Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

The Psychology Behind Color In Design or Nothing Should be Random http://cot.ag/zpB2NM

The Amazing World of Icon Fonts http://cot.ag/y0oAP6

Interesting insights from Aaron Gustafson: From “Mobile Friendly” to “Mobile First” http://bit.ly/qukmio #css #rwd /via @smashingmag

5 Tips to Help Home-Entrepreneurs Set Up a Great Office http://cot.ag/yPx1EP

We like this: Responsive Design Test Bookmarklet http://bit.ly/yIiIyp

The amazing drawing world of Pat Perry http://cot.ag/y5mbYP

The Future Of Screen Typography Is In Your Hands http://bit.ly/yZpy9D (via @smashingmag)

27 Best free WordPress Plugins for Musicians http://bit.ly/vZtOz4 (thanks @daviddas for the mention)

Leeds Print Festival posters or the beautiful art of marbling by Jemma Lewis http://cot.ag/ziNp1R

Working locally: providing a greater flexibility and creativity? http://cot.ag/zIL8ET

Ten Things To Think About When Designing Your iPad App http://bit.ly/zNmLdW *Great read

The gap between traditional and digital mediums illustrated perfectly for China Mobile in “Wireless City” http://bit.ly/xYeBJs

Sleep: Are you getting enough? http://bit.ly/zff73Z *Interesting read for those of you staying up all night

Time to Ruby dooby do? Perhaps. Take A Quick Look at Ruby on Rails http://bit.ly/yYUm1u

A super fun calendar for those obsessed with bubble wrap – it has a bubble to pop for every single day of the year! http://bit.ly/yBXQSa

Take a look at the making of Novum’s magazine geodesic front cover and get inspired! http://bit.ly/zPcJVb

Make Funky Animations With CC Circle And Radio Waves http://bit.ly/A4s0le

Gentlemint: Pinterest For Men http://bit.ly/xRb3A0 *Looks fun

Yosemite HD: amazing time lapse video collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty http://bit.ly/yz6vao

This Short Film About Letterpress Will Make You Yearn For An Ink Roller http://bit.ly/AFqDjE

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

A little preoccupied

Almost daily

The whiz kid

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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We have a fantastic freebie to download today from Pixeden, a one stop place for great tools for the modern design.

Released first and exclusively on WDD, it’s an infographic vector kit, with the most used elements that you may need for your infographic designs.

Included in this set is a world map, gender elements, as well as multiple pie and bar charts. You can easily combine and modify all the elements to create a distinctive infographic.

The elements in the kit can be used for personal and commercial purposes. The file cannot be redistributed or sold in any shape or form.

The file is available for free for all Webdesigner Depot and Mighty Deals subscribers. Simply enter your email address below to download it. See the full preview after the jump….. Enjoy!

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It’s not uncommon for a designer in today’s world to pay little attention to how type is laid out, especially with the ever-so-convenient default settings of heading tags and web safe fonts found universally on the web.

If we as interactive designers we’re able to take a little more time when it came to typography, than the results would show a unique, well thought of design as oppose to a “run of the mill” creation.

There is a good chance that the majority of designers and designs you admire showcase good examples of typography.

I’ll show you a few steps I take in tweaking set type to be more appealing than those default scenarios of 24px H1 tags along with 13px set in Times New Roman.

Don’t settle for default settings, everyone is doing it.

Here we have the ever- so- common look of a heading along with a chunk of body copy to follow. This doesn’t exactly pull you in or set itself apart from all the other samples just like it, right? So to make the text sample more visually appealing, first, we’re going to make a few changes with our font selection.

Choose a font that will have more visual weight with your headline

Although font selection is not exactly “typography,” it is in fact a quintessential component to help the type on a page distinguish itself from other elements. With the onset of @font-face, massive amounts of choices are available to designers anywhere.

Here I’ve used an Extra Condensed Gothic Style font that can easily be found on a free font site like FontSquirrel.com. If we stop and think about it, the name “Condensed” should mean something, because it is in fact more dense than it’s normal book style family member, which is exactly what we want out of a headline:, something that pulls the user in and truly sets itself apart from the body copy. It certainly succeeds in grabbing your attention better than the original but there are a few things we could do to further improve the text.

Make it more appealing with two lines of CSS

The immediate change is in the letters; they’re all capitalized now but they also now have negative kerning between each of the letters (a technique carried over from newspaper design).

Both of these characteristics can easily be accomplished through CSS, {text-transform:uppercase; and letter-spacing:-Xpx;}. By making these two lines worth of coding changes, it results in a major improvement in visual weight, especially over the original .

Work out any last little tweaks

In the next step, the font used in the body paragraph has in fact changed to a cleaner sans-serif, which better compliments the headline text. We’re getting closer to a much more visually appealing design, but there are a few changes we can make to clean it up even more.

As the green indicators show, there are unequal margins and what typographers like to call an “orphan.” Which is a single word that falls to the last line of the paragraph. It creates a very unequal weight visually as compared to the rest of the text, and this issue can be solved easily by rewording the text slightly.

When it comes to margins, there is no rule that all must be equal. However, if you are starting a young web design career, it’s good practice to have equal margins throughout until you experience and learn techniques that allow you to extend beyond the guidelines of typesetting and still accomplish your goal visually.

After creating a more balanced visual canvas by removing the orphan and adjusting the margins you can see the end result, a well set type sample that’s comfortable where it lays.

Dallas is an Interactive Designer at 352 Media Group, a digital marketing and web design company.

What are your best tips for web typography? Let us know in the comments!

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We’re thrilled to see bring you another great giveaway of business cards from our friends at Uprinting.

This time around we’ll be giving away 5 prizes of 250 die cut business cards each!

What makes these cards different is their unique and attractive shapes. They are sure to get you noticed and will make your clients look twice!

Use them as appointment reminders, mini-resumes, service lists, calendars, portfolios and product samples, to name a few.

Read on for more information on how to participate….

Each of the 5 winners will receive:

• 250 Die-cut business cards for 5 winners
• 2 x 3.5″ Rounded Corners, 2″ x 2″ Rounded Corners, 1.75″ x 3.5″ Rounded Corners, 2″ x 3.5″ Leaf, 2″ x 3.5″ Rounded One Corner, 2″ x 3.5″ Half-Circle Side, 2″ x 3.5″ Oval, 2.5″ Circle
• 14pt Cardstock Gloss / Matte / High Gloss (UV), or 13pt Cardstock Uncoated
• 6 Business days print turnaround time
• Free shipping
  

How to participate:

• Twitter: Send a tweet about this contest (and include the URL to the contest page) and then post one comment with the url of your tweet in the comments area below. You can get the url of your tweet by clicking on the date/time stamp of your tweet.
• “LIKE” Uprinting in Facebook
  
• Contest will end February 8th, 2012
  

Thanks to UPrinting for bringing us these great prizes and good luck to all of you!!!

SetSeed: A Super-Slick Self Hosted CMS – only $39!

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There are a whole bunch of CMSes out there ranging from lightweight micro-blogging platforms to huge enterprise packages.

I don’t want to mention any names here or tell you what to use.

Instead, I’m going give you some important points to consider, so that you can make an educated decision on your own.

And hopefully, not invest a huge amount of time and energy into a CMS you will have to abandon a year or two down the road.

The learning curve

Sadly, many designers pick a CMS on this point alone. Don’t get me wrong, choosing a CMS you can actually figure out is important, but you are investing a lot of time and energy into this piece of software. Potentially, years of your life will be spent working with this CMS. Don’t just go with the easiest one to configure without taking in some other considerations. A one-click install is nice, but should not be a deciding factor.

With that said, how fast you can get up-and-running, and building simple sites is important. Every CMS has a learning curve but some are much steeper than other. Consider how much time you have before making a choice. If you are a student, you might consider taking the plunge and digging into a more difficult to learn but feature-rich CMS, because you have the time available to do it. If you are working and need a CMS solution yesterday, you may be forced to go with something you can get up in running in a few days.

