16 Pixels: For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

16 Pixels
For Body Copy. Anything Less Is
A Costly Mistake

I know what you’re thinking. “Did he just say 16 pixels? For body copy? Obnoxiously big! 12 pixels is ideal for most websites.”

I’d like to persuade you otherwise.

As usability expert Oliver Reichenstein says in “The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard”:

[16 pixels]… read more

30 Free Serif Fonts to Download

30 Free Serif Fonts to Download

read more

10 Online HTML5 Tools For Web Designers

Advertise here with BSA

If you haven’t heard, HTML5 is taking the web by storm! It is currently being enhanced by experts to provide us Web Designers & Developers with awesome new revolutionary web page features!

HTML5 Background Information

For those of you who are new to HTML5, here is some quick… read more

Free Stuff: 210 Grunge Brushes from VectorPack.net – Comment to Win

In honor of VectorPack.net‘s Mega Design Bundle 2, I’ve got 5 copies of 210 Grunge brushes to give away! For this contest, I get to give away part of the brushes from that bundle to 5 lucky winners. Make sure to read the rules, and good luck!

Contest Rules:

All you have… read more

A comparison of leading WordPress theme frameworks

If you’re going to design a WordPress site, there are a few ways you can start. Many designers start with an HTML template that they then add WordPress code to.

Others start with the basic WordPress code and design around that.

But others begin with a starter theme or framework, which is… read more

22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website’s Usability

The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off.

A site’s ease of use, or its usability, is an integral part of its success, especially with… read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #120

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#120 and make sure to comeback… read more

Best Fonts for Titles and Headlines

Best Fonts for Titles and Headlines

read more

9 New and Free Fonts For Your Design

9 New and Free Fonts For Your Design

read more

How To Create And Edit Custom Word Clouds with Wordle

Most people who spend any time at all reading blogs on the Internet are familiar with the concept of the tag cloud. It’s an often amorphous pile of post tags where words that occur more often are displayed with more prominence. Wordle is a web-based Java applet that generates similar… read more

How To Make An eBook

Making an eBook is easy, regardless of your coding experience. This is good, because 99.9% of your time should be spent on writing and getting your book out there, rather than on technology.

EPUB And Kindle

Any electronic book can be called an eBook, but because over 90% of all eBooks are… read more

50 Meaningful Effects of Bold fonts typography ads

50 Meaningful Effects of Bold fonts typography ads

read more

Quick Tip: Transform Any Plain Font Into a Grunge Font

Follow this quick tip and learn how to transform any plain font into a grunge font using only some of the many Art and Scatter Brushes available in Illustrator along with a dose of creativity. I will demonstrate the method using two different types of fonts. Let’s begin!

Step 1

Open… read more

40 New jQuery Plugins

Advertise here with BSA

Every six months or we do like to take a look at some of the greatest and freshest jQuery plugins from within that time. Each time we do this the jQuery community never ever fails to let you down. Constantly releasing plugins that are not only… read more

30+ Genuinely Useful Mac Apps for Designers

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on a year since the Mac App Store was first announced. It seems like only yesterday we were itching to get our hands on a marketplace full of great utilities, games and other goodies all custom tailored to the Mac platform.

While… read more

deviant-art-fonts-ttf

deviant-art-fonts-ttf

read more

Free To Download Chinese, Japanese and Korean Styled Fonts

Free To Download Chinese, Japanese and Korean Styled Fonts

read more

20 Free Fonts For Beautiful Headline Typography

20 Free Fonts For Beautiful Headline Typography

read more

20 High Quality, Extraordinary & Free Web PSD Templates

No matter who you are or what your business may be, you will always want your website design to stand out. Having an extraordinary website allows you to stay on the mind of most of your visitors and can help translate how unique your product or service is to someone.

The… read more

Create a Zee Vintage Label on Illustrator

It seems that the past 3 years had a boom of retro design, starting with the “cosmic neon lightning” 80′s aesthetic that I think most of you are already bored about. Not just because it became a trend, but also because everyone with a photoshop could emulate one. So here’s… read more

15 Free HTML5 and CSS Templates

Advertise here with BSA

Ready-made HTML5 templates are currently one of the most sought after resources within the web design community. They not only offer a quick and easy-to-edit solution for building modern websites, they also offer a fantastic route to explore and understand HTML5s syntax.

