Tutorial Blog

One of the most popular formats for online advertisements, especially amongst blogs, is the 125px by 125px square ad. Who knows why. Perhaps the size makes it easy to use in both narrow sidebars in a single column and wider sidebars as well in two columns. Whatever the reason, it’s popularity is nice for both designers as well as advertisers. Designers because we can design around this block size when creating new designs. Advertisers because having a unified size means having to create less “custom” sizes for each new place they advertise.

Perhaps the easiest way to sell these spots on your website is by filling the unsold spots with mock advertisements which are linked to a page in which potential new advertisers can get more information about buying the spot. These “Advertise Here” graphics should be catchy, but not too catchy as to overwhelm current advertisers. Due to the constrained space, trying to provide any other information other than “Advertise Here” is probably a bad idea. Perhaps you could fit in a price, but that might be considered tacky and I would avoid it.

Here is an example of a bad “Advertise Here” graphic:

Better to be brief in your graphic, and let the image that it links to do the talking.

Freebies

Below are some totally original, nicer “Advertise Here” graphics. Classy, fun, hip, grungy… Use them for whatever you would like. At the bottom there is a link to a ZIP file containing all the original Photoshop files, for you own alternations.

DOWNLOAD ALL EXAMPLES
(Photoshop files & PNG files included.)

Longer articles/content on the web are well served by a Table of Contents. Like in a book, they increase usability by allowing readers to jump directly to specific sections, rather than laboriously scroll the entire article to find something. A typical Table of Contents rather boring, let’s spice it up a little bit with a little color and illustration!

Here is what we will build:

Read the rest of this entry »

The release of jQuery UI 1.5 brought with it the Themeroller, which is a quick and easy way to customize and download a set of jQuery “widgets” for use on a web page.

Simply choose from one of the pre-built themes, or adjust the settings to your own liking and download the theme. Your download will include all the files necessary to for all these widgets to work, and a demo file with all of them on one page.

In fact, these pre-built theme could serve you well as a starting point for a new design. Let’s manipulate a theme download into a basic website using the Tabs and Accordian.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web pages are full of buttons. Navigation, links, “next” buttons, “submit” buttons, “OK” buttons, “close” buttons… the list goes on. When you go about designing a new web page, chances are its going to have a lot of buttons. Make life easier for yourself by creating a button class that you can reuse over and over in your HTML whenever you need a button.

Not only is this a favor to you, but it’s good for your users and aesthetics as well. Consistency is a key factor in usability. Let’s get started.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe Illustrator has some cool and powerful tools for manipulating the colors in your document. Using these tools, you can achieve some very nice colorization’s even if you aren’t particularly good at choosing colors. It also becomes easier to try out different versions quickly!

Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration is a lovely trend in web design. It fits the medium well. Great Illustrators though, often don’t think in terms of the web when they do their illustrations. Take a look at this very nice sky/hill cityscape illustration I found on shutterstock:

I think this illustration would make a great base for a web design, but clearly it isn’t prepared for such a task out-of-the-box. Lets do some manipulation and prepare it the web.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like it or not, our lives often take us away from the computer. Out of our homes, and into the great outdoors. But just because the Eyedropper tool isn’t within reach, doesn’t mean that you need to turn your inner-designer off. Here are some ways you can keep your design on while you are away from the computer.

Bring a notepad and pencil.

Nothing is worse than having an amazing idea and then losing it to a flood of other thoughts before you can get it down. If you are at the computer, it’s easy to give your epiphany a more permanent home, but while you are away, the best tool is always your trusty pen and pad. Field Notes is a very cool, designer-friendly brand for your notepad needs.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know what they say… design is in the details. When you are designing a website, there are opportunities abound to focus on little details to visually enhance the experience. In this tutorial, we will show you how to create links with underlines that “glow”.

Read the rest of this entry »