Theming

If you are not familiar with the term, by theming I mean creating the skin, the visible part of the front-end of the website. How this is done should be a huge consideration. Remember developers are the people building CMSes and they like to make development easier, sometimes before considering you the designer, and unfortunately, the end user, too. Which means, the way the front-end is put together might have been neglected or made unnecessarily complicated. Some CMSes are much easier to theme than others. Also, how the control panel is set up and how easy it is to use should greatly influence your decision, because you will be spending huge amounts of time working with it.

You need to consider how flexible theming for the CMS is. Are you able to create or import static HTML and CSS or are there a ton of hoops to jump through first? How is the file structure set up and are you required to save separate pieces of your design all over the back-end? A good CMS, once you are proficient with it, will save you time. But there are definitely some CMSes out there where development takes extra time.

How much freedom are you given to build the website you want? Every CMS has some design hurdles you have to jump over. Are you forced to begin with a starter or default template? That can be a big cramp in your design style and it can eat up extra time. Although, some people prefer having templates to start with. Which do you prefer? Do you have to write markup right in the browser or can you use a text editor? Think about how you prefer building static webpages and check to see if you can use the same process or will you be forced to do things differently.

Documentation and resources

A CMS is only as good as its documentation. I’ve played around with a few amazing CMSes that I ended up having to abandon because I got stuck, and realized there wasn’t enough proper documentation to get me out of the jam I was in. So right after looking at the basic specs for a CMS, dig into the documentation. You should be able to start with zero knowledge and build a complete website just from reading the documentation. If it doesn’t look like that is the case, you might want to look into another CMS.

Most CMSes list their features but the documentation is really where you can see exactly what is offered. For example, a CMS will probably offer some sort of shopping cart solution, but what that is exactly, can vary greatly from CMS to CMS. If there are one or two things your CMS must have, be sure to read the documentation about them specifically, and see if they will work for you.

Community

Even the best documentation cannot answer every question you will have. Is there a place to go where people will answer your questions? If there is, how helpful is the community to designers and novices? Some communities can actually be quite hostile or simply ignore beginner’s questions.

If you would like to ask some questions, don’t be that person who gets on the forums or Twitter asking “Is this CMS any good?” Browse around a little bit. Someone has probably already asked the question you have. A good way to gauge the quality of the community is to see what kinds of responses people are getting to their questions, and how many hours/days it takes to get them. Nothing is worse than having a question you cannot answer and not having a resource to turn to.

Another consideration not often thought of is paid support. Do the CMS developers provide support and how much does it cost? If they don’t, are there people in the community that you can trust to get timely support from? Inevitably, there will come a time when you need a custom add-on built or something else comes up that is over your knowledge level. Someone needs to be there to do it for you or walk you through it.

Community also includes the third-party developers. Who and how many people are building add-ons for the CMS? Most CMSes have a central add-on community. Have a look around and see what is available.

Usability

Not every website you build will be for yourself. How easy a client can add and edit their own content is very important. Complicated back-ends and lack of features means more development time and more time training clients. One of the most basic and most important features of any CMS is the text editor. Editing site content should be a primary concern for you and the people you will be building websites for. How easy is the WYSIWYG editor to use and goes it write clean markup? Will clients who are not computer savvy be able to use it?

Also, along the same lines is the file upload system. How easy is it to upload images, video, PDFs, et cetera? Many clients don’t have the software or knowledge to edit and resize images, yet need this functionality on their website. Is there built-in image resizing your clients can take advantage of?

The usability of the control panel should be considered as well. You may have to train people to use the system, which can be many hours of work over the years. Is it simple enough your grandmother could use it? Also, how configurable is the control panel? Can you turn off or hide areas the client doesn’t need access to? It is nice to be able to only let clients edit the areas of the site they need to without having to deal with other parts of the control panel that might confuse them, or worse, allow them to break the website.

Clients need to be able to do these basic things:

• Edit existing page content
• Add new pages easily and have the navigation updated automatically
• Add photos, documents and video content
• Give access to the control panel to other employees

They all sound pretty easy but there can actually be a number of problems. Tabular data or heavily styled areas that require HTML and CSS knowledge can be difficult for a client to edit, and some WYSIWYG editors don’t do a very good job here. Some CMSes don’t provide an intuitive way of adding additional pages or easily up-datable navigation. You don’t want to leave these things up to the client if you don’t have to. I like to follow the rule that if a client could break something, they will break it. Some CMSes don’t allow certain file types to be uploaded or have an upload file size limit, which can cause headaches for clients trying to upload large PDFs or PowerPoint presentations.

All things to consider.

Programing knowledge requirements

You chose to be a designer for a reason, right? Some of us might be proficient in a language like PHP but that doesn’t mean we want to spend all of our time doing it. Take a look at the language the CMS is written in and see if it is something you are familiar with and could work in if you had to. Also, see how much scripting is done in the templates. Some CMSes do a really good job of keeping the PHP or whatever language out of the templates, so you can focus just on the HTML and CSS. Other CMSes can have their own templating language to use.

They are all a little bit different and, depending on your comfort level with code, you will have to choose one to live with. Generally, I say don’t go with a CMS where you have to learn a whole new language to get started, unless you really would rather be a developer and not a designer.

How active are the developers?

How good the CMS is now is important, but where it is going in the future is just as important. So find out what the developers are up to. Look at the time it takes for each major release and each dot release to come out. If it has been two years since the last dot release, the CMS might be dead or on hold. There is no perfect CMS but the more the developers are working the better a CMS is going to get. And what may be the best CMS now might not be five years from now. Don’t get stuck with a dying CMS.

Find the bug tracker and see just how long bugs go unfixed. If something is broken on a site you build, clients are going to rely on you to fix it. Telling them the CMS developers haven’t fixed the bug yet, isn’t a very good excuse.

Flexibility and reach

What does the CMS come with out of the box? A CMS with little functionality means you have to rely heavily on 3rd party add-ons. On the other hand a CMS with everything built in may be bloated and difficult to get up and running, especially if you are building a simple website. There needs to be a happy medium between the two. An ideal CMS can be set up quickly without a lot of configuration needing to be done, yet has all the tools required for more complex features.

Just because you are only building simple websites now doesn’t mean you might not be building more complex websites in the future. Think about the types of websites you would like to build or may be asked to build and does the CMS allow for it. How hard is it to add a membership area to the website, multi-language support, or to add a store?

Does it make you better?

Learning how to build website with a CMS is a great thing to know but just how much larger your skill set becomes, can vary. Being able to let clients edit their own content is the central feature of a CMS, but they can offer so much more:

• Ecommerce
• Membership functionality
• Multi-language support
• Dynamic media galleries
• Multi-site installations
• Integrating blogs and forums
• Pagination
• Easy syndication

To name a few. You probably would not have been able to create this type of work without some development knowledge but a good CMS can make that possible.

After working with a good CMS for a while, you should find that you are able to work at the same speed or even faster than if you were building a static website. A good CMS saves you development time, but should also help improve the way you develop the front-end as well, by creating reusable snippets of content, embedding templates inside each other, and displaying content from the database that you would have had to markup yourself in a static site.

Where are you going?

Think about where you are in your career now, and where you want to be five and ten years from now. The CMS you choose will be with you at least that long. Are you going to be working for a big design firm or do you want to work for yourself? Will you be doing freelance work on the side?

Not every firm uses the same CMS but there are some that are used more regularly. If you really fall in love with one CMS in particular, you can always find the firms that use it, too. Less popular CMSes have less job opportunities but the firms that do use them would be much more inclined to hire you, being proficient with the CMS, over someone who has never touched it before. Using a less popular CMS makes you more of a specialist. Using a popular CMS means you have a broader range of opportunities.

If you plan on freelancing full or part time, you will want a CMS where you are comfortable doing every aspect of development. Typically, your projects will be smaller in scope as well, so a huge CMS with a long setup time might not be the best option.

Conclusion

Every person is different and what CMS works for me might not be the best option for you. So take these points into consideration. Take a look at what CMSes are available, and pick the one that will work best for you.

Written exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Tyler Herman, a web designer and blogger at Couchable.co. You can also follow Tyler on Twitter @couchable to find out what he ate for lunch, see photos of his 24 cats, and read rants about sports teams you don’t care about.

