Today we are glad to release 30 Swirl Brushes, a set with 30 high-quality swirl Photoshop brushes with an average size 2000px. These brushes were created with Adobe Photoshop CS4 and also work with the version CS, CS2 and CS3. This set was designed by Thomas Béal especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
So take a moment and look over the list below of the 12 best free cms options available. Some might seem really familiar (we love wordpress) and some others might be new to you. They all deserve your attention for a few minutes. Hell, even test drive a few of them and see if there’s any that might work for a new project – I’m currently digging into SilverStripe which looks to be pretty damn awesome!
And don’t forget to let us know in the comments section which is your favorite CMS and why!
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. Wordpress is also what Spyre Studios and Design Newz run on (as well as my blog design website and my Guerrilla Freelancing blog). Read the rest of this entry »
Firebug is a revolutionary Firefox extension that helps web developers and designers test and inspect front-end code. It provides us with many useful features such as a console panel for logging information, a DOM inspector, detailed information about page elements, and much more.
Though Firebug is already fully packed with features out of the box, several extensions out there can enhance its utility. In this article, you will find the 10 best Firefox extensions for Firebug that will make your life, as a developer or designer, easier.
Pixel Perfect allows you to overlay web layouts and other design compositions onto a web page so that you can accurately (and easily) write your CSS and HTML. By being able to toggle a web composition on or off, web developers and designers can have a visual guide for pixel-perfect accuracy of the position and dimensions of web page components. Check out the video demonstration to Pixel Perfect in action. Read the rest of this entry »
In this set, you’ll find 10 free and high-resolution brown paper textures which can be used in a wide range of ways. They have a very liberal Creative Commons license so you can use them in any manner you choose, whether it’s personal or commercial. Read the rest of this entry »
There are various CSS frameworks which offer a grid system, a style reset, basic typography, form styling & more.
But, if you only need a lightweight grid framework to build the skeleton of your website, take a look at the 1Kb CSS Grid.
It supports both fluid grids besides the fixed-width ones and nested rows can be created.
The website of the framework provides a generator to customize the grid & download the CSS easily.
Also, Usability Post has a very detailed introduction to the 1Kb CSS Grid in 3 steps. To dig the details, make sure you check them:
Pictaculous is a free web-based service which generates the color palette of an image you upload.
And, it provides color palette suggestions from Adobe Kuler & Colourlovers which can be used with the image.
Once the color palette is created, it can be downloaded as an Adobe Swatch file.
Pictaculous also enables you to send the image & get results via e-mail (which is nice for using the service in phones). Read the rest of this entry »
