9 Popular Fonts 2012

 

Cosmo

 

Stroke

Navia

Geared

Silverfake

Metropolis

Bariol

Bobber

Sablon

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Top 10 Useful Free PDF ebooks for Designers and Bloggers

Web Font User Guide by FontShop

This Web FontFont User Guide contains information aimed at web developers, system administrators and website visitors.
Section B is for web developers, showing how to get started using Web FontFonts for display on your website. Section C contains information for system administrators about which configuration changes may be necessary to successfully serve webfonts from your web server and, finally, section D outlines some issues visitors of your website may experience in connection to webfonts and may assist site owners in answering webfont-related support requests.
Web Font User Guide →
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Introduction to Good Usability by Peter Pixel

This guide is especially handy if you haven’t done a lot of webdesign yet or if you are involved in webdesign but don’t do any of the real work. I hope to shed some light on some common interface elements and mistakes people often make with them.
A lot of books have been written in the past but the threshold for reading them, especially if you have never built a site, is quite big, hence this short guide. This is by no means a complete guide or solid set of rules, but it is definitely a good start.
Introduction to Good Usability →
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Web Accessibility Checklist by Aaron Cannon

Written by Aaron Cannon, blind web developer and accessibility consultant.Aaron explains in his article “The Accessibility Checklist I Vowed I’d Never Write”, that the problems with a “simple checklist that, when followed, will give you an accessible site without fail.” No such checklist exists or likely ever will. He believes that this list is not the perfect solution, nor is it the only solution, but believes it is a good first step, and it gives our developers and designers a place to start from.
Web Accessibility Checklist →
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CSS Systems For Writing Maintainable CSS by Natalie Downe

A CSS System is a reusable set of content-oriented markup patterns and associated CSS created to express a site's individual design. It is the end result of a process that emphasizes up-front planning, loose coupling between CSS and markup, pre-empting browser bugs and overall robustness. It also incorporates a shared vocabulary for developers to communicate the intent of the code.
This ebook elaborates on this concept, and also describes a number of tricks used to preempt maintainability issues.
CSS Systems For Writing Maintainable CSS →
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Better CSS Font Stacks by Nathan Ford

Better CSS Font Stacks →
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Faster, and More Secure Webfonts by Bram Pitoyo

Font embedding for the web is a great step in making the web look better and become more functional, but what about security and load times?
Bram Pitoyo’s ebook takes the top layer off font embedding and shows us how things work, and ultimately how to improve performance and make it more secure.
Faster, and More Secure Webfonts →
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Type Classification eBook by Jacob Cass

This book has been made to help you learn the 10 broad classifications of type. These are the basic foundations of what you need to learn to learn typography and it is essential for any designer to know how to classify type. This book goes through the 10 type classifications with a brief history as well as the key characteristics of each.
Type Classification eBook →
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HTML5 Quick Learning Guide by freehtml5templates.com

This guide introduces you to just the main elements of HTML5 that you’ll probably want to use right away. This guide is for those who want to get the basics figured out first, and worry about the finer details later on.
HTML5 Quick Learning Guide →
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The Woork Handbook by Antonio Lupetti

The Woork Handbook is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other general topics about web design.
The Woork Handbook →
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Typo Tips – Seven Rules for Better Typography by Erik Spiekermann

Typo Tips – Seven Rules for Better Typography →
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Top 10 Useful Books For Web Design

1. Web Design: Navigation – Julius Wiedemann

This addition to the popular ICONS Web Design series focuses on very carefully crafted navigation systems, where usability and narrative are taken in consideration in the development of the website.

Released: March 2009

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2. The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing

This book will help position your business front-and-center when prospects are searching for solutions online.

In addition, Lutze explains how to respond to your customers and understand their issues, wants, and needs so that you can more easily turn prospects into customers. Her step-by-step approach, up-to-date research, and warnings about common pitfalls make this the ultimate practical guide to getting your business noticed on the Internet.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website

3. A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers In The Field or In The Making – Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler

This book presents a chapter-by-chapter guide through an appropriate User Experience process, as well as provides additional information on the creating SOWs and Proposals, Project Ecosystem, best practices for meetings, and understanding business requirements.

User Experience neophytes and professionals alike should be able to find information relevant to any phase of a project in this book.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website

4. When Search Meets Web Usability – Shari Thurow and Nick Musica

This book delivers a proactive approach to building an effective Web site that is search engine friendly and will result in better search rankings.

