8 Funding Contests to Kick Start Your Big Idea

This post originally appeared on Dyn.com, a world leader in managed DNS, powering the best brands on the web including Gowalla, Mashable, Twitter, Wikia and more. Follow @DynInc on Twitter.

Taking a business from idea to reality involves a good deal of attrition, ingenuity, and compromise. But no matter how much… read more

10 of the Web’s Most Insightful News Infographics

A picture is worth a thousand words. But if you include an entire database, make it interactive, and add filtering options, the word-to-picture exchange rate is even better.

Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun.

In that… read more

Showcase Of Appetizing Restaurant Websites

They say the first bite is taken with the eye. If so, these appetizing restaurant websites succeed in whetting our appetites, inviting us to a savoury next bite. In these designs, color scheme and introductory copy show vastly different aspects of the restaurant experience. Moody warm tones create atmosphere, vibrant… read more

iCandies Icon Set: 60 Free Icons For Your User Interfaces and Apps

Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek and geeky style… read more

HOW TO: Follow the US Open with Social Media

It’s US Open time in New York, which means tennis fever has officially hit the city that never sleeps. As the final major tournament in professional tennis, the US Open always draws a healthy audience, nationally and abroad.

Maybe you’ve been waiting for the US Open tennis tournament since Wimbledon ended… read more

Creative Bookmarks: Best of August 2010

August was another awesome month with great tutorials and articles oozing from everywhere. Here’s Creative Bookmarks August!

Quick Nav:

Photoshop TutorialsIllustrator TutorialsWeb/Blogging TutorialsFreebies, Inspiration, & ResourcesPhotoshop TutorialsHow To Create The Expendables Winged Skull Poster Art

In this tutorial, by Chris Spooner, you’ll learn how to re-create the sinister and gun-crazy poster for the… read more

The Case For Open-Source Design: Can Design By Committee Work?

In celebrating the merits of free software and the excitement over this radical networked production method, an important truth is left unspoken. Networked collaboration shines in the low levels of network protocols, server software and memory allocation, but user interface has consistently been a point of failure. How come the… read more

Social Network Unites Writers and Fans of Short Fiction [INVITES]

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Fictionaut

Quick Pitch: A social network for writers that doubles… read more

The Complete Overview of Indie Graphics Software for Mac

Everyone knows about the big guns in the graphics field. Adobe is pretty much the unchallenged master of image editing with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. Adobe’s InDesign shares the digital publishing field, albeit grudgingly, with Quark’s QuarkXPress. Serious graphic designers find themselves stuck between these two large corporations, due in… read more

Print Tutorial: Creating A Magazine Cover

By Cameron Chapman

Graphic design in a print environment can be a nice change for someone who normally does web design. It’s a slightly different skillset, but still incorporates a lot of the same concepts. Print projects can be an exciting new challenge, something that lets a designer stretch their creativity… read more

Best of the Vector Web – August 2010

As you know, each month, we search the web for the best vector-related content and showcase it here for you all to enjoy. This month, we found some really great tutorials on vector character design, creating charts in Illustrator, and vector skulls among others. We’ve also expanded this month’s offering…. read more

The Robust Collection Of (50) Mindblowing Icon Sets For Your Next Design

Icons can be useful to furnish users with unforgettable images and examples if used properly, and this is the reason why Icon sets always come in handy. You will find the huge collection of recently released icon sets which are believed to assist you in bettering your designs on websites… read more

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: September 2010

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. And to make them… read more

Digg v4: Refreshing Social News Discovery

How many times has your blog or website been brought down by traffic from Facebook or Twitter? Even with their combined audience of few hundred millions, no other site other than Digg has the power to bring a blog massive surge in traffic and the much deserved attention. While links… read more

How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future

This series is supported by Gist. Gist provides a full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details. See how it works here.