All of the themes below… read more

Our favorite tweets of the week Sep 19-Sep 25, 2011

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick… read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #119

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#119 and make sure to comeback… read more

Announcement: Winners of MotoCMS Giveaway

A weeks ago, we created a contest at instantShift called Win 1×3 Flash Templates had announced the three winners of premium Flash CMS templates powered by MotoCMS to InstantShift readers.

We’ve got more than 100 response comments. After voiding spam and non-legit comments we have left with 76 valid comments. It’s… read more

Are You Ready For A Web Design Challenge?

This is not a normal Smashing Magazine post. I’m not going to teach you something new or inspire you with examples of great work. Instead, I want to encourage you to complete a Web design challenge. I believe this will help to address a weakness that exists in many of… read more

10 jQuery Plugins to Enhance your User Interfaces

Advertise here with BSA

With a recently estimated over 20 million websites currently using jQuery it is essential to know what jQuery plugins there are out there in order to stay with the web design trend. Today, we’ll put some focus on some popular jQuery user interface plugins to help… read more

15 Top Vintage Fonts

15 Top Vintage Fonts

read more

15 fresh and free fonts for awesome typographic designs

15 fresh and free fonts for awesome typographic designs

read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #118

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#118 and make sure to comeback… read more

Introducing: The BittBox FREEBIE GALLERY!

Hey everyone, I’m pleased to announce a brand new section to BittBox. The “Freebie Gallery!” We’ve put every single free resource on the site into one easy to browse thumbnail gallery with categories (Textures, Brushes, Fonts, and Vectors). It’s a great way to quickly and easily find the resources you’re… read more

40 New Free Fonts for Your Designs

It’s essential for Designers to have a good understanding of typography and selection as the importance of typography in design can’t be neglected. The proper selection of typography can convert your normal design into attractive piece of art.

Among other things, effective typography manages to achieve three necessary objectives of web… read more

45+ Free Lessons In Graphic Design Theory

Considering how many designers are self-taught, either in whole or in part, the importance of a solid foundation in graphic design theory is often overlooked. New designers often want to jump right into creating websites, rather than learning the basics of why some designs work and some don’t. But they’re… read more

Signature: Sign Your Digital Documents

I don’t think that I’m alone in the annoyance I feel when I’m asked to sign something over the Internet. This usually means having to to print PDFs so that I can sign them, after which I have to then re-scan them. Even though it’s a situation that we… read more

10 New Free Fonts for Your Inspiration

Advertise here with BSA

Typography definitely plays a big role in any design, and here at WDL we really like to keep our readers updated with free and inspiring fonts, so we decided to gather a new list of free fonts for your delight. Check them out and remember to… read more

14 Brand New Fonts for Your Designs

14 Brand New Fonts for Your Designs

read more

How to Create a Glossy, Colorful Text Effect

In the following tutorial you will learn how to create a glossy, colorful text design in Illustrator CS5. We’ll use an interesting font choice, opacity masks, shape building techniques, and more to create this text effect.

Step 1

Create a 700 px by 200 px, RGB document. First, turn on the Grid… read more

Win 1×3 Flash Templates Powered By MotoCMS

We are again excited to present you with special, more exciting prizes. InstantShift again came up with cool freebies giveaway as promised. This is our way of saying thanks to our readers for being part of the iShift community and helping us make it to where we are right now.

We… read more

10 Apps That Started Life on iOS

This year, with the launch of Lion, Apple has been all about “Back to the Mac” – Taking great features from iOS, and porting them over to OS X. For the most part, this has been fairly successful. For this reason, it makes sense that many iOS developers would… read more

What’s new for designers – Sep. 2011

The September edition of what’s new out there for web designers and developers includes new web apps, JavaScript frameworks, a couple of fun dummy text generators, useful apps for working with clients, and a number of great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and… read more

35 Awesome Free Sans Serif Fonts

35 Awesome Free Sans Serif Fonts

read more

Our favorite tweets of the week Sep 5-Sep 11, 2011

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick… read more

Beautiful Fonts: 45 Amazing and Beautiful Hand Drawn Fonts

Beautiful Fonts: 45 Amazing and Beautiful Hand Drawn Fonts

read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #117

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#117 and make sure to comeback… read more

40 Fresh Logo Examples for Logo Design Inspiration

A Logo is a graphical element that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo’s design is for immediate recognition. The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic or academic entity, and its shapes, colors,… read more

