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Found Friday Vol 80

January 27, 2012

The eightieth version of Found Friday is here, and this week we have: a beautiful wood iPhone case; a collection of great plugins for those of us using WordPress as a CMS; a neat little tool designed to help hang things and such (bad description, but scroll down and have a look); a new t-shirt from the folks at United PixelWorkers and A Book Apart; and a must-watch video for any creative. Read on!

Material 6 Wood iPhone Case

The iPhone is a beautiful device – nobody’s arguing that. But the glass backside sacrifices durability for beauty. Here’s a solution to that problem: a beautiful and durable wood iPhone case! Want.

WordPress CMS Plugins

WordPress is a great publishing platform, but most anything can be improved. That’s what this list of plugins from the folks at DigWP does: aim to improve the use of WordPress as a CMS.
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How to Design an Inset Button in Photoshop

January 23, 2012

Buttons are a great way to grab a website viewer’s attention, and a way to hone your user interface design chops. They can be used to effectively drive traffic to desired subpages, drive more sign-ups, or any other collection of goals you’ve established for your website design. In this Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to go step-by-step through the creation of a circular, inset button with some subtle details and lighting effects, achieved using vector shapes and Photoshop’s layer styles palette. You’ll end up with the button below (and you can download the source file at the bottom of the page to boot)!

Please note: for this tutorial, you should be familiar with basic Photoshop elements like: the gradient tool, the color picker, the ellipse tool, the type tool, and the layer styles palette.

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Found Friday Vol 79

January 20, 2012

It’s Friday! Let us help you celebrate with five great designy finds from the web. This week, we have: a must-use plugin for those using WordPress as a CMS; a limited-time, free bundle of design goods; the world’s simplest mailing list setup; a preview for an upcoming type film for typography nerds; and a beautiful, inventive coffee machine. Because, you know, we all run on coffee. Enjoy!

Dashboard Site Notes

WordPress is famous for its ease of use; however, it can still be daunting to total n00bs, like some of your clients. We normally use a Dashboard Tips Widget with our client WordPress builds; however, it’s a little janky and not that great to set up. Enter Dashboard Site Notes: a WordPress plugin that lets you author notes and site guidelines for your clients through the WordPress interface, so they always have reminders nearby. A must-install in my books.

ZeroBundle

Everyone likes free stuff! Especially designers. This bundle has a bunch of icons, UI elements and the like for designers. It’s free for another 27 days or so. Check it out!

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Found Friday Vol 78

January 13, 2012

This week’s Found Friday is a goldmine for web designers & developers. We have a great demo/download for some beautiful CSS buttons; we have a neat online app for creating Photoshop-esque “layer styles” in CSS; a site showcasing OpenType features on the web, for you fellow typeheads; an interesting looking book on “common sense for designers”; and a minimalist site for playing a band’s top YouTube videos sans clutter. Check ‘em out!

CSS Buttons With Pseudo Elements

A great tutorial with source files, these CSS buttons combine beauty & usefulness.

Layer Styles

For those of us who dabble in both Photoshop and CSS/HTML, this neat little tool might come in handy. It’s a GUI that looks exactly like Photoshop’s layer styles palette, but spits out CSS styling for live web rendering of the same effects.

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Found Friday Vol 77

January 6, 2012

Number 77 of Found Fridays checking in here. You know what else was #77? Ray Bourque. There, maybe you learned something today. Feel free to learn more (perhaps related to your profession, i.e. design) with the following finds: an awesome “day in the life of a designer” parody video from the holidays; a super-simple WordPress plugin for front-end uploads; an interesting year-end update from Process Type Foundry; a site with a great collection of design & dev tools; and finally some beautiful new monitors from Samsung.

Viewpoint Creative – Holiday Card

So I’m a little late on this one, but if you missed it, check out this short (and hilarious) video. If you’re a designer of any ilk, you’ll relate.

Front End Upload WordPress Plugin

This is a simple, open-source solution to adding front-end uploading capabilities to your WordPress site. Looks pretty handy, although I haven’t tried it myself.