Today’s CEO is not social. So says Forrester… read more

Interactive PDFs

InDesign CS5 now offers a choice of exporting for print and a brand-new interactive PDF format to fulfill your interactive needs. The interactive PDF format supports a robust export function that takes advantage of the ability in InDesign CS5 to create multiple page sizes and includes a range of interactive… read more

An Interview With Professional Nature Photographer Jon Cornforth

I was blown away the first time I saw Jon Cornforth’s images.  Even more so because many of the images were taken in my native Washington State.  While we have many talented photographers in our fine state, I was also impressed with how personable Jon was on Twitter and… read more

Writing and Web Design: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides

A few years ago, you might not have pointed out during a meeting with a potential client that you maintained a blog. Over time, though, blogs have evolved from the being a personal hobby to a serious work tool. In fact, today, web designers are supposed to know much more… read more

The Perfect Office #52

We’ve seen some great gadgets and equipment for designers. So many cool stuff, that we could actually assemble infinite perfect office spaces! Every week we’ll assemble a perfect office, and we’d like you to help us. What equipment would the perfect office have?

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Not only gadgets and equipment, but also furniture,… read more

7 Services That Will Suggest Things You Like

“Unlimited choice” can “produce genuine suffering,” argues Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice. His research basically sums up what your mother has been telling you for years: You don’t even know what you want.

Thankfully, the Internet does know what you want — or at least its algorithmic recommendation services… read more

Academica: Free WordPress 3.0+ Theme For Educational Websites

In this post we release a yet another freebie: Academica WordPress Theme, a free WordPress theme designed specifically for educational websites such as universities, schools etc. It’s a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university, academy or non-profit organization. The theme is… read more

This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums (22-28 Aug ‘10)

Weekly Assignment

This week we got up close with some creepy crawlies in our Bugs or Insects assignment. I have to admit, sometimes it wasn’t too nice looking through the assignment, but there were some amazing details captured. And who realized that bugs were so colorful? Our winners this week were… read more

Profile: Getting into Character with Cartoonist George Coghill

From bad jokes to sultry devil girls, Cartoon Character Designer George Coghill knows how to inject some fun into life. He set aside some time to talk with us about everything from the importance of knowing how to run a business to what it’s like to see his characters come… read more

40 First-Class Premium Magazine Style WordPress Themes

40 First-Class Premium Magazine Style WordPress Themes

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Interview with Tim and Bram Vanhaeren from Into1

Tim and Bram Vanhaeren, belgium based artists, run a creative studio focused on graphic design. Read how the brothers get along working together

1. First of all we would like to thank you both for taking the time to provide abduzeedo.com with this interview. Please tell us more about your art… read more

Getting To Grips With InDesign Part 6: Importing Images

Getting To Grips With InDesign Part 6: Importing Images

read more

Free Wireframing Kits, UI Design Kits, PDFs and Resources

To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give… read more

How To Trace a Sketch with a Vintage Comic Style

You can find the vintage comic style in newspapers, magazines, and in animation. In this tutorial you will learn several techniques for tracing a sketch, including how to make custom brushes, how to combine shapes and brushes and how to combine multiple brushes. You will also learn how to simulate… read more

The Best Free to use Posterous Themes

Don't mistake Posterous as another micro-blogging service, it is much, much bigger than that. There are no limits to what you can do with it and there are seemingly no limits to what you can post to it – photos (auto resizing), audio files and links, documents and video (auto… read more

In Defense Of A/B Testing

Recently, A/B testing has come under (unjust) criticism from different circles on the Internet. Even though this criticism contains some relevant points, the basic argument against A/B testing is flawed. It seems to confuse the A/B testing methodology with a specific implementation of it (e.g. testing red vs. green buttons… read more

HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page

Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

So you paid attention to what everyone is saying and you created a Facebook Page for your business. You’ve got your press… read more

jQuery Plugin Checklist: Should You Use That jQuery Plug-In?

jQuery plug-ins provide an excellent way to save time and streamline development, allowing programmers to avoid having to build every component from scratch. But plug-ins are also a wild card that introduce an element of uncertainty into any code base. A good plug-in saves countless development hours; a bad plug-in… read more

Art of Type: Out of Scale

There was a time when few designers dared to venture into the murky world of the Adobe InDesign justification controls. The good news is that more and more users are starting to take charge of them. The bad news is one of them—the powerful glyph scaling control, unique to InDesign—is… read more

Corporate Website Design: Creative and Beautiful Solutions

What do corporate websites have in common with other people’s children? Three things: they have their charm, like finger-paintings on the refrigerator; they can be useful, if infrequently; they are usually admired only by the people who created them.