What do you look for when choosing your CMS? Share other tips with us!

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Firefox 10, due out January 31st (the same day Firefox 11 becomes an official Beta release), finally rounds out the browser’s growing collection of developer tools with Page and Style Inspectors.

In some ways, these tools are similar to Firebug, but they’re also uniquely Mozilla-ey.

Rather than try to reproduce Firebug or the WebKit developer tools, Mozilla has included only the most essential features, focusing instead on making the experience elegant.

Does the new approach work, or will designers run screaming back to Firebug? Let’s take a look.

You can pull up the Page Inspector by right-clicking a web page and choosing “Inspect.” (Firebug recently changed its context menu item to read “Inspect in Firebug,” so it will coexist peacefully with the built-in dev tools.) At the bottom of the screen, a purple bar appears with a list of the selected element’s parents and children.

You can click parents or children to select them, and you can right-click an element to see its siblings. There are also buttons labeled “Inspect,” “HTML,” and “Style.” If Firebug’s sea of tabs and buttons drove you up the wall, this layout will be a godsend. If just you want to see the DOM, having to click “HTML” first may drive you up the wall.

Digging in

Clicking the HTML button bring up a panel that shows the hierarchy of HTML tags that make up your page. In this view, you can expand and collapse tags and edit their attributes. Clicking the “Inspect” button lets you hover over elements to inspect them, and as you do so, Firefox highlights the element you’re inspecting and darkens the rest of the page.

Clicking the “Style” button brings up the Style Inspector, showing the CSS rules that apply to the selected element. In the Style Inspector, you can switch from “Rules” to a “Properties” section that gives you the computed CSS properties for the selected element, along with links to Mozilla’s documentation for each property.

The Style Inspector sits to the right of the page, while the Page inspector and HTML pane sit at the bottom of the screen. You can choose to display both panes, just one of them, or neither.

That basically covers the entirety of what the Page and Style Inspectors do. The web console and JavaScript scratchpad, introduced in earlier versions of Firefox, are separate tools. There is no network activity monitor. There’s no user agent switcher, no “edit as HTML feature,” no performance-testing tools, no way to inject new tags into a page, no way to activate an element’s hover state. There’s not even a “layout” panel for viewing the dimensions, padding, and margins of your element.

Despite all those limitations, I keep coming back to the Page and Style Inspectors. I come back for the uncluttered interface, the thoughtfully placed panes, and that funky purple chrome. I come back because they’re a pleasure to use, and because they meet my needs most of the time.

The inspectors’ simple UI also means that they’re useful even when I’ve made the window small to test responsive designs. When they don’t meet my needs, I just open Firebug or the Web Developer Toolbar. (I’d do this a lot less if the built-in dev tools had equivalents to Firebug’s Layout and Net panels.)

Mozilla’s development tools don’t have to match the feature set of their competitors’ tools, because the specialized features of those tools already exist as Firefox extensions. That’s what makes the Firefox dev tools unique.

These browsers go up to 11

In addition to the HTML and Style Inspector, some innovative features are slated for later releases of Firefox. Firefox 11’s developer tools let you view your web page as three-dimensional stacks of tags. Each time you nest a tag, that stack of tags gets taller. This feature is actually surprisingly helpful—you can see at a glance whether an element is inside the wrong parent, and seeing those tags pile up will cure new developers of div-itis right quick.

Also due out in Firefox 11 is a style editor. This is tool lets you create new stylesheets, much like any good text editor would. The main difference is that your changes are applied to live web pages as soon as you finish typing.

Previously, this sort of live CSS editing has been the domain of development environments like Espresso, so it’s awesome to see this feature built right into the browser. More features, including “tooling to assist with application performance issues,” are planned for later this year.

Even in Firefox 11, though, comparing the built-in dev tools with Firebug (or with the WebKit dev tools) is a little like comparing iOS with Android. The former has a clean, intuitive UI and some innovative ideas, but it’s short on power user features.

The latter has every feature that you can think of, and you can configure the blazes out if it, but it’s not quite as elegant as Cupertino’s wunderkind. Unlike iOS and Android, it’s easy to use both tools at the same time if you want. Mozilla continues to contribute to Firebug and has made it clear that Firebug is here for the long haul.

Which tool is right for you? That depends on what features you need, what features you can live without, and how you feel about hunting down extensions to fill in the gaps in your tool of choice. Whatever you think about the new developer tools, this is one area where you can’t accuse Firefox of aping WebKit.

Ryan DeBeasi is a front-end developer at the web design company 352 Media Group. He loves concise language, elegant design, strong coffee, and jazz. He spends far too much time on Twitter.

Are you excited about the new dev tools in Firefox 10? What are your go-to dev tools? Let us know in the comments!

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Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Check out Modern Pictograms, a typeface made for interface designers and programmers http://cot.ag/weQW2I #free #tool

New innovations in digital publishing http://bit.ly/AoDFoa Great lecture by Mike Matas

Listen to your critics & seek feedback Vs Ignore your critics & follow your intuition – the constant battle http://cot.ag/y94OLS

Photography and surrealism by Gregory Crewdson, really impressive http://bit.ly/yfzyvy

My Useless Design Portfolio http://ow.ly/8Dg8B via @jophillips

What are the variables that make a business a success or a failure? http://bit.ly/AvYb5K

How much fun would it be to design limited edition COINS for your government? http://bit.ly/wbsduE

Redesigning a website in 30 minutes http://bit.ly/yhwvmq *Cool inspiration

Definitely gotta check ‘em out! The top 20 HTML5 games: http://bit.ly/xtKUKS (via @netmag)

Do it right even in a Jacuzzi: 9 Tips for Working While Traveling http://bit.ly/yQwR1M

Neat! Create a Mobile App Icon in Photoshop http://bit.ly/wDbnQ4

Creative Infographic on How to Get More Clicks on Twitter http://bit.ly/zGg5E3 Did we get it right?

Leo Burnett’s Short, Sweet Guide To Creative Satisfaction (And Making Money) http://cot.ag/zCNlx3 *An awesome 75th anniversary video

A must read: What Successful Products Teach Us About Web Design http://bit.ly/yIkSfR

Gleeks, Glee Can Teach You about Attracting a Raving Horde of Social Media Fans http://cot.ag/wnE7Gp

Browser Wars based on changeability: Users Vs Browsers http://cot.ag/w4OZz4 Interesting debate between Aral & John

Eye candy: Creative Uses of Illustration in Web Design http://cot.ag/xAaq2p

Realism in UI Design: a good or a bad thing? http://cot.ag/yw8nB0

An interesting read on WordPress: Custom Post Types are not Posts – http://bit.ly/wk6YNK (via @smashingmag)

Vintage + Illustration + Posters + Paul Rogers = love http://cot.ag/wqZCe2

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

SetSeed: A Super-Slick Self Hosted CMS – only $39!

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Brand recognition problem

The louder the better

The endangered client

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

SetSeed: A Super-Slick Self Hosted CMS – only $39!

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Managing a blog with a single author can be time-consuming enough, but adding in multiple authors can exponentially increase the amount of time and effort it takes to manage.

There’s editorial workflow, scheduling, and author management to consider, among other things.

Below are fifteen plugins that can make managing your multi-author blog a lot easier.

They include editorial workflow plugins, scheduling and calendar plugins, and plugins that will benefit your authors or make it easier to communicate with them.

EditFlow

EditFlow is one of the most useful plugins for managing posts on a multi-author blog. It allows you to set up custom editorial statuses for your posts, to better manage your workflow. It also sets up a feedback system directly in the post, to help eliminate emails going back and forth between authors and editors. It’s a must for blogs with any kind of editorial process.

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar plugin is great for blogs that need to schedule posts ahead of time, which includes most multi-author blogs. Editorial Calendar gives you a visual look at your upcoming posts and when they’re scheduled, and shows you gaps in your schedule.

WP Status Notifier

WP Status Notifier will automatically send emails to a specified address whenever a post is submitted for review, eliminating the need to check manually. You can also set it to email the post’s author when a post is approved or sent back to drafts.

Audit Trail Plugin

Audit Trail lets you keep track of what’s happening inside your blog by logging certain actions. You can record things like user logins, post saves, and other common functions so you know exactly who’s doing what on your blog.