MailerLite Review, Save Time with Simple Email Marketing

I work for a magazine publishing company with a very small staff. We use email marketing to let our advertisers know what is coming up in future issues, enticing them to advertise. There is no way our sales team can personally call and visit each and every one of… read more

20 More Fresh & Free Fonts for Beautiful Headlines

Advertise here with BSA

Today’s round-up highlights 20 new(ish) elegant and free fonts that would be perfect for the headlines or titles of either a webpage or a print publication. We have previously published a post entitled 20 Free Fonts for Distinctive Headlines and Titles, you may want to check… read more

9 Brand New Free Fonts For Your Next Design Projects

9 Brand New Free Fonts For Your Next Design Projects

read more

Daily Inspiration #920

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it,… read more

How to Create a jQuery Animated Sliding Sub-Menu Navigation

We have seen a lot of different jQuery techniques over the years. This comes at a time when website navigation is at an utmost importance. User experience is key in all forms of design. Without perfecting your layout it will be difficult to keep visitors coming back for more. And… read more

30 Useful and Entertaining Video Tutorials from Vectortuts+

Looking for something to watch this afternoon? Look no further than this collection from the Vectortuts+ archives. Today we have a 30 useful and entertaining video tutorials covering a variety of subjects from Tools and Tips to Character Design. If you enjoy them, don’t forget that you can subscribe to… read more

Traits of Successful Website Welcome Pages

Many websites these days have some form of welcome area on their homepage. Welcome pages generally act as an introduction for new visitors, explain the website and often prompt an action on the part of the user.

Website welcome pages are typically more prevalent at personal websites, portfolios, and traditional businesses…. read more

30 Truly Useful Mac Apps for Professional Writers

As a full-time professional writer, I’m always on the lookout for utilities that will improve my workflow and help provide a much needed boost in efficiency.

Today we’ll take a look at thirty of the best utilities around to help serious writers in their work. Whether you want a better… read more

Free Fonts : A Walk on the Grunge Side

With so many free fonts available on the web today, it is easy to miss out on some true gems in the typographic arena. It is hard to stay on top of the latest developments and releases when there are so many outlets to turn to find your fonts. Today… read more

15 Free WordPress Themes with a Responsive Layout

Advertise here with BSA

The most popular topic of discussion at the moment, amongst web designers anyway, is undoubtedly responsive web design. This is in response to the popularity, over the past couple of years, of visitors opting to use a mobile device of some sort (Android, iPhone, iPad..) to… read more

25 Examples of Big Typography in Web Design

Advertise here with BSA

Here at WDL we love typography and we are constantly showing our readers good typo usage, from print to logos, from web to random typographic works, we really feel the need to keep the juices flowing in that area, and we could not forget to mention… read more

Create a Stylish Rifle in Illustrator

Since I was a kid, I wasn’t really good at playing with colors, now that I grew up I decided to embrace this characteristic on my work. I’ve being trying to push more and more my black and white style and so I decided to create the “Two Bloody Weeks… read more

20 Nice Elegant Fonts

20 Nice Elegant Fonts

read more

Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.102)

Advertise here with BSA

This is our weekly column were we share our favorites design related articles, resources and resources all from the previous week.

If you would like to be kept up to date with loads of fresh design news and resources, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebook,… read more

40+ Hand Picked HandMade Fonts for you to Download

40+ Hand Picked HandMade Fonts for you to Download

read more

Dear Diary: 5 Journal Apps for iPhone

Many of us remember how fun (not to mention therapeutic) it was to pour our innermost thoughts into a pen-and-paper diary, but how many of us take the time to keep a personal journal today?

As you no doubt take your mobile everywhere you go, a diary app for your iPhone… read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #116

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#116 and make sure to comeback… read more

Reel in Your Audience With Reel Presentations

Of all the files we need to share, it seems that presentations often are the most frustrating. PowerPoint 2007 can open a PowerPoint 2010 presentation, but it’ll lose many of the graphics effects and transitions. Keynote presentations look beautiful, but they can only be opened in Keynote on a Mac… read more

Reliable Cross-Browser Testing, Part 1: Internet Explorer

In a perfect world, cross-browser testing would be straightforward. We would download a legacy version of a browser, run it, and be able to instantly test our pages and scripts without a single care in the world. The reality of cross-browser testing, though, is very different. Issues such as runtime… read more

FontDeals.com September Bundle is here!