While designers know that a user’s experience on a website has a… read more

20 Web Dev Events, 20 Beautifully Crafted Web Designs

The initial idea for this article was to highlight all web design related events and conferences up until the end of 2010. As the article evolved, the primary focus and direction changed – no longer were we only highlighting some important and essential conferences, we soon realized we were privy… read more

Polaroid: A Free Magento Theme For Your eCommerce Website

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: Polaroid Magento Theme, a professional design skin for the shops powered by the popular open-source ecommerce web application Magento. The theme was designed by eCommerce-Themes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free… read more

Top 5 Ways Big Brands are Using Foursquare

This series is supported by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, a leading enterprise-grade application for marketers struggling with the social media chaos of managing multiple social channels. Click here to learn more.

Unlike other more mainstream social networks, the business potential of Foursquare may not be immediately apparent. At present,… read more

Improve Your E-Commerce Design With Brilliant Product Photos

Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products… read more

Creating a Mobile Version of Your Site

Despite the obvious explosion of the mobile market some website owners feel like very few, if any users will decide to browse their site using a mobile device. Well it is time to wake up and realize that there never has been a better time to ensure your site is… read more

20 Cool Twitter Accounts for Daily Fun and Inspiration [PICS]

Twitter is an ever-expanding source of fascinating information. More than just news and updates, there is also another, more fun side of Twitter that is sometimes overlooked.

You can use the real-time micro-blogging service to get a daily dose of education, entertainment, or something in between. Whether you want to expand… read more

Inspiration: Interesting & Unique Typographic Book Covers

Books offer graphic designers, illustrators and typographers a great way to expand their portfolios. There are endless possibilities that can be explored when designing for book covers, and often are explored, as can be seen in this post.

I’ve had an increased interest in book covers recently after putting together another… read more

Cubicle Spy: At Work with Steve Rubel of Edelman [PICS]

As part of the ongoing “Cubicle Spy” series here at Mashable, we’re taking a look inside the coolest, quirkiest, and most gadget-laden offices of people who work with social media.

For our second peek into the cube, we scoped out the office of Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President and Director of… read more

DesignChat Guest – Erin Loechner

This week, Erin Loechner welcomes US to the conversation as she has been writing about design on blogs for longer than most. Erin is a freelance design writer/blogger whose work has been featured in Glamour, Dwell, Lucky and Nylon magazines. She muses daily on her award-winning website Design For Mankind,… read more

4 Things to Consider When Creating a Business Logo

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

With all the noise on the web today, good branding is more important than ever. Even if your business is not a cutting edge tech startup, the… read more

How Limitations Improve Design

We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.

From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.

Limitations are abundant but… read more

40 New And Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

The Internet is bursting with knowledge. Whatever you want is available at your fingertips, and learning new techniques is so easy with the load of useful tutorials that guide you step by step. Adobe Illustrator is powerful indeed, but when used right, it can perform feats that humans will marvel… read more

A Design Is Only As Deep As It Is Usable

There are well-known proverbs that imply (or state outright) that beauty is superficial and limited in what it can accomplish. “It’s what’s inside that counts” and “Beauty is only skin deep” are a few simple examples. Because the Web design industry is now flooded with a lot of raw talent,… read more

Wallpaper of the Week #113 by Perttu Murto

The wallpaper of this week is really cool design by Perttu Murto, a 24-year-old graphic designer, art director and illustrator from Finland. Pettu has been involved in graphics for almost 8 years and was also selected as the Young Advertisement Designer of the Year for 2007 in Northern Finland. His… read more

Interview with Ricardo Gimenes

You may already know about the blog, Behind the Websites. In today’s interview we’re going to meet Ricardo Gimenes, illustrator and founder of the site. Ricardo is a São Paulo based Brazilian designer and illustrator who has worked with variety of clients around the world. He says he has… read more

Modernist: Free WordPress Theme with Focus on Typography

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a beautiful Modernist WordPress theme, designed by Rodrigo Galindez and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists. Beautifully built yet transparent, it… read more