Dashboard Notepad

Dashboard Notepad lets you leave notes in your blog’s dashboard. You can set who can edit notes and who can simply read them. It’s a great place for leaving instructions or other information for your writers.

Genki Pre-Publish Reminder

Genki Pre-Publish Reminder inserts a box in the post sidebar to remind your authors about anything important they need to do before publishing their posts. It accepts both HTML and PHP code for plenty of flexibility.

Auto-Schedule Posts

Auto-Schedule Posts takes over the post scheduling on your blog for you. It catches posts as they’re published and holds them until they meet your predefined criteria for being posted. You can set posts to only publish between certain hours, on certain days, and with a minimum amount of time between posts.

WP Hide Dashboard

WP Hide Dashboard removes the Dashboard menu from your WordPress backend for select user roles. You can also eliminate the Dashboard links in the admin menu, and prevent Dashboard access to users assigned to the Subscriber role (so they can edit their profiles but otherwise not have access to the Dashboard). It works with single site and multisite modes, and with BuddyPress.

Co-Authors Plus

Co-Authors Plus lets you assign multiple authors to a single post, page, or custom post type. Co-authored posts will show up on the feeds for both authors, and on the posts page for each.

Advanced Access Manager

With any multi-author blog, you’re almost certainly going to want to restrict the access that some users have. Advanced Access Manager lets you do just that. You can filter the admin menu, dashboard widgets, and list of metaboxes for particular user roles. You can also create new user roles, delete user roles, and otherwise fine-tune access. You can even apply settings to all the blogs in a multi-site setup.

Author Exposed

Author Exposed adds a hidden div with author information that can be exposed when a user clicks on the author’s name on a post. It has space to include the author’s email and website address, as well as a Gravatar and “About” section.

Cool Author Box

Cool Author Box adds a prominent author bio at the end of your post, in a styled box. It also includes support for a Gravatar, a link to the author’s website, and links to other posts by the same author.

Private Email Plugin

This Private Email Plugin lets you send an email out to the registered users of your blog. It creates a new submenu where you can send an email to specific users, based on user roles. It also reports back the success rate of each email, so you know if any of your users’ email addresses are out of date.

Adminimize

Adminimize visually minimizes the administrative header so you can see more admin page content. It also lets you hide unnecessary items from the WP admin menu, submenu, and the Dashboard, plus hide items from the post meta controls on Write pages to simplify the editing interface. And of course you can customize what’s hidden based on user roles.

Category Reminder

Since uncategorized posts end up with the default category assignment (which is often “Uncategorized”), it’s important that your authors remember to add a category to their post before publishing it. The Category Reminder plugin uses JavaScript to verify that a post category has been assigned, and will prompt the user to add one before publishing.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Do you run a multi-author blog? Do you have any recommendations for plugins that make running it easier? Let us know in the comments!

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Great websites always seem to combine great design with great code. Since building a website is a pretty simple task you find many people learn HTML and CSS and figure that if they can learn that then they can design any website they want. While technically they can you will often find that there are some key mistakes they make because they don’t wish to take the time to actually learn about design.

Programmers are designers in their own right, but they design code and wonderfully architected systems. To design something visual is completely different and just because you have a good eye for design doesn’t mean you have a good mind to apply it.

Since so many programmers have personal projects that usually means they have to create their own websites. If you are a freelance coder, one of the greatest assets you can have is knowing the full web development process from beginning to end, and this includes design.

Here are eight mistakes that I often see developers make when applying design to a website.

1. I know what good design looks like

It can be difficult to separate an eye for design with the ability to design. It is very similar to the people that can look at fashion and tell you what looks good, but can’t really dress the same way themselves.

Great designers simply know what good design is. They know what will work and what won’t work many times before they even pick up a pencil or open Photoshop. Often this is the case because they have spent years pouring over different designs and trying out designs themselves. Just like no artist can pick up a pencil and draw something great the very first time, no developer should believe they can knock their first design right out of the park.

Similar to the way a programmer might study the code of another person, anyone can study a design and begin to gain an understanding of why it works.

Taking a look at the beautiful Punchfork you can see what makes the design so great.

• A great use of images. Images are always helpful in spicing up a design, but too many times designers can get carried away with them. The images used on Punchfork are helpful to getting the message across.
• A solid grid. The great use of a grid layout helps the eye get into a flow.
• Simple typography. There are fonts that should be used on the web and there are fonts that should be used very, very sparingly on the web (Papyrus, Comic Sans, etc.). There is nothing wrong with sticking with Georgia and Helvetica for a design because they work when done right.

There are many more parts of the design that make it so wonderful. When you come across a design you like take the time to study the individual elements, but also acknowledge how they fit into the whole. One great element of a design doesn’t make the whole design great.

2. Color selection

Color selection can be a pain. I hate having to pick colors because there are so many to choose from. For some reason most developers tend to stick to a blue and white palette. Maybe because it is used everywhere or those are the browser defaults, but great design can involve a range of colors. Fortunately for us color-challenged folks there are a ton of tools out there that can help us put together some wonderful color combinations.

COLOURlovers is a great community where people create their favorite color palettes and share them. You can browse, save and vote for your favorite palettes and colors. On more than one occasion I have turned to COLOURlovers to come through and save the day with color selection.

When picking a color palette be sure to stick with one that fits the mood of your site and its content. Don’t pick a palette simply because you love it. Orange and black might not be the best colors for a site around the concept of love for example.

Rarely will you need to use more than 3-4 different colors and if you decide to you need justify your choice.

3. Center it

It can be very tempting to center a headline. It looks great in newspapers, but rarely will it work well on the web unless everything is centered. We know that left-aligned text looks professional and works with the natural flow of the eyes so why go outsides the lines?

Centered text is best used for headlines and short lines of text. Users can read them with ease because the lines are short, scannable, and don’t need repeated eye movements. Centered text can also give your layout an aesthetic look with its symmetrical format. This works for text that goes with centered images. If your images are left- or right-aligned, you should left-align your text to keep it consistent with your layout.

Centered headlines work in newspapers because the text is broken up into columns so the headline flows over the whole story. If you are only dealing with one column of text you should stick to a left-aligned headline.

4. Font smorgasbord

When you aren’t immersed in the world of typography then Arial looks like Helvetica and Georgia resembles Times New Roman. You know that there are other fonts out there like Comic Sans, but you don’t see the importance of having to pay for a font when you can very easily use what is available to you.

With resources like Typekit though, font selection has become eerily similar to color selection. It can take days of research to find the right combination when you could’ve easily used a basic font and finished with the rest.

Don’t go overboard with fonts. Like colors a limited selection often works best. When it comes to fonts, one or two different fonts can be plenty to produce a beautiful design. Remember you can do a lot of different things with fonts. You can italicize them, bold them, underline them, uppercase them, or lowercase them.

5. Pack in the information

When you are a developer, the more information you can have on a page the better. When I code I like to do so on multiple screens because it allows me to have everything right in front of me. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in design. You shouldn’t cram as much information in a tight space as you see fit because then the design becomes dysfunctional.

The eye can only take in so much information at a time and if the purpose of most designs is to get a task completed, then hiding it inside of a million other pieces of information isn’t going to help.

While busy websites can be effective, more times than not they aren’t. White space should be your best friend. You need empty portions in your design to provide emphasis to the parts of the design that are important.

6. No questions asked

We all know that wonderful feeling of creating something and seeing it out in the real world. Because we created it, there tends to be a bias behind it that makes us think that it is better than it really is. You need to get the opinions of others to know if your design is effective and if it isn’t you can find ways to improve it. Instead, developers feel that they don’t need to ask the opinion of others because they know how their design works so it all makes sense to them.

You will also find that when people ask for an opinion about a design they aren’t asking for a critique, but approval. They want justification for the decisions they made and this isn’t the right approach. Asking questions really helps you find usability issues that you might not have been aware of before. Often you get so stuck in your own design that everything makes sense to you, but for a new person your design might be more complicated than a Rubiks Cube.