Hi everyone, I’m pleased to announce that the FontDeals.com September Bundle has launched! I’ve teamed up with Tipo Type, Evolutionfonts, and Photoshop Island to bring you a ginormous discount on some awesome fonts for your design arsenal. The deal will only be available for 20 days, and I’m giving away… read more

Making Communication Valuable

Design without functionality is useless. With the resources needed to design websites, videos and graphics at the fingertips of those who crave them, the value of communication today is evident. Many factors will shape the future of the creative design industry, so the more we share ideas the better. We… read more

20 Supreme Free Fonts for Serious Designers

20 Supreme Free Fonts for Serious Designers

read more

25+ Must-have Chrome extensions for web designers and developers

For many web designers and developers, Firefox is unsurpassable. For others, Firefox eats Chrome’s dust.

For the past two years, since Google Chrome’s release, there’s been a raging debate on which browser is superior. Mozilla’s open source product has stood the test of time and Firefox has quickly become the second… read more

Best of the Vector Web – August 2011

Each month, we search the web for the best vector-related content and showcase it here for you all to enjoy. This month, we showcase high quality tutorials on creating vintage vector seamless patterns, creating abstract character scenes, luminous text effects, geometric graphics, and more. We have loads of tutorials, in… read more

The most popular fonts used by designers

There are usually two camps among designers when it comes to typeface choices.

One group has a handful of favorite typefaces they adapt to every design they create, believing that these handful of typefaces can be suitable for every situation.

The other camp believes in using a huge variety… read more

The Lost Art Of Design Etiquette

Endless layers in Photoshop. Overstuffed image folders. That jQuery plug-in that has 12 files associated with it. Hundreds or thousands of individual pieces go into making a website. No wonder we go off the deep end when we can’t find a closing div — er, section tag. We work with a ridiculously… read more

Psychedelic Design in Photoshop and Illustrator

It has been a little bit more than six months since I moved to San Francisco, California. As you might know, I am from Brazil so it’s quite a big change, however I’ve been having an amazing time here, constantly learning new things. That’s why I’ve decided to try… read more

Wikibot: Wikipedia On Your Desktop

If you’re like me, Wikipedia isn’t just a resource, it’s a source of entertainment. I spend hours clicking through articles, learning everything from topics that concern me (music and social media) to niche subjects that could not be further from my field of expertise (Alexander the Great and Narcissus). While… read more

20 Awesome Fonts For Cursive Letters

20 Awesome Fonts For Cursive Letters

read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #115

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#115 and make sure to comeback… read more

Illustrator’s Blend Tool: A Comprehensive Guide

A few times a each month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from throughout the history of Vectortuts+. This tutorial by Simona Pfreundner was first published on November 14th 2008.

In Adobe Illustrator, the Blend Tool can help you create impressive color blends. But there is more to it… read more

25+ Useful Document and File Comparison Tools

Figuring out how a document has changed from one version to another isn’t always the simplest task. It’s further complicated when that document is longer or more complex, like source code.

The tools collected here can help you analyze and compare your documents and files, as well as merge them if… read more

Use your blog to get design jobs

Are you a freelance designer? Are you interested in boosting your credibility, building your client base and increasing your number of paying projects? The answer is obvious, but knowing where and how to get started can be daunting, especially during the periods of low client work (you know what… read more

The Best and Worst Fonts of The Moment

The Best and Worst Fonts of The Moment

read more

Create Winning Resumes with ResumeBaking

Those who have searched for a job will know how tough it is to get the right one, if you can find one at all. You will have to be able to market yourself to the prospective employer, and customizing your skills and appealing to different corporate environments can be… read more

50 Social Media Bookmarking Icon Sets – 2011 Edition

Advertise here with BSA

Our social bookmarking services icon set articles has now become a yearly tradition for us. This is our third edition (you can also view 2010 and 2009) and our best by far.

All of social icon sets below are of the highest quality and have all been… read more

Illustrator: How to average points for perfect alignment

I’ve only recently been using this Illustrator feature, but I’ve found it to be very useful for really precise drawing. In my case, when I draw fonts. I want to show you how to use the Illustrator “Average” feature to get perfect point alignment during drawing.

As you can see in… read more

Interview with Joshua Smith (aka. Hydro 74)

Today we’re really glad to publish a high anticipated interview with Joshua Smith, well known on the design community as Hydro 74. Since I started on the creative, I always loved Hydro 74 artworks, so this is quite a great accomplishment to me ann the blog. I hope you guys… read more

A Showcase of Creative Brand Identities

What defines your brand?

What sets you apart from your competition?

