Here’s a treat for the Thanksgiving and the holiday season that’s ramping up: freebies, bundles, and deals to help you create beautiful designs, all showcased on inspiring sites to boot.

This week’s Friday Focus is a little meta: a combination of useful guides and tools geared towards designers and developers all wrapped in inspiring designs.

This week a selection of business card tutorials and templates. The days that we only had a phone number to give are long gone. With Twitter, Facebook, weblogs, emails and the old fashioned phone number, everyone should carry a business card. Actually you should carry more than one, one for professional purposes and one for [...]

Images don’t need to reside in strictly rectangular boxes. Check out these sites that use out of the ordinary shapes for masking photos. Happy Friday Focus!

This week’s featured sites are exactly what the title says: brilliant in-browser animations. Happy Friday Focus!

With the increasing better support from browsers for CSS we can rely more on code for content presentation. I noticed that a lot of websites don’t look farther then the design and typography. It’s good practice to include images with your articles and weblog entries. But many people don’t think about enhancing photos and using [...]

It’s all about coffee this week on Friday Focus!

Sixteen days until Christmas, time to get those digital Christmas cards designed and e-mailed. It’s equally personal to design your own card from yourself or your company to mail to others as it is sending a regular card signed by you. Personally I tend to do both, digital and regular card. The holiday season is [...]

One of the best ways to learn how to use Photoshop and to keep up to date with new techniques, is to work on tutorials. It is amazing how far Photoshop tutorials has come along the last nine years. With a lot of practice most people can create wonderful things with Photoshop from a small [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This week’s Friday Focus features different institutions of society as design inspiration for the featured websites. Did they make you do a double-take too?