7. Details waste time

With great designs it can be hard to notice the small details that really make it. They might be so subtle that the casual observer looks past them and continues on. For a developer, the small details might be a waste of time because they don’t understand the overall impact a drop shadow can have on an element.

Small details by themselves only impact a specific element of a design, but when they all come together then you have a wonderful design that flows. Sites like Dribbble expose how great the small details can work in a larger design. However, if you aren’t a designer by trade, focusing too much on the details might slow down the process more than you would like. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of how the details can impact a design.

Paul Scrivens is the Product Designer at (mt) Media Temple. He also runs the Imagination Community, Drawar. He believes great design makes the world a better place and that we should all strive to improve the world around us. You can find him on Twitter @scrivs. He also likes cats.

What other common mistakes do developers make when it comes to design? Please share in the comments!

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In this article, I’m going to examine the science behind making successful UI icons before teaching you how to make your own embeddable icon font.

From designing the individual icons to converting them for @font-face embedding, and even licensing them for distribution, we shall be using only free software and online services. How about that? You will not need to rely on any of the esoteric knowledge required to make successful alphanumeric typefaces; just an eye for designing things that may appear very, very small.

Ultimately, you should go away with a process for making design elements that extends far beyond the manufacture of simple icons.

Before we continue, something should be said about what exactly we are trying to achieve by using icons in our designs in the first place, and what makes one icon more successful than the next. Theory before application. In order to do this, we must consider the icon’s role as part of semiology.

What makes a good icon?

Semiology, in the broadest sense, is the study of sign systems, how we contribute to their formation and maintenance, and the impact they have on our understanding of the world within and without us.

Whenever you consider a part of your design work from the perspective of what it signifies — what it is saying to your audience or what concepts it is recalling for them — you are considering your design as a semiotician. Although semiology, like linguistics, does cover language, there are many more things on a website that “say” something without words, such as colors, typefaces and the shapes that we call icons. One should be wary that what these things say has a strong cultural dimension. In China, the color red can signify good fortune whereas, in many Western countries, it is used to denote danger.

(Based on an image by ell brown)

The term “icon” has a special meaning in the field of semiology. An icon is an artifact that signifies something by resembling it. Take, for instance, a map pin icon. As a shape that resembles a “real” map pin, it is able to signify it. In turn, the real map pin brings to mind all sorts of meaningful concepts. Among these are abstract concepts such as location as well as less abstract concepts, like the map to which the pin might belong.

Some so-called icons are not truly iconic. The ubiquitous RSS icon, with its dot and two concentric circle segments, no more resembles syndication than the words “Really Simple Syndication” resemble it. The configuration of shapes that constitute the RSS icon signify RSS by convention alone; we have agreed that this is what they are for. An RSS icon is more properly called an RSS symbol.

By now, I hope we have established that successful web icons should meet one or both of the following two criteria:

1. A strong resemblance to a real thing, for example a print icon that resembles an actual printer
2. Establishment and, therefore, familiarity as a recognizable symbol within the sign system

Icon fonts gaining popularity

Icons have long been considered a good way to enhance UI designs because they provide a visual shorthand that assists the comprehension of an otherwise purely textual message. Sheets of icon images are circulated throughout the web design community like contraband, each set promising to make your design shinier, more enticing and more clickable than the last.

Compared with images, the idea of using embedded fonts for icons is a relatively new idea. However, it is one that is gaining considerable traction due to the many inherent advantages over the image (or background-image) method. I wrote about some of these advantages on my tiny blog back in early September. Chris Coyier obviously had a similar idea, introducing the idea to a (much, much) larger audience weeks later. Drawing on the two posts and others, I’ve compiled this comprehensive list of features:

1. They are easily resized without degradation (because they are essentially vectors)
2. Recoloring the icon is as trivial as recoloring text. For example, color: orange for an RSS icon
3. Many icons are grouped into one file, necessitating just one http request
4. As Chris points out, they are shapes that have transparent “knockouts” which work in browsers as early as IE6 (unlike alpha PNGs)
5. For icons that should appear adjacent to text, alignment and wrapping are non-issues (because they are text)
6. You can apply CSS3 effects via text-shadow and background-clip:text that respect the shape of the glyph
7. Unlike with SVG, cross-browser support is easy to achieve

Problems

In Chris’s words, using fonts for icons is a good idea, I’m telling you. Nonetheless, the status quo regarding icon font usage is not ideal. Firstly, most of the quality fonts available, called things like Pictos, Fico, Klepto, Cheetos, Ponyo and Sailor Moon (I may have got some of these wrong), are paid-for fonts. In practice this means there are really two problems:

1. You might have to part with money
2. Whether you have to part with money or not, you’ll have to accept somebody else’s filthy design work

Aside from automated crawler programs, I’m assuming that it is mostly web designers who will be reading this article. I’m a designer myself and I don’t think I’m alone in resenting the idea of having to compromise my own design by relying on someone else’s handiwork. Naturally, I’m even less enamored with the thought of paying for the privilege. I know what icons I want to use and I know precisely how I want to tailor them to my overall design. I want that control.

After some searching, I was eventually introduced to the possibilities of Inkscape‘s SVG Font Editor. With a little practice using Inkscape and the help of an online converter to transform my SVG font into a TTF, I was able to make “Heydings”. This font is now included in Simurai’s list (as linked to by Coyier’s article). I’m not trying to sell you my font (it’s free anyway) but I think it makes for a pretty good proof of concept:

Making icon glyphs with InkscapeSetting up Inkscape

Let’s get started by downloading and installing Inkscape. You should also use my icon font starter template, located in the resources folder of this GitHub repository (more on this GitHub project later). Once you’ve opened this file in your new Inkscape installation you should set up your workspace by opening the following windows from the main menu:

• OBJECT → FILL AND STROKE
• OBJECT → ALIGN AND DISTRIBUTE
• TEXT → SVG FONT EDITOR

In the SVG Font Editor pane, click on “Font 1” under “Font”. Your workspace should now look something like this screenshot:

It’s worth pointing out that the baseline guide is not below the lower boundary of the canvas by mistake: For reasons best known to somebody else, your icons should very slightly overhang the bottom of the canvas if you wish them to share the same baseline as adjacent typefaces. I’ve tested this with Georgia, Arial and a number of web fonts.

Making your first glyph

To define the glyph, click on the Glyphs tab in the SVG Font Editor pane, then click the Add Glyph button in the lower portion of the pane. It’s not immediately clear on first inspection, but if you click on your glyph (“Glyph 1”) a field will appear which allows you to enter the character to which you’d like to assign your icon. We shall be making a simple star shape first of all, so I recommend you enter the character “s”, “S” or “*”:

Now that we’ve defined the glyph’s corresponding character, we need to make the glyph itself. Since we are just making a star this time, we should select Inkscape’s helpful Stars and Polygons tool from the left toolbar and draw a star in the canvas. You will notice that this tool comes with options that allow you to change the appearance of the star. In my example, I’ve chosen 5 corners, a spoke ratio of 0.5 and a rounded value of 0.1.

Center the star horizontally using the Align and Distribute panel (which may be hidden below the SVG Font Editor) and drag the shape downwards to meet the baseline. With the grid turned off, the canvas should look something like this:

Glyphs in our icon font are just shapes; shapes with no colors, layers or gradients. So, to make our star a legitimate candidate for our font, we must convert it from an object into a path-based shape. To do this, select the star and choose PATH → OBJECT TO PATH from the main menu. Now, with the star selected, we can go to our SVG Font Editor, highlight the applicable “s” glyph and hit the Get curves from selection button:

When you enter “s” in the Sample Text field, your star should now appear as a preview, like so:

Making more complex icons

You’ve now made your first scalable SVG font glyph. By using options from the Fill and Stroke pane, editing path nodes and combining objects and strokes you will be able to make much more ambitious icon designs. I don’t want to go into a full Inkscape tutorial because we have a lot more to cover, but following these simple rules will stand you in good stead:

1. Stick to using black strokes and fills, if only to remind you that the icons are just shapes, not complex vector graphics. Coloring the icon is possible in the final product using CSS.
2. All objects and strokes (lines) must be converted to paths using either PATH → OBJECT TO PATH or PATH → STROKE TO PATH
3. Multiple objects and/or strokes used to make up one icon glyph should be combined together using PATH → COMBINE (or, in some circumstances, PATH → UNION)
4. To cut shapes out of shapes (like using a cookie cutter) place the shape that will create the “knockout” over the main shape, select both and choose PATH → DIFFERENCE. White areas on black that look like “knockouts” will not suffice, as you will discover when you hit Get curves from selection See rule 1.