Some get confused, but its important that you define this, for a powerful brand communicates who you are effectively to people. However, your brand is different from your identity. We couldn’t have explained things better, so check out Jacob… read more

40 Bright and Colorful Juice & Smoothie Bar Logos

Advertise here with BSA

Juice and smoothie bars are clients you should be expecting to see more of – it’s an industry that has seen massive growth in the last decade, and new outlets continue to pop up everywhere. In fact, Market Research World has called it “the new coffee… read more

17 New Creative Fonts To Download

17 New Creative Fonts To Download

read more

Designing with Your Client in Mind: 6 Questions to Ask Before You Start a New Project

Advertise here with BSA

I have been a designer for about thirteen years, and most of my business during the past two years has come from new clients. Many have been new up-start businesses, not-for-profit groups and educational networks. When you are embarking on a new project, you need to… read more

Techniques for Constructing Usable Registration Forms

Advertise here with BSA

Most websites offer a way for users to sign up into their databases. This is often coupled with a username or e-mail address tied to a unique user ID number. The process of creating a user database is heavily developed and streamlined to a point. However… read more

45+ Handy CSS3 Tools, Tutorials and Resources

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a special style sheet language used to create website layouts and styles. It has been extensively used by web developers all around the world and has proved its worth in the field of web development.

Recently CSS3 comes with some magnificent new features that support… read more

Showcase of Italian Web Design Pt.2

Last week we had a showcase of Italian web design from a member of the Italian web design community. This week we have a showcase from a different perspective. This week, we have a showcase and look at Italian web design from a designer outside of that community. Complete with… read more

Guidelines for Creating an Elegant E-mail Newsletter Layout

Advertise here with BSA

Marketing is the lifeblood of the Internet industry. Running your own brand and corporation can be tiresome, not to mention extremely difficult. But with a powerful e-mail marketing campaign you can gather a lot of attention very quickly. It’s a fast process to find new subscribers… read more

Linkswitch #82, Reputation Monitoring, Free Fonts, Your Brand

7 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Freelance Reputation

Honest freelancers keep their word to get work done on time. They value their reputation and their strong work ethic pays dividends. An enthusiastic customer recommendation about a freelancer’s performance can bring a number of new offers and better income.

It’s important to… read more

Our favorite tweets of the week Aug 15-Aug 21, 2011

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick… read more

Friday Fresh Free Fonts #114

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it’s awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#114 and make sure to comeback… read more

Fresh Collection Of High Quality Free Fonts for Professional Designs

Fonts or typography holds critical importance in any web design, logo design, print advertisement, you name it. In the graphics and web designing field, fonts always play an important part in capturing the attention of the target audience. Therefore, having a good collection of high-quality fonts is a must when… read more

44 Websites to Find Free Fonts

If you’re a graphic designer who can’t bear to see Helvetica used for one more postcard or Times New Roman on another newsletter, then it’s time to expand your font library. But what to do when you’re a freelancer on a budget? Find free fonts!

League Script #1, from The League… read more

Beautiful Catalog Design Ideas to Spark Creativity

Catalogs are multi-paged printed materials that can either be stitched or wire-bound on the sides. They are popularly used as menus, service and product listings and directories. Like magazines, they can often be kept by customers for future reference or left in stores for daily use. 

It is only… read more

7 Fresh Free Fonts for Your Designs

Advertise here with BSA

Here at WDL we really like to keep our readers posted about the best sources available out there, and of course we are also talking about freebies! Today we decided to gather seven fresh free fonts that will give your designs a new look, so check… read more

Arranging and Designing Synchronized User Interfaces

Advertise here with BSA

In the design field there is a deep understanding of intuition vs science. Often designers will stress when trying to perfect a layout. This could be within sizes, positioning, page structure, color theory, or a whole host of other categories. But as you mature your design… read more

[Requested Illustrator Tip] Edit Styles in Multiple Text Boxes at Once

This Illustrator quick tip was requested by Chris. Chris asks, “I want to make a global change to the FONT or STYLE of a bunch of text boxes (each with different text inside them) at once. Is there a way to do this?” As a matter of fact, there are… read more

Mind Your En And Em Dashes: Typographic Etiquette

An understanding of typographic etiquette separates the master designers from the novices. A well-trained designer can tell within moments of viewing a design whether its creator knows how to work with typography. Typographic details aren’t just inside jokes among designers. They have been built up from thousands of years of… read more