Graphic Design Blog

Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
It’s fast, easy, and fun.

My last post on magazine themes brought quite a bit of attention to the Theme Playground, which I can’t really complain about. After bringing in over 1,400 visits on Friday, nearly 4,000 on Saturday, and almost 1,500 today (Sunday), We’ve reached a new high for Theme Playground. Thank you everyone that visited, and those that subscribed. I appreciate it, and it definitely encourages me to push what I’m doing here to the next level. Again, I can’t thank you enough.

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Sometimes it’s just amazing to see, how developers use creative approaches to design amazing layouts, based upon a simple WordPress template. Every now and again we take a look around, and select WordPress themes, which offer thought-out design, flexible template structure and conform to the basic principles of usability. The choice is big enough, but the search is worth it. We invest our time, browsing through dozens of web-sites, news aggregators and design-communities and put enhanced solutions together, so you don’t have to.

Let’s take a look at 21 23 fresh, usable, simple and and elegant WordPress themes, which have been released over the last few months. Among other things, we’ve also selected some of the new minimalistic solutions - all of them make use of clear and precise typography. They’re definitely worth a look.

You can also take a look at

• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen,
• 8 Fresh And Clean WordPress Themes and
• 10 Fresh, Elegant and Clean WordPress Themes.

> keep Reading - Showcase | Smashing Magazine.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a nice looking Monitor and Computer icon. Final output can be seen below:

Some different sizes:

klick here for more

This tutorial is going to show you how you can draw a printer that can be used as an icon like the one shown below. (Basic knowledge of the use of the pen tool is required)

Let’s start.
Set #96A4AF as foreground color, select the pen tool and draw a shape like the one shown in the screenshot.
klick here for more…

1) Create a new image 256×256 pixels with transparent background. Rename the first layer as “background” 2) Fill the background with white color #ffffff. 3) Create a new layer, rename this layer as “circle”. 4) Select the Eliptical Marquee Tool and draw a circle 222×222 pixels while holding SHIFT to get a perfect circle. Save this selection as “circle selection”. 5) Fill the selection with any color. I used #880303

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Tablecloth is lightweight, easy to use, unobtrusive way to add style and behaviour to your html table elements. By simply adding 2 lines of code to your html page you will have styled and active tables that your visitors will love Try to mouseover or click on a table below.

http://cssglobe.com/lab/tablecloth/

Polaroid Gallery offers a quite unusual way of presenting a bunch of photos online. The script loads images and image titles dynamically from an external XML file. Then the script processes the data and creates an interactive flash gallery in which all images are presented as Polaroid-photos.

The images are kind of thrown on the the table randomly and create a beautiful mess — the idea resembles BumpTop, physics-driven 3D-desktop with draggable folders and files. You can move the polaroids around with the mouse, and you can double click a Polaroid picture to zoom in.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/10/12/flash-based-galleries-for-your-images/

Dzone – Provides links for developers that members can vote up or down.
Pixel Groovy - A user-controlled tutorial directory.
Sphinn – For search and internet marketing professionals.
CSS Globe - Not a typical social media site where members vote, but rather a site that lets members provide links to relevant articles and blog posts.
DevelopersNiche - A smaller social media site for developers.

http://www.vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/89-community-sites-for-webmasters/