Preparing your font for embedding

Imagine that you have gone on to create a number of useful icons for your font by repeating the glyph spawning method that I have just described and saved the file as myicons.svg. Now, you’ll want to prepare this icon library for use in web pages.

Converting the SVG to TTF

The first measure you should take is to convert the SVG font into a more familiar and versatile format. TTF is the pre-eminent format for local installation as well as distribution. It also provides a good base for reconversion to meet @font-face requirements. Online services that allow you to convert fonts between formats include http://onlinefontconverter.com/, http://www.fontconverter.org/ and http://www.font2web.com/. My personal favorite, however, is http://www.freefontconverter.com/ because I don’t get queued and I’ve never known it to return any glitches.

I won’t patronize you by explaining how to use this resource. The successive file upload field, select element and gigantic Convert button speak for themselves, really.

Editing the font’s meta info

Now that you have the TTF in your hand, I recommend you edit the generated meta data. Renaming, attributing and describing the font to your satisfaction makes it ready for installation, embedding and distribution. It’s also a way to show that the font is your own work. Readers running Windows have the option of using the deceptively grand sounding Microsoft Font Properties Editor or the free-for-x-days Typograf. For Apple and Linux users, I implore those better informed than I am to help out in the comments.

The clunky but serviceable Font Properties Editor

Important note: Although the Microsoft Font Properties Editor allows you to add author, description and license information, it doesn’t seem to let you edit basic data such as the font name and postscript name. These fields are disabled. If you’re using this particular piece of software, you’ll need to locate and edit the prohibited values in the SVG code prior to TTF conversion. Open the original SVG in your favorite text editor (I use Notepad++) and edit the following:

Font Name: Found in tag, font-family attribute

Postscript Name: Found in tag, id attribute

Description: You ought to add a description (author, license etc.) in the tag. Please note that this is not equivalent to the TTF description text and will not be preserved through conversion; you’ll have to add the TTF description separately.

Making the font embeddable

Once you’ve installed the TTF on your local system and previewed it a little to make sure nothing has gone awry, it’s time to run it through Font Squirrel’s @font-face generator. To make the outputted code as efficient and effective as possible there are a few options worth noting in the generator’s expert mode:

Subsetting: The subsetting option allows you to include only the characters which you’ve delegated, reducing file size.

Remove kerning: Your icons will almost always appear in isolation, so kerning (added information regarding the proximity of characters to one another) is not necessary. This will, purportedly, reduce file size as well.

WebOnly™: If you’re evangelical about people using your font as intended ‐ and not reverting to making images out of the glyphs in Photoshonk ‐ you can select this option. It may also better suit your licensing plan. I’ll cover licensing now.

Distributing your font

If you are interested in releasing your font, it is considered good practice to give it a license. Many font websites will not carry your font without one. Since we used free, open source software to make the icons, it is fitting that we should distribute them as such.

There are many licensing options available and investigating them is sometimes perplexing. The GNU General Public License is perfectly acceptable, but you may want to consider the SIL Open Font License. The main advantage with this license is the provision of a reserved font name: Other designers are permitted to modify your font, so long as they name it differently. In practice, this means that crimes against icon design cannot be carried out “in your name”.

In the case of either license, you should include a version in a text file, as well as inserting the copyright notice and a link to the full license URL in the font’s meta. Visit the respective licensing pages (linked above) for more specific instructions.

The end of CSS spriting

Why stop at making generic icons using SVG fonts? With the ability to make icons comes the ability to make more site-specific shapes, branding elements and decorations. Like CSS sprites, all of these visual elements can be kept in one file, reducing server calls to a singular http request. Unlike CSS sprites, the elements are both resizeable and not dependent on positional coordinates (background-position values) to display correctly. This makes them eminently better suited to responsive design.

Let’s pretend I chose to use an SVG font to cover some basic design elements in my vaguely steampunk-like blog. A simple HTML table rendering of the component designs would look something like this:

One of the best things about this approach is the versatility. For instance, the second cog shape from the left could be used as both a tiny bullet point design and a giant, abstracted background decoration. Coloring is as easy as using color:maroon, but there’s no need to adhere to flat colors; a multitude of CSS3 effects can be employed to add texture and tactility. For a little inspiration to get you started, examine this excellent gallery of CSS3-enhanced webfonts.

A quick note about screen readers

One problem with using fonts to display visual elements in this way is the impact on screen reader output. A visitor to the site who reads visually will see cogs, arrows and the like, but a screen reader will insist on reading out the characters that designate these designs. For uses of SVG font elements that are decorative, I recommend heeding Coyier’s suggestion: Assign the vectors to the Supplementary Private Use Area of Unicode. Such characters should not be read out by readers.

A collaborative icon webfont

As my JavaScript mentor, Rupert, pointed out to me the other day, using SVG fonts to create icon sets offers an interesting opportunity for collaboration. You see, SVG code ‐ which is a form of XML ‐ is highly standardized and easily human-readable. It is exactly the sort of source code suited to development using a “social coding” service like GitHub.

The idea resonated with me for its semiotic implications: If the apprehensibility of an icon is determined by consensus, then surely consensus should also play a role in its formation. By collaborating over our icon “sign system”, only the most archetypal icon designs should emerge. We should be able to create icon vocabularies that truly belong to the communities for whom they should mean something.

I have created a public GitHub repository to help foster this idea. Called Community Icon Font, the repository’s code base is not complex: A close inspection of the preceding Inkscape tutorial and a quick read of the project page should give you everything you need to get involved. If you are new to GitHub, try looking at their help pages or asking your neighborhood techie (that’s what I do).

Written for Web Designer Depot by Heydon Pickering. Heydon likes coding tags for people who like writing words. Twitter: @heydonworks

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When I wrote about QR codes (Designed QR codes: the next level), it was very well received. When I wrote “SnapTags: Will they kill QR codes?” people got a little nasty with their suggestion on what I could do with snaptags and my mother. Now that I’m delving into Augmented Reality, I’m wondering what suggestions people will have for me…and certain family members when I insist that AR is the future of digital media?

According to Wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one.

Augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulable. Artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world. The term augmented reality is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, working at Boeing.

Research explores the application of computer-generated imagery in live-video streams as a way to enhance the perception of the real world. AR technology includes head-mounted displays and virtual retinal displays for visualization purposes, and construction of controlled environments containing sensors and actuators.

What are people doing with AR?

There are many examples you can or have seen. Here’s a recent one made by Disney and displayed in Times Square:

Of course, with Pixar tucked neatly into their back pockets, Disney’s AR piece is the top of technology. Appshaker, London did a really impressive AR piece for National Geographic:

There are some demos from smaller companies and individuals that show the capabilities of AR. Check out these cool applications:

Why just buy a product when you can see what it will look like out of the box?

Your face as your business card

Not all of the AR applications are fun and games. Recognition and information are also possible. This video was posted to YouTube two years ago:

In fact, stalking will be a breeze with facial recognition software on smart phones:

When I first ran across Augmented Reality almost nine years ago, it was phone-sized tablets that identified places and directions. This phone app is an example:

The future of business cards

While the QR Code may take you to YouTube or a web site, imagine what it can do for your business card! It’s a bit like Emperor Palpatine popping up to give order 66 (ask a local Star Wars nerd what that means) but why make people read something about you when you can tell them yourself:

Try one for yourself HERE.

While most AR recognition needs a code, very much like the QR Code or, apparently despised Snaptag, this experiment by innovative campaign from Crispin Porter + Bogusky uses a simple dollar bill for a Burger King AR piece:

There are numerous tutorials on how to create AR pieces. Check them out.

Are you ready to jump into Augmented Reality?