It outlines the steps needed to bridge the gap between a Google search and a Web site, and also improve the users’ experience once they get to the site.

By understanding the wide variety of information-seeking strategies and the individual behaviors associated with them, this book helps information architects, Web designers/developers, SEOs/SEMs, and usability professionals build better interfaces and functionality into Web sites.

Creating a satisfying user experience is the key to maximizing search effectiveness and getting conversions.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website

5. Sexy Web Design: Creating Interfaces that Work – Elliot Jay Stocks

Designing usable and aesthetically pleasing interfaces is crucial to the success of any application on today’s Web. This book answers critical questions such as:

• What makes a web site work?
• What makes a web site look good?
• What makes a web site easy to use?

This book also covers the process of web site design from the discovery phase all the way through production and the development of style guides.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website – Author’s Website

6. Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field – Helen Armstrong

Graphic Design Theory distills modern design thinking into twenty-four essential essays.

It presents ground-breaking, primary texts from the most important historical and contemporary design thinkers—from Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group” to Kenya Hara’s “Computer Technology and Design”

This fundamental survey quickly reveals key evolving ideas in the industry, putting them into a rich historical and cultural context.

To Be Released: April 4, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website – Author’s Website

7. Search Engine Optimization for Flash: Best Practices for Using Flash On The Web – Todd Perkins

This breakthrough book offers you a series of best practices for using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for building sites with Flash that will stand tall in search rankings. You’ll learn how search engines work, what constitutes a search-engine-optimized (SEO) site, and what to watch out for in the way of SEO pitfalls. With this concise book, you will:

• Learn about searchable content, and understand the importance of metadata, keywords, and links
• Place HTML content in your Flash applications
• Create an SEO website by connecting Flash to JavaScript and CSS
• Work effectively with SWFObject by understanding its capabilities and limitations
• Realize the advantages of using the Adobe Flex framework for SEO

The first -and only- book that explains how to optimize Flash content for search engines,Search Engine Optimization for Flash is an invaluable resource if you develop with Flash and want to be sure your audience can easily find your site.

To Be Released: April 6, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website

8. Speaking in Styles: Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers – Jason Cranford Teague

Speaking in Styles targets Web designers, aiming to help them learn the “language” that will be used to take their vision from the static comp to the live Internet.

Many designers think that CSS is code, and that it’s too hard to learn.

Author Jason Teague takes an approach to CSS that breaks it down around common design tasks and helps the reader learn that they already think in styles- they just need to learn to speak the language.

To Be Released: April 7, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website – Author’s Website

9. Professional Web Widgets with CSS, DOM, JSON and Ajax – Rajesh Lal and Lakshmi Chava

Professional Widgets with CSS, DOM and Ajax is the first guide to building web widgets – tiny applications that can be embedded in a web page or on the desktop and have exploded in popularity in recent months.

Inside, award-winning programmer Rajesh Lal provides readers with a methodology for building widgets using standards like CSS and DOM to create widgets that work anywhere.

Next he guides readers though the creation of widgets using several popular toolkits and frameworks including Yahoo! Widgets, Silverlight with PopFly, Google Web Toolkit, Microsoft Web Gadgets and more.

Professional Widgets with CSS, DOM and Ajax is heavy on step-by step examples enabling readers to get up to speed and begin building widgets quickly and easily.

To Be Released: April 13, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website

10. Semantic Web Programming – John Hebeler, Matthew Fisher, Ryan Blace, Andrew Perez-Lopez, Mike Dean

The next major advance in the Web 3.0 will be built on semantic Web technologies, which will allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.

Written by a team of highly experienced Web developers, this book explains and examines how this powerful new technology can unify and fully leverage the ever-growing data, information, and services that are available on the Internet.

Helpful examples demonstrate how to use the semantic Web to solve practical, real-world problems while you take a look at the set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and technologies that form the semantic Web.

To Be Released: April 13, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website

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Latest Trends in Web Design 2011-12

In this post, we are going to discuss all those changes, upcoming trends, new design elements and new design approaches which were identified, discovered and observed over the last few months. So let’s dig into the post covering the current trends of web design as 2011 turns to 2012.

