Some months ago we’ve selected 50 prominent designers and design companies, contacted them and asked to answer five design-related questions, sharing their knowledge and experience with fellows developers. 35 designers have responded then. For each of 5 questions we’ve received 5 precise answers. The result was 35×5 professional ideas from some of the leading web-developers all around the world.

Good news — planning the celebration of our 1st anniversary, we’ve decided to do some more math. We’ve selected 6 questions, which main purpose was to give fellows designers more insights in practice, and in the experience prominent designers gained during their work over the last 5-10 years.

So this time we wanted it to be not about useful coding suggestions or clever CSS-techniques, but about the practical knowledge and personal experience developers would share with us and our readers.

What are the things you should know before starting designing / programming? What things should you be aware of? How to get your project done? In fact, we wanted to take a close look at some practical answers to these questions - from the worlds’ best designers.

50 Designers x 6 Questions

Technorati Tags: coding, creative, CSS, design, inspiration, techniques

Dinis91.com

2006 was rich on creative, beautiful and unusual design concepts. We’ve seen a lot of whitespace, many examples of readable and usable text-design, badges, stars, rounded corners, shapes, gradients, mirror and 3D-effects - just name it. Let’s take a close look at some of the most beautiful designs we’ve seen in 2006. Some gorgeous designs are missing? Let us know - comment on this article!

 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006

Gossip City is a theme for WordPress created by Design Disease. The theme was created based on what people would want to see from a gossip blog.

Theme
Once you’ve downloaded the theme and extracted the files, upload the folder to your wp-content/themes/ directory. Next, go to the ‘Presentation’ area in your WordPress administration panel and activate the theme.

Plugins
I’ve included the following plugins with the theme (in the plugins folder):

1. flickrrss
2. wp_gravatar

Just upload everything in the plugins folder to your wp-content/plugins/ folder and activate the plugins from the ‘Plugins’ page in your administration panel. The plugins are customised to match Gossip City theme.

Logo
By default, the theme displays your Web site’s title and description in the header. If you want to replace that with your logo, it’s easy to do. If you look at the Logo Instructions.txt you will see how easy it is to change the logo. PSD Source for the logo is also included.

License
This theme, like all themes released by Bloggy Network are released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please keep the credit and the links from the footer.

The theme is Widget Ready.

• Test the Theme
• Download the Theme

Technorati Tags: blog, city, design, download, free, gossip, professional, theme

PFO Stripes [ Demo ]

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:

• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
  An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
• 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
  A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
• 10 Fresh and Clean Themes
  The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.

You want them — you get them. This page may take a while to load; therefore please be patient and don’t hit “Reload” too often.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

Technorati Tags: design, inspiration, template, theme, wordpress