Balancing Inspiration and Individuality

I love it when a good story is broken down so that even the simplest of minds can understand. I’m not the smartest, fastest or most creative person in the world, so I don’t like using a lot of big words or fancy jargon to try and impress you —… read more

The Classic Portrait: How to Build and Use Your Own Portable Portrait Studio

Ed Verosky is a professional photographer and author based in New York. In this article, Verosky explains how to create classic portraits with minimal lighting equipment. To learn more about achieving great lighting in any situation, check out Verosky’s popular eBook, “100% Reliable Flash Photography.“

In photography, there are… read more

Morning Brief: Nokia Acquires Analytics Co, Apple Shutters Quattro, Dell & HP Post Earnings

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in… read more

Five Great Photography Magazines You Should be Reading

The Internet is an amazing thing, and we take pride in providing you with content to help you with your passion for photography.  There is however, something to be said about printed material, just like it’s a different experience in holding a photographic print compared to looking… read more

How To: Fix Adobe InDesign to PDF Character Conversion Problem

How To: Fix Adobe InDesign to PDF Character Conversion Problem

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People Magazine Launches iPad App

People magazine launched its iPad app early this morning despite reports it would be delayed due to issues over photo licensing agreements.

Photographers were reportedly upset with People’s assertion that the magazine shouldn’t have to pay extra fees when it uses agency photos already featured in the print issue on the… read more

Facebook Places: What’s Foursquare’s Next Move? [INTERVIEW]

With the launch of Facebook Places, many are questioning the survival of the location services who pioneered the place checkin. As the head of the startup class, Foursquare is taking a majority of the punches.

Headlines like “Facebook Places Will Crush Foursquare” from PC Magazine have not been uncommon sightings. Even… read more

Top 5 Mobile Advertising Trends To Watch

The mobile trends series is supported by Samsung. Read more about the Samsung Galaxy here.

Mobile advertising is increasingly important, as cell phone adoption rates, especially smartphone adoption rates, soar. With a range of mobile advertising options, including SMS, WAP, mobile app display ads, search ads, rich media, video and push… read more

Design Makeover: S Virginia Higher Ed Center

A Smarter Logo

Client:
Southern Virginia Higher Education Center www.svhed.org

BEFORE

The Southern Virginia Higher Education Center’s logo is based on an abstract representation of the building itself, which stands on a hill overlooking a river.

The Southern Virginia Higher Education Center calls itself an “educational connector,” in the words of Communications Manager… read more

100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick… read more

6 Tips for Budding Live Concert Photographers

A Guest Post by Viennese Concert Photographer Matthias Hombauer

Being a concert photographer can be very exciting. Imagine yourself standing 6 feet away in front of your beloved idol and taking portraits of them. Not only do you have the ability to shoot one image but can take hundreds of pictures… read more

GridIron Flow: A Visual File Workflow for Designers

In my last software review, I covered Blast, an application that shows you the recent files you’ve open or modified. In a similar spirit – but with more of a creative, professional spin – I’d like to introduce you to GridIron Software’s Flow.

Flow’s main goal is to help… read more

People Magazine iPad App Launch Stalled by Photographer Disputes

Publishers are clamoring to get their magazine titles onto Apple’s iPad, but many may be facing a new challenge: photographers.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Time Inc. has been forced to delay the release of its People magazine iPad app, in part because of disputes with photo agencies over licensing agreements… read more

Animated Taiwanese News Story Shows Google’s Plight [VIDEO]

Those geniuses over at Hong Kong and Taiwan’s Next Media Animation have done it again, creating an animated video depicting Google’s current woes in the privacy and net neutrality departments.

We all know that Google’s been having some issues of late when it comes to customer feedback — that whole deal… read more

Tweeting While Driving Cited in Celebrity Surgeon Death

New reports indicate that Dr. Frank Ryan, plastic surgeon to Heidi Montag and other celebrities, was tweeting just before his fatal car accident on Monday.

Ex-girlfriend Charmaine Blake told People Magazine that the plastic surgeon “lived up in Malibu on a tiny street and he was texting while driving and he… read more

A Sneak Peek at Premium for Non-members

Vector Premium launched in late September 2008. Since then we’ve added over 60 Premium tutorials for Premium members and hundreds of Illustrator and InDesign source files. Over 10,000 members have formed our unique Premium community. Learn more about the material and resources available to Premium members to Join Premium today.