1. Simple Color Schemes

Simplicity is yet another recent design trend that has captured the respect and imagination of users. Instead of using black and white or shades of grey designers are experimenting with primary colors like green, yellow or red intelligently to create a web design which is something simple and truly remarkable, but limited their palette to two or three colors and are playing with shades of each color to create really inspiring color combination to communicate a message.
Some of the best examples of great web design inspired with color schemes formed by using different shades of primary colors like green and red.
WideView

Motionoto

2. Mobile Device Compatibility

 

With the increasing popularity of tablet technology and smart phones, web designers must adapt to new standards. With different screen resolutions its difficult to accommodate the whole site in small mobile screen. Instead of having to create a separate, lackluster site, CSS3 allows web designers to accommodate mobile technology into the website design. One of the most important advances is that you can design a whole site and allow your coding to conform to the user’s viewing medium.
A mobile website should retain the design elements of the original, just in a smaller, touch-screen-friendly format. Today, more people will be buying smartphones than personal computers. That means that websites should look just as good on a tiny screen as on high-definition larger monitors.
Google

G-Shock

Dolce & Gabbana

4. Parallax scrolling

In 2012 creating a sense of dimension and depth will become more common and web designers are more focused to create a sense of depth in website design and this is the most effective web design trend for 2012. This emerging trend brings parallax scrolling into the picture. The Parallax effect or parallax scrolling in web design is the technique that features layered images that move around the website in different speeds/perspectives creating a nice and interesting 3D illusion. It can be done with the help of simple CSS tricks, jQuery plugins, HTML5, JavaScript and even Flash
Egopop Creative Studio

Head2Heart

Webdesign Karlsruhe

5.Touch screen-friendly website designs

In modern time, technology has been becoming more tactile which resulted in a huge shift from usability to tangible. With smart phones, tablets, and even some desktops using touch screens, designers need to accommodate fingertip navigation. Links that change color, or underline when a mouse is hovered over them will not have the same effect on a touch screen.  As per this trend, horizontal scrolling websites are considered more appropriate for touch screens.
Interexpresso

6. Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is a different approach of web design using this technology one can create a flexible website layout that dynamically fits into the screen of every device at any resolution, from desktop to laptop and from browser supported smart phones to any kind of mobile devices. This technique enables web developers to create one version of the website that fits in all devices rather then creating different version of the same website for different devices.
Simon Collison

Sparkbox

Think Vitamin

7. Typography

Stylized typography is an age-old feature, and today designers are using it to give their designs a different look. In past years, typography has been overlooked because customizing typography used to be a complicated method. Now web designers can integrate custom fonts into websites with tools such as WhatTheFont, CSS Typeset and Typetester which has helped designers be more creative. Mixing bold and scrolling letters and using extra-large font sizes to grab viewers’ attention is becoming mainstream. Think bold, fun, and unique.
Forefathers

Carsonified

8. Big Images & Photo Backgrounds

Big images aren’t new; wider screen sizes offer a bigger window with which to display them. More sites will be using that space for great big images in 2012. Images with high resolution covering the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab the audience attention.
Cpeople

Miraclestudios

Nespresso

 9.Textured Backgrounds

The use of textured backgrounds is another hot trend to follow. The visual experience of the audience increases exponentially if the background is aesthetically pleasing and precise. The points to focus on are simplicity of design and the illusion of textures to create depth and dimension on the page.
Cake Sweet Cake

Alpine Meadows

Organic Supermarket

10. Single Page Design

The ever-expanding competition to keep users on a website is becoming more challenging. Visitors scan web pages to locate the information they want, but with each click required to delve deeper into the website, the interest level drop. This phenomenon has led to a growing desire to build single-page websites. Interaction is key, and more user friendly websites will start to crop up.
Ryanscherf

Imagemechanics

11. Social Media Sharing

The integration of social media will continue to spread like wildfire throughout the web in the future. This practice has allowed businesses to gain greater exposure and access to users than ever before. Online businesses, big and small, will focus squarely on this.

12.CSS3 + HTML 5

One of the most unexpected trends observed over the last few months was the more use of  CSS3 and HTML5. Most of web designers are jumping from Flash to HTML5. HTML5 introduced to share the burden placed on Flash but HTML5 cannot substitute Flash when it comes to create the extraordinary design elements. HTML5 now works on Firefox 3.5 and higher, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer 8. This programming language is all about giving developers more flexibility, connecting data / drawings / videos / audio, and delivering designs faster.
Not all browsers have adopted CSS3 as a whole yet, but they are slowly starting to come around. Some of the new features of CSS3 include rounded corners, mega drop-down menus, animated buttons, multiple backgrounds, box shadow, text shadow, transparent images and lot more… Animations with CSS3 are made easy, subtle and lightweight.
Below are some examples:
jetcooper

sundaybestdesigns

chirp.twitter

 

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