourly rate calculator. It accounts for everything, including rent and office supplies, and provides you with both an ideal rate and your bottom-basement hourly rate. If you can’t break even within your market’s hourly rate range, it’s best to know early on so you can restructure your business plan.

3. Estimate Your Non-billable Contributions

How many hours per freelance week do you spend tracking and invoicing? Pitching? Following up with clients? You’d be surprised how quickly your non-billable hours add up. Depending on the particulars of your business, a 40-hour freelance workweek might include only 30 billable hours.

You can cut down on some of your administrative time by using a tracking/billing system, but you can’t eliminate non-billable time entirely. Be kind to yourself by recognizing that you can’t directly convert 40 hours of time into 40 hours of cash; plan your hourly rate with lost time in mind.

4. Learn Your Productivity Rate

Just how much of a typical project can you complete in an hour? How many hours do typical projects take? Figuring out your average productivity rate will help you to provide reliable estimates for your clients, manage your workload, and keep your income in balance.

Get in the habit of tracking your work and keeping your own stats. Popular applications can help you to record and organize the time you spend on each freelance project. Checking in with yourself will help you realize whether a particular project has become a time sink, which will in turn help you to troubleshoot work issues with your clients. You’ll also be well prepared to justify your invoices.

5. Don’t Overdo Your Productivity

I know some days you feel like you can take on the world–and you do. You might bang out client projects in a few days by working 12 to 13 hour days because you feel so great and confident. If you’re billing hourly, it won’t matter of course, because you’re still technically working the same amount of hours. This tip is more for your sanity. If you give clients the expectation that you can get a project done in a few days (regardless of the hours) they may still be under that impression when you do the same amount of hours, but on “real person” time–meaning, eight to nine hour days.

6. Enlist the Help of Other Freelancers

What services can you confidently provide yourself?

Say for instance you’re a web designer. You’re bound to get clients that want copy done once their website is designed and ready to go live. When you run into instances like these, you can either find general rates for that particular type of freelance work, tackle it yourself, and work it into your hourly rate, or ask another freelancer what they charge. Then, you can either bill the client separately for each service (yours and whatever freelancer’s you’re contracting) or roll it all into one cost.

7. Schedule Lunch

The prospect of beginning a freelance business is energizing and exciting, and you might be looking forward to spending uninterrupted hours on your projects. Avoid the assumption that you’ll consistently have that novice buzz. You need coffee breaks, lunch breaks, sick days and time off. If your hourly rate and workflow can’t support reasonable downtime, your freelance career will burn you out.

Remember that a good boss treats his or her employees well in order to get top productivity from them. This holds doubly true for the self-employed.

Your Turn

Do you charge an hourly rate? What tips do you have for other freelancers?

About the author: Sonia Mansfield is the content editor for PsPrint and editor of PsPrint Blog. PsPrint is an online printing solutions company, which you can follow on Twitter and Facebook.

Improve Your Blog by Offering More Subscription Options

admin — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 05:12:37 +0000

Sometimes giving someone more choices can make one’s life a little more difficult since, by nature, people can become overwhelmed with too many options. However, one area where you want to offer more choices is with how people can receive the content from your blog.

The most common option available to bloggers is the main RSS feed. It allows someone to subscribe to all of the blog’s content via an RSS reader. Great option, but sometimes people don’t want to subscribe to all the blog’s content and would only like to get updates when a specific section is updated.

Using WordPress, it’s simple to give readers an option of subscribing only to a specific category, or even a specific tag by appending the URL with a feed indicator. The indicator will depend on whether you have set up permalinks or not. If you’ve set up permalinks, then all someone needs to add is add /feed/ to the end of the category or tag URL to get its feed. If you haven’t set up permalinks, then someone needs to add &feed=rss2 to the category or tag URL. See the following examples:

Permalinks: http://www.yourblog.com/tag/sky/feed/
Default: http://www.yourblog.com/?cat=2&feed=rss2

In fact, just about anything on WordPress can be turned into a feed by appending the feed indicator to the URL. If you were to append it to your search results, you’d get the search results feed. If you were to add it to an entry’s permalink, you’d get the comments feed for that specific entry.

Which brings me to the subscription option for comments. Again, WordPress allows for a couple feed options: all comments or specific entry comments. For those who leave comments regularly on your blog, subscribing to all comments might be the wisest option; that way they don’t have a ton of comment feeds cluttering up their readers. However, for the occasional comment or for someone who just wants to follow the heated debate, subscribing to the individual threat is better.

Finally, there is one subscription option that many bloggers don’t think about it and its email. Yes, folks, email is still alive and kicking and some readers prefer receiving their blog updates via email. This is especially true if the reader already has an overcrowded feed reader because you definitely don’t want your blog to be lost in the noise. So, in addition to feed subscription options, give your readers the option of receiving once daily or weekly blog updates via email.

Rather than cluttering up your blog with a bunch of feed buttons everywhere, take a moment to create a subscription page. On this page, explain that your readers can subscribe to the specific areas of your blog and provide instructions for doing so. In some instances (assuming you don’t have many categories/tags), you can provide a list of the individual links. Also, mention there is a newsletter option and make sure the subscription box is provided. For comments, you can install a plugin called subscribe to comments which will allow readers to receive an email each time a reply to a blog entry is made. Explain this on the subscription page as well.

Now that you have the subscription page set up, make sure to update your feed buttons and links to mention that there are more subscription options than just the main feed for those who’d like to take advantage.

Author: Teli Adlam

Top 15 WordPress Plugins

admin — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:21:48 +0000

hy do people blog? Through blogging, people can express their thoughts and ideas. WordPress serves as the bridge that links bloggers to other Internet users. Thousands of fervent bloggers from all over the world flock around WordPress.

However, due to the strict coding standard that I always adhere to, my themes should work well with most of the popular plugins.

All in One SEO Pack – This great tool optimizes your blog including the titles and the META tags so that search engines will find your site easily. This plugin also helps you avoid duplicate content found in blogs. With this pack, you can easily modify and tweak everything.
NexGen Gallery – This is an image gallery plugin, which provides uncomplicated administration for those who have multiple albums and galleries. This allows you to add custom themes, new short codes, set your own collection of photos and use them in the Flash slideshow selection.
WordPress.com Stats – With this tool, the statistics about your visitors are provided. Just input your API key and let this plugin do the work.
WP Super Cache – This plugin produces static html files from your WordPress blog.
Google XML Sitemaps – This tool is generally helpful especially when you have updated your blog, your sitemap will be edited and the search engines will be informed about the change.
Contact form 7 – It can manage your multiple contact forms and you can also customize the mail and the form contents with just a simple markup. The form supports CAPTCHA, Ajax-powered submitting and Akismet spam filter
Lightbox 2 – It is used to overlie images on the current page
Akismet – It will check automatically your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
WP-DB-Backup – This will allows you easily backup your main WordPress database tables.
FlickrRSS for WordPress – This plugin will let you display Flickr photos on the weblog. It will also support set, user, group, favorite and community photo streams, plus it is easy to configure and setup.
WP PageNavi – This plugin will add more advanced navigation for you WordPress blog.
WordPress Post Ratings – A wonderful tool where you can be able to see or post ratings on your WordPress blog.

Twittle tools – This is a plugin that will create a complete addition between your WordPress blog and the Twitter account.
WP Polls - A plugin to insert your polls by customizing via templates and CSS styles and there are lots of other options to ensure your polls look the way you want it.
Simple Tags – Simple yet a wonderful plugin to your blog where you can customize your admin features.