Join… read more

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners

At one time or another, we are all newbies. That’s right: you can deny it all you want, but not one of us got into this game with a full deck stacked in our favor. We entered as newbies, born fresh after the start screen loaded. However, unlike in a… read more

Self-Motivating Through Creative Blocks

As designers, we need to be creative in order to be successful at our jobs.

Coming up with ideas and creative solutions to problems is what we do on a daily basis. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do so.

Sometimes we get blocked creatively, and it seems like no… read more

Useful and Free Pictogram Dingbat Fonts

Pictograms are essentially a graphical idea, sign or simple instruction that has been stripped down to its bare and basic details, yet is still recognizable as the original idea. There versatility and simplicity offers an universally easy to understand language that can be seen in anything from road signs and… read more

Color Stream: a Free iPhone App For Web Designers

Today we are glad to release Color Stream, a free iPhone App, created by Sahil Lavingia (@slavingia on Twitter) and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Color stream lets you create and store color palettes that are either created from scratch or generated from a photo, or even generated… read more

Recession Survival Tips For Online Businesses

In a recession, companies go one of two ways: either they become the cautious cat, adopting a wait-and-see attitude, spending carefully on their marketing and less overall, cutting back, or they become the ferocious lion, bold, taking advantage of their competitors’ caution to seize opportunities in the tough market.

Whatever your… read more

Web Standardistas Book Giveaway

HTML & CSS Web Standards Solutions – A Web Standardistas’ Approach is quite possibly one of the most authoritative books that you can learn XHTML & CSS through. This book makes learning easy opposed to monotonous reading and technical jargon. Even if you are an absolute beginner in web design, this book… read more

How People Are Signing In Across the Web [STATS]

OpenID company Janrain has just released its latest usage study detailing what social networks and services people use to sign in and share activities across the web.

As in its last report back in April, Google and Facebook continue to dominate websites that offer third-party login options. Across the 250,000 sites… read more

Kid Receives 26,000 Texts After Justin Bieber Tweets Phone Number

On Saturday, Justin Bieber broke a sacred rule: He tweeted “everyone call me [number] or text” to his 4.5 million followers. The number wasn’t his, though, and the boy it did belong to was inundated with thousands of calls from Bieber’s fans.

Bieber deleted his tweet shortly after publishing it,… read more

DesignChat Guest – SamataMason

This week on DesignChat we’re speaking to 2 of the partners from SamataMason, a heavily decorated design firm in West Dundee Illinois. If that name sounds familiar, its because I say it every week on the show. SamataMason is where I broadcast from, and they have been great supporters of… read more

The World Of Signage Photo Contest: Join In and Win a Digital SLR Camera!

This one’s easy: take a shot, send us the image and win a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS digital SLR camera. Typography and icons are everywhere: they surround us, guide us, help us find the right path every day. As Web designers and graphic artists, we can learn from observing… read more

Design a Coffee Shop Menu Layout from Scratch with Photoshop and InDesign – Part 1

Hi everyone, this time I’ve got for you a practical tutorial about creating a ready to print booklet menu for an imaginary coffee shop named "Violet Coffee." In this tutorial you’ll learn to mockup a ready to print background and a couple of additional objects, which will be imported later… read more

Design a Coffee Shop Menu Layout from Scratch with Photoshop and InDesign – Part 2

This is the second part of this tutorial series about creating a ready to print booklet menu for an imaginary coffee shop named "Violet Coffee." In this final part of the two part series, you’ll learn to create a ready to print booklet on InDesign, work with master pages, text,… read more

40 Highly Effective FaceBook Business Pages

Facebook is huge. With the average user connecting to 80 community pages, groups and events and with over 900 million (!) objects that users love to interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages), Facebook pages are massive and with a well thought layout they will prove to be a… read more

15 Great Geeky Web Comic Strips [PICS]

There are hundreds of great web comics out there, which means if you’re new to the format, diving in can be difficult. We’re narrowed the many options down to 15 sure-fire funnies that will give you a regular smile.