So, I’m guessing by now you are saying to yourself, “I’ve got to get into this!” and my family and I are safe from comments on different inappropriate things we can do…unlike my exploration of Snaptags.

AR is not just about learning some new software. There is obviously video, writing, graphic design, and type skills needed but any creative should be able to handle it. I’ve yet to see anyone at any networking event or cross paths with anyone who has an AR business card to date. That seems odd, considering the explosion of the technology. Perhaps the technology hasn’t quite exploded as of yet, so why not be the first kid on the block to have one?

Suggested reading on Augmented Reality

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-sony-augmented-reality-tv-buyers.html

http://mashable.com/2009/12/05/augmented-reality-iphone/

http://technabob.com/blog/2008/12/17/mini-augmented-reality-ads-hit-newstands/

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/21/layar-augmented-reality-for-ma.html

*There are many sources for AR software but I cannot suggest or recommend any in this forum. All of the examples used in this article were solely for the purpose of inspiration and information on AR technology and is not an advertisement for or an endorsement of any of the firms that created the videos included.

Speider Schneider is a former member of The Usual Gang of Idiots at MAD Magazine and has designed products for Disney/Pixar, Warner Bros., Harley-Davidson, ESPN, Mattel, DC and Marvel Comics, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon among other notable companies. Speider is a former member of the board for the Graphic Artists Guild, co-chair of the GAG Professional Practices Committee and a former board member of the Society of Illustrators. Follow him on Twitter @speider

Do you use Augmented Reality for your work? Give us a link to your video or post your AR code for people to print out and try.

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Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Hextone is a smart little #tool that can help you quickly convert HEX to RGB. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/yGkSH4

The Fireworks Police: an online resource dedicated to Fireworks freebies and tools – http://bit.ly/wLBxl1 #useful / via @smashingmag

You can make a great pewter style metal text effect with just a couple of Photoshop layer styles http://bit.ly/z7fdPw

Vacuum-Sealed Couples in this colorful and intriguing “Flesh Love” by Photographer Hal http://bit.ly/ww31eJ

The Lost Art of Becoming Good at Things: have we become a society of armchair experts? http://bit.ly/yE9Ol1

Check out the humorous and brilliantly creative illustrations of Tiago Hoisel http://bit.ly/zwtj4m

In need of an asset management framework for PHP? Assetic could be your answer http://bit.ly/ftjugG

Make your design more pleasant to look at with these 23 Glyph, Symbols & Simple Icon Sets http://bit.ly/zfRnaT

Mesmerized by the stunning Paper Sculptures of Jeremy Kool http://bit.ly/woIohL

Baby’s all grown up! Wait, what? Amusing, yet creepy parent-kid headswapping photography by Paul Ripke http://bit.ly/AlOfTW

Developing a Responsive Website: Background Images http://su.pr/2TS8WG

Let’s have a closer look at one of the more useful #HTML5 features: http://bit.ly/xhmDdx

Creating a Vibrant Cloud Icon in Photoshop is not hard at all. Take a look: http://bit.ly/AlH3UW

Tips for Keeping Focused on Freelance Deadlines http://bit.ly/zHQ4gv *some great pointers here

Check out Notification Control, a great tool to wind down your email notification http://notificationcontrol.com/

Pixel by pixel all the way to perfection – http://bit.ly/wcMSbG – A Showcase of Inspired Pixel Art

How To Integrate Facebook, Twitter And Google+ In WordPress http://bit.ly/AtuQov <– Nice read!

Internet Blackout Aftermath – Is the Threat of SOPA/PIPA Over? http://bit.ly/w8RGHU

Fortune companies and other “serious” businesses have them. Should your freelancing business have one too? http://bit.ly/xaBvBh

The 40 best beautifully designed typographic portraits for you to take some inspiration from http://bit.ly/xC4gii

Is HTML5 ready to take the overall crown? http://bit.ly/A5MiHb

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Copyright confusion

Outdated font

A site that works

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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We’ve just released ZeroBundle.com It’s a brand new website, brought to you by WDD and MightyDeals.com, where we offer fantastic freebies for designers for a limited time only.

The bundle includes hundreds of professional and exclusive resources such as PSDs, vectors, brushes, icons, textures, UI elements and a bunch more. The files are provided by professional designers and are available for both personal and commercial uses.

Why the name ZeroBundle you may wonder…. well, it’s because it’s 100% free, with ‘zero’ cost to you.

ZeroBundle is available for a limited time only and it will then be gone, so don’t delay to get your hands quickly on this mega bundle of awesome resources!! Check out all the previews at ZeroBundle.com! Enjoy!

To see all the previews and to download the files, click on the image below to head over to ZeroBundle.com….

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Designing a new website is great, but not everyone loves taking their PSD designs and converting them into actual, working HTML and CSS.

In fact, there are some designers who positively hate it (and often get someone else to do that part for them rather than suffer through it themselves).

A PSD to HTML service can be a huge time-saver even for designers who don’t mind coding their own designs. After all, the coding of a basic theme or template can be time-consuming even though it’s a relatively simple process.

Why not outsource it so you can focus on the creative aspects of creating websites?

W3 Markup is just one of the best services out there that can take your PSD file and convert it into valid, pixel-perfect HTML/CSS code. They can even work with AJAX, sIFR, Cufon, MicroFormats, mootools, script.aculo.us, and jQuery. Their finished files are semantic and search-engine friendly, optimized for usability, accessibility, and loading times, and they’re always cross-browser compatible (for Safari 5, Firefox 3.6+, IE 7+, Opera 11, and Google Chrome). See some of their testimonials.

You get 100% control of code and style preferences on their order form, and can choose between XHTML or HTML5 and CSS3, or have your design coded for various CMSs (WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla), or for use as an email template. See their pricing and order page

In today’s contest you get the chance to win one of 5 prizes for PSD to HTML conversion worth $200 each for any W3 Markup! You can use the credit to get a single page marked up without paying anything out of pocket, or use it toward the coding of multiple pages or CMS-ready files.

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment below (one entry per person, please). Make sure you use a valid email address (do not post with a Twitter or Facebook ID) so we can let you know if you won. Get a bonus entry by tweeting about this contest and leave a second comment with a link to your tweet to double your chances to win. Winners will be picked randomly and announced on January 26th, 2012!

Good luck to everyone and thanks to W3 for a great giveaway!

[UPDATE] Contest has ended, here are the winners:

#80 – Philipp
#76 – Brian
#175 – Cheryl
#59 – d2mike
#48 – Puneet Gupta

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Two bills currently making their way through the United States Congress—SOPA and PIPA—threaten freedom of expression and security online, not to mention the American economy (and economies of countries directly tied to the U.S.).

In protest of these two incredibly dangerous and damaging bills, large portions of the internet will voluntarily blackout in whole or in part on Wednesday, January 18th. Among them are Wikipedia, Mozilla, and Tumblr.

If you’re a U.S. resident, be sure to educate yourself about the bills, their potential effects, and what you can do to stop them from passing. Call your Congressional representatives or send them emails telling them you don’t support SOPA or PIPA. Participate in the blackout, and support other sites that are participating. And most important of all—spread the word!

Check out the infographic below for even more information, and then visit the Stop American Censorship website to get involved.

What do you think about these bills? Have you gotten involved in the campaign to stop them from passing? Let us know in the comments!

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As creatives, most times we feel like we can do it all, or we are put in a position to do it all. We typically take on a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ mentality, that can either help or harm us.

For some odd reason, there seems to be a discrepancy of sorts when it comes to doing the work for ourselves. Some designers feel like of course we should take on that Jack-of-all-trades mindset, while others just feel like it makes sense to pass the work off and let someone else do it.

The truth is, they’re both great ideas but vary depending on your situation. How creative are you? What is your skill set? What kind of things stress you out? All these questions should be taken into consideration when determining whether or not designers should do their own personal projects.

Keep in mind, that for the purposes of this argument, we will say that a personal project is any type of work that contributes to yourself and your services. For example, we are talking about business cards, websites, etc.

Yes, do personal projects

Doing your own work can be extremely beneficial, especially if you are in a place where your client work is slow or you are just starting out and need some things to keep you occupied. Doing your own personal work from start to finish can sometimes be much more fun than client work and can teach you a lot about yourself and your style. Keep reading to find out some reasons why designers work on their own projects.

