This is our weekly selection of our favorite web designs from the past week. Thanks to everybody for their recommendations and please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

With yet another step towards redefining internet search, Yahoo! recently launched Axis – a web browser enhancement.

Being hailed as a tool to enhance your search experience, Axis lets you search and see visual results without leaving the page you’re currently on. Traditionally, we are used to seeing links as search results. Axis, on the other hand, presents you with a panorama view of thumbnails that you can scroll and view right above the web page you’re currently browsing.

Eye candy? Sure!

Efficiency? Only time will tell!

Yahoo! Axis is being viewed by some users as a direct response to ...

Sharing has always been at the heart of Automattic, the developers of WordPress. And now those developers are looking to give back to the community – in the true spirit of open source. They have just launched a brand new resource for WordPress designers and developers called Code Poet.

Code Poet aims to collect the knowledge that is scattered around the web in such a way that the large WordPress user-base can take advantage of. Pete Davies, Premium Services Lead at Automattic, spoke to us about the learning process they’ve engaged in to identify their developer and designer ...

There was a time, not too long ago, when blogging was only about creating full-length entry content for readers to peruse and interact with. That time has long passed, however, and has given way to the era of tweets, blogrolls and link lists, micro-entries, digests, and all kinds of other content which gets published right alongside traditional content.

When it’s placed into a regular WordPress blog design, there’s actually nothing wrong with all of that additional content. It makes semantic sense in terms of its placement, the way its shown, when it is shown, and how users highlight it. However, ...

Working in the field of web development has a much different feel than graphics design. The work is more task-oriented and requires a higher level of concentration and detail. Not to mention bug fixes, maintenance, or getting sites running live on a web server.

It seems the job of a designer is more creative and freeform. This holds true for development as well, except in a different ideology. The open source movement has dramatically changed the web design industry at its core.. And social media is a related industry with a tremendous backbone. Once you understand how social networks can ...

Few professions demand greater talent, experience and flexibility than web-design. Not only do you have to deal with constantly evolving customer demands, you have to deal with constantly evolving aesthetic norms and design standards. What was popular six months back may already be falling out of favor.

Website layouts, once standardized and scarcely trifled with, are now the focus of extensive experimentation. While it helps to break the mold, in a time of creative crisis you can always turn to these 10 evergreen website layouts that will never let you down:

This is easily the ...

Sushi has been popular in the Western world since the 1970s, when it was introduced to diners in the U.S. You probably have a strong opinion about it – either you love it and are always looking for ‘the best’ sushi in your neighborhood, or you absolutely hate it and can’t understand how anyone could go near it, much less put it in their mouths. Personally, I’m in the ‘love it’ camp, and today I’m going to share with you six ways that you can leverage the power of sushi to improve your designs. Yes, really!

This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy :)
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This past week, Google Chrome overtook Internet Explorer to become the most used web browser in the world (well, at least for a day). While calculating the exact figures when it comes to the internet is hardly a precise science, Statcounter shows that Chrome has been growing at a steady rate at the expense of both IE and Firefox.

Ever since its inception, Chrome has been winning converts and its rise in popularity does not seem to be stopping anytime soon.

If we look at the Statcounter data closely, there are some interesting revelations:

• For a start, IE is ...

As a freelancer, you know how challenging it can be to juggle your time between marketing your services, managing your budget, and tracking invoices – not to mention actually working on client projects. Being a freelancer means being every department in one, and many freelancers fail to reach their potential because they make crucial mistakes that consistently hold them back. I know, because I’ve committed the same mistakes.

The following highlights the five biggest freelance mistakes you can make and how to rectify them.

When you’re breaking in to the business, nearly all the advice regarding ...

Craig Mod

A wonderfully eloquent and thought-provoking talk by writer-designer-publisher, Craig Mod. After outlining the differences (physical and emotional) between the book as artifact and as digital, he addresses how we might reduce the experiential gap. Well worth 40 minutes of your day.

Sponsored by H&FJ.

Nevertheless, there are certain features that most good text faces have in common. Familiarity with these helps to select the right fonts for a given project. This article presents a few criteria to help the process along.

Some of today’s most successful typefaces were designed to excel in very specific areas of use: Frutiger grew out of airport signage, Georgia and Verdana were among the first mass-market fonts ...

One of the things which characterizes WordPress is its broad use of PHP and “PHP-like” variables throughout its template files. These variables have remained unchanged for the better part of a decade since WordPress was developed, and so too has their placement. Since the very first WordPress release, PHP code could only be used in a raw template file which was stored on the server. This was (and is) largely done to protect a website’s security, as it was theorized that allowing PHP code in the body of entries, within a sidebar widget, or even in the body of a ...

THE OTHER BRICKLAYERS LAUGHED AT HIM. TEASED HIM. And for good reason: Erik Marinovich was the boss’ son. The college kid. And worse — he was the slowest, fussiest mason in town.

“Yes,” Erik remembers. “I was very meticulous. I made sure each brick … was laid perfectly.”

In the world of bricklaying, Erik Marinovich was a misfit.

It was 2005, and after graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Erik couldn’t find an internship in Design, let alone a real job.

Now, he was a mason, his fallback career. He worked hard, laughed at himself for being ...

You see them every time you go to the supermarket. Chances are, you’ve used one recently. Shopping carts have been a matter of course for supermarkets, grocery stores, and many retail outlets for decades, but did you know that Sylvan Goldman, their inventor, struggled with some of the exact same problems you yourself face as a designer? Today we’re going to explore the history of the humble shopping cart, taking lessons from its design, marketing, and even the psychology of use, that you can start applying to your own design process today.

Image Source

A couple ...

Bernd ...

This is our weekly selection of our favorite web designs from the past week. Thanks to everybody for their recommendations and please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Collaboration and education are two key words intrinsically associated with hackathons (the third being ‘free pizza’!). Hackathons promise a chance to meet other coders or designers, network with influencers and industry experts, and even find recruitment opportunities. It isn’t surprising that, with the spread of startup culture across geographic boundaries, hackathons too have started mushrooming in the likeliest – and the unlikeliest – of places.

There are certain rules – both said and unsaid – that apply when attending hackathons. While most hackathons remain informal, free-wheeling affairs, you can learn a lot more from them if you follow a ...

We all see it every day. That box, that wrapper, those bottles, jars, and cans. Food packaging is something that permeates our lives, and yet most people don’t ever stop to consider how it actually affects the decisions we make when we purchase our food. From the moment you make a selection in the store to the moment you get your groceries home and open them, food package designers have carefully engineered each step of your eating experience to make sure you make the choices that are right for you. As designers, it’s always worth considering how others in different ...

Advancing trends for the mobile web are slowly blurring the line between Internet websites and native applications. Lately there have been many updates to mobile operating systems and web browsers with more capable rendering engines. This means we can work openly with webkit CSS3 effects and even many bits of jQuery code.

However a lot of the customization for mobile web apps is done in the document header. Meta tags ...

Colors help our eyes determine detail. Sometimes, however, multiple colors can disguise details that we do not naturally see. Using shades of one color to wash out a photo or art piece can add to the overall impact and bring out details we might have missed.

This process of either eliminating all color or reducing the color palette to hues within a single shade is generally referred to as monochromatism. In the below examples of monochromatic photos and art, we included images in which the artist focuses your attention using careful color selection. This is not necessarily a single color, ...