Using ribbons is really big these days, bringing both sophistication and a hint of nostalgia to designs.

As someone who spends many hours behind the computer writing and creating websites my desktop wallpaper is very crucial to me. I’m very picky with my wallpapers, they must inspire me but not distract me or bore me very fast.
I like to take inspiration from things right in front of me or around me and [...]

I’ve noticed a lot of designs with a mostly black and white color palette lately, and not just for site types you’d expect. Is the colorful, rainbow trend being phased out with something more classic? Are people tired of safe, middle-ground gray? Welcome to this week’s Friday Focus.

There are countless of posts that highlight great WordPress plug-ins and after sometime you keep coming across the same ones over and over again. The fact is that no matter how good or great these plug-ins are sometimes they are just overkill for your needs. Once a plug-in is popular developers will mostly keep expanding [...]

This week on Friday Focus: designs that feature artistic renderings of skyscrapers and other features of a long landscape. See how they’re incorporated below.

Every designer should have a folder full of ‘tools’ to design. Just having Photoshop and knowing how to use it is not enough. You should have folders full of fonts, vectors, and brushes.
When used with the right effects, think lightening, gradient, etc., photoshop brushes are a very
easy way to enhance your design. If you [...]

This week on Friday Focus: vines, blooms, and other foliage that do a great job of framing your website.

One of WordPress greatest feature since version 2.5 is shortcodes. All themes comes with a function.php file. You just have to put the shortcodes in your themes function.php and you can start using them.
Shortcodes are handy for features you want to use in your posts but not in all of them. Plug-ins usually are standard [...]

Where sidebars are not an afterthought, and even steal the show. Happy Friday Focus!

There has been a debate waging some time already about the use of Flash or HTML5 Canvas, which became pretty intense when it became obvious that Apple would not support Flash on its mobile devices. With big websites slowly implementing canvas, the constant updates from browsers(dear IE excluded) and the gaining popularity of HTML5 the [...]

Sites usually place logos at the top left corner of the page, but nudge them to the center and it makes quite an impact, as a red wax seal does on a white letter envelope. Let's check out sites with centered logos on this week's Friday Focus.

We have already shown what CSS3 with HTML5 can do for your website. But beside websites CSS3 with jQuery can do a whole lot more. You can make animations with it that could only be done with Flash before and create designs only possible with Photoshop.
Once FireFox and Internet Explorer have finally catch up with [...]

This week on Friday Focus: websites whose content are arranged into boxes like those cute bento meals. This time, you must think inside the box!

If you want your website to stand out a good first step would be to design your own instead of using a template which is used by hundreds others. While it's true that content is very important to any other websites design also matters, it matters a lot.
We can't all be creatives or a graphic [...]