Beginner’s luck

If you are at the very beginning of your design career, it’s kind of hard to offer services to others, especially if you are lacking the proper portfolio. Most times folks aren’t going to give you a chance if they don’t know you or know your work. The best way to counterattack this to make your first client yourself.

Let’s say for example, you are a graphic designer who would like to offer their services to the public. Well, to start off, you feel like you need to print up some business cards because you’d like to give them to some friends, family, and colleagues. That’s a great idea, but if you don’t have any work to show for, how are they going to know your work? Take the time out to really create your own business card and whatever other pieces you feel like you need to offer your services. There’s no need to run and grab a template if you can do it yourself.

As we are talking about personal projects essentially for your services and for promotional purposes, don’t forget that it’s okay to create conceptual art and put it in your portfolio. There’s this preconceived notion that all work in your portfolio has to be paid client work, but that is a falsehood. It’s okay to create a mock up, or some sort of conceptual art to let your viewers see what you are capable of. Whether you are a beginner or not, if there is a new technique you want to try out and show off, make something up. It’s totally fine to add imaginative work to your portfolio. It could quite possibly be the work that gets you in with a client!

Growth and technique

Doing personal projects really buys you time inside of whatever program it is that you may use. No matter your how good you think you are or how good others think you may be, it’s always great to have practice under your belt. Being involved with your personal projects allows you the opportunity to grow and be solid in your craft and allows you to become more familiar with techniques.

One thing that is extremely important to designers of all types, is their workflow. You may be an awesome web designer, but you don’t want it to be a pain in the butt to get done what it is that you need to get done. Personal projects help you figure out your workflow better because when you’re working on your own things, (hopefully) you aren’t as strict on yourself and you feel more free to create (than say, if you had a big near-deadline client). With your client work you want to try to be neat and color inside the lines—hopefully you loosen the reins a bit when it comes to your own creative projects.

Growth in whatever you do is necessary. Developing your technique and your workflow inside your programs of choice is absolutely necessary to the success of what you’re doing.

Experimentation

Along with practicing and streamlining your workflow, you want to be able to experiment on some things. Experimentation, along with practice, really helps you figure out new techniques and helps you come up with your own style. Most times with commissioned projects, we aren’t as prone to experiment, but with our own personal projects, experimentation should be heavily utilized and looked forward to.

Depending on your target audience, the work you end up doing could be extremely repetitive. You may be known for the way you put together really clean, minimalistic web designs. There’s no foul there, but it’s nice to be able to step outside of yourself if necessary—if not to add a skill, then to be able to have a general knowledge of said skill.

You may also have a skill set that is closely related to another—there may be times where you are asked to carry out those tasks by a client. Now it’s all up to you whether or not you want to increase your skills, but it is good to be able to experiment and research so that you have some clue about related skillsets. As a strict graphic designer myself, I don’t know a ton about web development, but I have experimented enough to know what works and what may not work. I have enough knowledge to know, if I can’t do the task, I can point you in the right direction. This is what experimentation can do for you.

Added personal touch

What I think is most important about doing your own projects is the personal touch and flavor that’s put on it. Yes, you can tell someone your style and the things that you like but no one can really portray it and put it down as best as you can (especially if you have the ability to do so). Most times, the work that is done for yourself is and can be the first that people see of you. Are you okay with that first impression being work someone else has done for you?

It also makes sense that if you are known for a specific talent to carry out that specific talent for yourself. For example, if you are known for developing great WordPress themes and such, when you need your own website, make it a WordPress site and develop your own theme. That acts as a free advertisement and folks can know and understand how great you really are. If you were to outsource your website and a client wants a site much like yours, they’re more than likely going to skip out on you and hire the company that worked for you.

If you are in a position where you want people to under your vision and your brand, it’s probably best that you do as much of your own work as possible. Quite frankly, when you outsource, most times you end up being lumped together with other clients that are doing similar things and then you lose your personality and what makes you different. You never want to risk losing that by not doing your own personal projects.

No, don’t do personal projects

There are some designers who feel like personal projects should be done by a third party. Much like doing your personal projects, there are some benefits to not doing your own work. When you think about outsourcing your personal projects, it’s best to take into consideration your business strategy, your common stressors, and much more. Again, below are some reasons why some designers choose to employ others and let them do the dirty work.

The small things

Simply put, giving the smaller tasks to a third party can really decrease your workload and your stress levels. You can focus on work you feel needs to be done (things close to deadlines, really big clients, etc.) and pass off smaller tasks, such as business cards and brochures, to others.

Of course, this is all with the assumption that you’ve already handled the larger tasks, such as the website, the logo, etc. What is really popular is to hire these third parties to make updates and changes as you move further along with your brand. It can get to be a bit much to update every single thing yourself, especially when it may be hard to find time—or it’s easily forgotten because it’s just not that huge of a task; however, it must be done. If your personal projects seem to always need updates and changes, you may want to think about outsourcing.

Time is limited

Some of us aren’t beginners and some of us are actually swamped with tons of commissioned work. Depending on your business and your strategy, focusing on this type of work may be all you want to do. If that’s the case, you may only have the option to have a third party help out with your personal projects.

There are times when after you feel like you’ve really gotten to a place of some success, sometimes you might want to re-brand. The projects you did for yourself when you just started are no longer representative of you, or you feel like your business is going in a different direction. Re-branding (especially visually) is extremely important if what you had and where you are going are two different things. Just imagine, if you are a web designer who did dynamic websites, but wants to change to focus on mobile responsiveness, there may be some visual re-branding you want to do.

If your time is limited and wrapped up by your clients, it’s probably best that you bite the bullet and outsource. You want to find a way to manage your time and your projects as best as possible.

You don’t know how

No matter how much you try to fake the funk on some things, when it’s time to actually sit down and create something you have no clue how to do it—or it just may not be of the quality you want it to be. We talked about how it’s nice be familiar with different skillsets, but most times, if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it. And you should be familiar enough with the skillset to know when it is time to reach out to someone else.

For example, as a designer you may want to create a promotional video for yourself. You have a nice digital camera that shoots in high def, and you even have iMovie or Final Cut, but perhaps that’s not quite what you had in mind. You know you want multiple angles and camera tricks and all types of fancy stuff—so it sounds like you may want to outsource.

What you don’t want to do is stress yourself out by trying to learn a completely new skill while trying to create something you know you want to use. It’s a great way to learn but it’s also one of the quickest ways to get stressed—you have to determine if that’s worth it, especially if you have a pile of client work to do and you’re trying to squeeze years worth of knowledge into a small personal project.

A different outlook

It’s easy to get caught in the act of using the same techniques, same programs, and same workflow that you use constantly. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being efficient but there is an issue when all your work begins to look and feel the same. There is a fine line between having a style and having the same base, just changing a thing or two. If you feel like all your work is looking pretty much the same, you may want to call on an outside opinion.

Even if you are creating work that does not look different, it is good to have a different opinion. Many times, it’s hard for us to step outside of our roles and see the much bigger picture. Having an outsider’s opinion can go far, not just by the look and design of things but also in helping you figure some things out with your brand and services. Outsourcing your work doesn’t have to just be about giving someone else your workload, but it can also be a partnership that helps move your personal visions further.

Which one?

Both of these ‘methods’ sound so simple, but the truth is, a lot of designers make a bunch of mistakes by choosing to outsource or not to outsource. I don’t believe you have to stick to one method because both are appropriate depending on your situation and strategy, but it is important you use the right one at the right time.

Doing your personal projects is completely up to you and your capabilities, but if you are a designer of any sort and have some sort of general knowledge, you should definitely have some sort of hand in your personal projects. I’m not just talking about telling someone what you want to do, but actually doing something and being a large part of the creative process.

Ultimately, with whatever work you are doing, you don’t want to stress or burn yourself out. If that means you have to pass some work along to someone else, do that. You want to make sure you take as much care of your creativity as possible.

Kendra Gaines is a freelance designer from Virginia, USA. Connect with her.

Do you prefer to work on all your personal projects or not? When have you outsourced?

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