In the tradition of the social media web comics we recently brought… read more

25 Useful Videos and Presentations for Designers

With the huge number of design-related conferences and events around the world, the Web gives those of us who cannot attend them a great opportunity to listen and benefit from their great and talented speakers. To aid in this, here we present some of the best videos, interviews and presentations… read more

Best of the Week #132

It’s time for our best news of this week. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to keep you updated about what’s… read more

Mashable Hosts #SummerMash in Chicago [PHOTOS]

The 2010 Mashable U.S. Summer Tour came to a triumphant close Wednesday at the Crystal Ballroom of Chicago’s Hyatt Regency hotel. Hundreds of guests from all over the Midwest joined us in the Windy City to cut loose, have a few drinks and put the “Chic” in Chicago. Mashable’s NYC… read more

Four Indesign CS5 Tips

RC Concepcion goes over 4 invaluable tips for document dimensions, placing images, and resizing frames automatically in Indesign CS5.

read more

Can Flash Move Forward?

There has been a long debate about Adobe Vs. Apple, or even Flash Vs. HTML5. Whatever side of the fence you are on—you probably won’t be changing your mind anytime soon. Flash brings a lot of features and creativity for web designers, but then again the promise of HTML5, CSS3… read more

Lightroom Pro Q&A with Nat Coalson

Hi everyone. Here’s another in a series of mini-interviews with some of the Lightroom pros out there where they’ve answered a short series of questions about how they use and feel about Lightroom:

Today’s Guest: Nat Coalson.

Bio/Intro: Nathaniel Coalson is a travel and fine art photographer, teacher and writer based… read more

80+ Stunning Photographic Portraits

In this post I would like to introduce a new topic on photography. Its surprising that I have never made a post on photography considering that photographs are used in everyday design such as campaign ads, posters, magazine covers and photo compositions just to name a few.  In this article… read more

30 New Free High-Quality Fonts

Every now and then we look around, select fresh high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and find… read more

5 Free to Use Freelance Design Contract Templates

The most important and essential document a freelance designer should have is a rock solid and reliable contract. The worst thing is though, freelance web designers or graphic designers, especially when they are just starting out, can ill afford the expense of paying a lawyer to draw up a decent… read more

How Starbucks Plans to Capitalize on Free Wi-Fi

Starbucks stores nationwide now have free Wi-Fi, but details around the second piece to the coffee retailer’s digital strategy — the Starbucks Digital Network — have been slim. Here’s how Starbucks plans to cater to digital consumers and premium content providers through its Digital Network.

The Starbucks Digital Network (SDN) will… read more

Watch #SummerMash Interviews From Chicago [LIVE]

The Mashable team is hosting its final stop on the U.S. Summer Tour in Chicago tonight. In case you can’t make it, you can still participate in the event via our live video and chat stream. We’ll be joined by Rachel Sklar, who will be interviewing attendees on our Watchitoo… read more

HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style

Matthew Latkiewicz works at Zendesk.com, customer support software. He writes for and edits Zengage, Zendesk’s blog about customer engagement. He also writes about wine for McSweeney’s and imagines stuff at his own website, youwillnotbelieve.us.

What’s your customer engagement style? It’s a question reminiscent of those light-hearted quizzes that… read more

Quick Tip: How to Create Mixed Ink Swatches with InDesign

Today’s financial situation has led to more clients asking for better value for money when setting budgets for design and print. A common request for a designer is to cut the number of inks from four down to two. Although this does cut print costs, it also cuts the designer’s… read more

The Future of the Internet

“In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure

The… read more

Mashable Hosts #SummerMash in New York City [PHOTOS]

The Mashable team hosted its New York City stop on its 2010 U.S. Summer Tour Monday night. The event brought hundreds from the local community together for networking and prizes at the 92Y Tribeca. The Mashable NYC team was joined by Rachel Sklar, who interviewed event attendees and readers… read more

How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream

In honor of Mashable’s five-year anniversary, this series is supported by IDG. Join social conversations to market your brand with IDG’s social advertising platform, IDG Amplify. Learn more about how it works here.

The social network of a reader is quickly becoming their personalized news wire. That’s because in the last… read more