Photoshop Essentials - Thousands of Free Brushes, Gradients, Layer Styles and More!

Photoshop is an amazingly powerful tool. It alone can allow you to create fantastic designs and photo manipulations. But, there are many, many other resources available to designers to enhance Photoshop and increase your productivity.

I’m talking about free gradients, patterns, brushes, layer styles and more that you can download and add on to Photoshop.

CSS Sprites - Easily Use CSS To Replace Images

If you’re not using CSS Sprites (also known as the CSS Image Replacement Method) you should be. Many coders seem to fear this easy and basic way to use images with CSS and I’m not sure why.

The benefits of CSS Sprites are plentiful, but you (and your visitors) will benefit from this method ten-fold. For the coder it’s less slicing and cropping of images, and for the user it rids us of that annoying image loading flash when you use CSS to replace background images.

I’ll take you through some quick steps to get started with CSS Sprites.

Give Images Polaroid Style Treatmeant

I’m a big fan of polaroid’s. I love the fact that you can snap a photo and the camera will spit out a photo for you instantly. I love the style so much in the new version of CSSgirl (to be released within the next two weeks!!!) has incorporated their style in the new design. I thought I’d share how I went about creating the image and the HTML/CSS behind it!

Style Your Code Samples Without Excessive Markup

I’ve noticed a lot of sites have a very complicated way of styling the code samples they provide, using multiple span classes and/or inline styles and many, many <br />s. Other times the site just wraps the code in a <code> attribute and doesn’t highlight the different syntaxes.

I’ve written some simple CSS styles to fix this problem. So if you are interested in having your code display as if it was in a text editor with syntax highlighting here is an easy way to do it.

The first example is a sample of CSS code and how it can look when you apply these styles (***This is not the actual styles, just an EXAMPLE):

17 Great Resources - Color Inspiration For Web Design

One of my favorite parts when creating a new design is the process of choosing a color scheme. There are times when the colors just fall into place after I have my main color, or when using a photo the colors just flow around it. But sometimes you need a little help.

Whether your looking for a color scheme to base your design on or you need a little help picking out complimentary colors the generators, articles, color wheels and more below will assist and inspire your color creativity.