Design. How do you design something that apeals to the person looking at it and achieves the goal you are trying to achieve? Well, lets look at the goal of a good design, the main goal would be to communicate to the viewer the idea you want to communicate. This may be indirect, very direct, or even hidden. Take the Google home page for example, what are they trying to communicate with the design? Well each person who saw it might tell you what they get, but what I get is “simplicity” the design communicates that to me and I myself like a search engine that is simple so I use Google like so many others. Google Search (Entire page): Yahoo Search (Entire page): If you wanted to communicate that your website has many different services and show that on your homepage, you might get a design like Yahoo where the home page is so loaded that to me it overwhelms me. Someone else who might like lots of links might really enjoy the design. Thats the point, you want to communicate your...

I just stumbled on this great website which has very useful and simple jquery ajax applications. I will review each here in a simple way so you can see all of the useful information. This website shows a video tutorial, a text tutorial and a demo for each of the ajax applications. Please keep in mind that you should use these design elements sparingly and tastefully. Using too many effects in your webdesign can be tacky and detract from the overall design. To begin, here is the website: http://jqueryfordesigners.com/ Ajax image carousel This creates an endless carousel with an html list. It also displays a very smooth scrolling effect. This is very simple to set up and uses jquery. Here is an image showing the carousel. View the code and tutorial here. Ajax smooth slidedown This shows you how to make a smooth div slidedown effect without the initial jump. This can be used for many cool ajax effects. View the code and tutorial here. Ajax smooth data changer This creates a panel that...

 Have you ever wanted to create vector or bitmap graphics but did’t have all of the expensive programs to work in? Well I got wind of this website/project called Aviary which allows you to do just that.  Aviary has created applications mimicking all of the popular graphics programs out there today. I will list the different programs, what they do and some examples of work created by people. I find it quite amazing what you can do with these programs — and they are all free.  Aviary uses names of bird species for each of their programs. Image Editor (Similar to Photoshop, Paint Shop, Gimp, etc.) which is called Pheonix and is depicted by a very nice Peonix icon. Pheonix has all of the basic things you need to edit an image which include: clone tool, magic wand, filters, selection tools, smudge, layers and image resizing. To Give Pheonix (image editor) a try click here. Here are some of the popular images that I really like. These were created in Pheonix by regular users:   Apple...

This tutorial will give you an idea of how to productively clone an object out of an image. Some people might wonder why it is called cloning. This is because you are creating a part of the image that was not there from other parts of the image. In this tutorial I will tell you some of the basics. Please bear with me, it is difficult to show you in detail every step without overbloating the post with images. Level: Intermediate (can be useful for advanced Photoshop users) Photoshop Version: CS4 (Can apply to Earlier versions up to Photoshop 6) Tutorial: In this image is a bug that we are going to remove. We are going to clone it out by placing pieces of the image over it until it is gone. Each person using Photoshop will have their own way of doing this — so take note: this is my way of doing this particular action. The first thing we want to do is to clone out the major part of the image by using a piece of the image, here we select a square part of the petal. Next,...

Level: Intermediate (useful for advanced users) Description: This is a tutorial on creating a realistic Photoshop lens flare. I have noticed lens flares being used in many designs especially in the recent years. I have figured out how to do one myself. I am not sure if this is the technique that has been used — but I have found it to work quite well for creating this effect. You can use this tutorial for any kind of flare, solar flare or light explosion. You can use this tutorial to create many kinds of flares or light effects — all you have to do is start out with a different white object (As gone over later). Photoshop Version: CS2 (Can apply to Earlier versions up to Photoshop 7 or versions of Photoshop with Radial Blur) Tutorial: The first step is to create a new Photoshop document with a black background. It should be 5 inches by 5 inches at 300 dpi or a dpi that suits your needs. The reason I suggest using this large of image size is so that you can reuse the flare...