You know that flaming text effect that was so hip pre-dotcom bubble burst, very Web 1.0? Well, don’t overdo it, it’s a bit tacky most of the time. Sometimes, however, it’s exactly what you need, so why not take a look at this quick and dirty tutorial for Photoshop? Let’s start burning that type!

Zoe tackles layers in Photoshop in this week’s tutorial. Layers can be very useful, both for creating graphic elements and banners for sites, and when mocking up a site before moving onto production. In this tutorial, Zoe works from a photo and adds some new elements to fit the project.

Wonder how those great Photoshop artist achieve their dazzling images? Talent, mostly, but it also helps to have the right kind of tools. That includes plugins, something that Zoe’s been dabbling with for some time now. This is her first look at the world, and she’s already found some extra juice for Photoshop to recommend.

Looking for that cracked, distorted effect in a font for your website, but you’re not finding a free font that cuts it, nor do you have the budget to cash up for a commercial license? Never fear, using Adobe Illustrator, a photo, and a suitable non-distorted font, you’ll be able to create your own unique beaten-up look. Zoe tells how in this tutorial.

I recently saw a post on Woork where they talked about the perfect pagination using CSS, and the first thing I noticed was that they were showing off what they label as the Digg-like structure that I use on most of my blogs.

I have always hated the previous, and next page links that most WordPress themes come with, as it doesn’t tell anything about which direction you will be going once you are off the front page.

Will previous bring me to where I was previous, or to even older posts? It has always been something that has annoyed me.

In the old days we aligned images with align="right" with vspace and hspace to add a bit of spacing to the mix. These days, it’s CSS that should handle these things, and with the upcoming WordPress 2.5 release the most popular self-hosted blogging platform will follow suit. Here’s how to do it!

Recently, I was at the Northern Voice conference in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, where I was able to meet up with people from a variety of different backgrounds. It got me wondering about how each conference brings in different groups of people, and how the best conferences are the ones that have a blurry line between different groups and specialties.

I’ve been very busy and have seemingly disappeared from Devlounge lately. If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been all this time and our looking for some good opinionated things to read, stop by my new blog. Hope all is well. I hope to return to the Devlounge scene sometime soon.
AJ

When Flash first made its debut online, I was really excited about all it could do. Creating more immersive environments online, Flash seemed like it was going to open up a whole new layer of experience and interaction for the web.

Quickly though, like many, I realized that over use of Flash could be a bad thing, and basically tossed it aside. What I didn’t realize at the time is how big of a role Flash was going take online as time progressed.

Now we watch Flash videos all the time, and people are quickly realizing once again how great, properly used Flash can be.

Hacking code in Notepad may be hardcore to some, but it’s not something I would recommend, really. Sure, it gets the job done, but a great text editor can save time and help you on your way. The problem is finding The Right One…