Right time to go into Photoshop and create a “simple” moody image using loads of simple effects to create an image with depth and composition. This is simpler than you think but can demand a lot from your system. You will be switching between Illustrator, Photoshop, Painter and throwing a few hand rendered elements in just for good measure so put the kettle on, sit back and get ready to begin!

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Creative thinking is an essential part of design workflow. Whatever sketch you are working on, at some point you find yourself in the situation where you simply need some fresh ideas to find your path around the creativity block. Going away may help. Listening to the music may help. But particularly the works of the famous graphic artists may help. In fact, studying them very closely, you can not only explore new ideas, but also learn the smallest details - they form the profound foundation of every masterpiece.

In this post we’d like to present you an ultimate breakthrough for your creativity blocks; over the last weeks we’ve been searching for the most popular graphic designers, illustrators and artists around the world. We’ve selected some of their works to give you an idea what style they have and what details of modern design you can expect and learn from them.

So what do we have as result? Over 100 breathtaking illustrations from some of the best contemporary graphic designers, illustrators and artists; besides you’ll also find references to further (mostly unknown) sources for inspiration you can use on a daily basis.

Once you’ve selected the artist whose works you like, click on the image to get to his/her portfolio and explore his/her work in more depth. Please notice that most artists listed below are well-known in the worldwide design community (and so are their works); hopefully you know not all of them.

Please be patient, it may take a while until the images are loaded. Please be aware that it also may take a while until you’ve seen most of showcased images.

Further suggestions and ideas? Please comment.

Creativity Spark From Masters Of Illustration

Web-developers can create amazing web-applications with AJAX. Stikkit, Netvibes, GMail and dozens of further web-projects offer a new level of interactivity we’ve used to give up the idea of. Modern web-applications can be designed with enhanced user interfaces and functionalities, which used to be the privelege of professional desktop-applications. AJAX makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible web-solutions. And it’s the first step towards rich internet applications of the future.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML isn’t a new programming language, as it is often mistakingly called. Basically, AJAX is a set of XHTML, CSS, DOM, XMLHttpRequest and XML, put together and used together for the same purpose - to improve the user-server-interaction.

• To understand the idea behind AJAX, you should read Jesse James Garrett’s article “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications” and Wikipedia: Ajax;
• to learn the basics of AJAX, you should go through some AJAX tutorials we’ve presented previously;
• to learn more about professional CSS coding, you should visit 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding;
• and to get a powerful and handy CSS-Toolbox for your future projects, you can use 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without.

In this article we’d like to present a list of over 90 useful AJAX-based techniques you should always have ready to hand developing AJAX-based web-applications. Auto-completion, instant field editing, menus, calendars, interactive elements, visual effects, animation, basic javascripts, as well as an extensive developer’s suite should give you a useful and powerful toolbox you can use every day, without a need to go through hundreds of AJAX-related bookmarks.

80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding

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

Wordpress is simple, minimalistic and yet extremely powerful. However, being easy-to-use, the engine has also some huge disadvantages - e.g. “naked” Wordpress is very inefficient when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Reason: there is simply too much to tweak, too many plugins to use and too many details to take care of.

Title, Meta-Description and Keywords determine the way your posts are shown in search engines, and thus how appealing they appear for random users. The better description your weblog provides, the better idea users will have about the content of your post, which results in the amount of your page impressions. Furthermore, if your Wordpress automatically generates several URLs for a single post (date, id, title of the article), you might run into serious problems with search engines. In fact, sites with the so-called Duplicate Content are often penalized and can be excluded from the search index for several months.

Therefore it’s extremely important to have a profound understanding of what can and should be done to avoid penalization and ensure optimal presentation in search engine results. Popular Wordpress Plugins Optimal Title and Head META Description offer help, but their possibilities are limited.

So if you’d like to have a more comprehensive solution, you should consider the not-so-well-known wpSEO-plugin, which is an effective Wordpress-plugin which can help you to achieve optimal results in search engines. The plugin comes from Germany, was written by Sergej Müller and has been recently released in Version 2.0. So, what can you do with wpSEO?

wpSEO: More SEO for Wordpress