The week is coming to an end and that means it is time for us to look back on the week that passed, the best design news, resources and other goodies. This week we look at how you can use any font with CSS3, how you can have multiple backgrounds, why not all websites look the same in all browsers, as well as how you can add your website to the iOS home screen. 

How to use any font you like with CSS3

Custom fonts are among the most potentially appealing aspects of CSS3 for designers. With the font-face rule, you can render any font you have online within your web page text, regardless of whether the user has it installed or not. As with most CSS3 techniques, the basic code is pretty simple, but the practical reality is a little more complex. In this short tutorial, we will run through the basics of including custom fonts in your pages.

Build a basic responsive site with CSS

This article first appeared in issue 231 of .net magazine – the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Everyone’s talking about responsive web design. But does everyone understand what it’s for? I’m not sure. Many web designers and developers seem to me to have misunderstood the problem it’s trying to solve. Put simply, it’s not about making sites for mobile devices, it’s about adapting layouts to viewport sizes.

Multiple Backgrounds with CSS3

Adding background image with CSS is nothing new, this feature has been there since its inception. But we were limited to only add one image in one declaration block. Now, CSS3 is raising the stakes by proiding you the option of adding multiple backgrounds.

Why some websites don’t work properly in your favorite browser

It never fails: No matter which browser you use, and how well you keep up with its updates, sooner or later you end up finding a website that doesn’t quite work the right way. Even more frustratingly, bugs and defects always seem to crop up more often on sites that tend to push the limits of what can be done with a browser, with activities like printing, interactivity, and complex animations frequent targets of malfunctions and misfirings.

15 Awesome Infinite Scrolling jQuery Plugins

In this post, we are sharing with you a jQuery scrolling plugin collection that can help you implement endless scrolling system on your website. Most of these infinite scrolling scripts are free, but I also added a premium product. If you have more infinite scrolling jQuery plugins we could add, please give us a link in a comment. We will also be happy to hear your opinion about this article and about infinite scrolling in general. Enjoy!

10 brilliant examples of responsive design in ecommerce

There is no longer a debate over whether online retailers need a mobile site, as consumer demand dictates that brands need to optimised for small screens. However there are still several different options facing brands that want to create a mobile optimised site. Responsive design is seen by many as being the future of web design, and we previously looked at 11 gorgeous examples of the technology and asked several experts whether site owners need to adopt it. But the examples we’ve seen suggest that responsive design is currently more popular among design agencies and artists, while major ecommerce retailers have been slow on the uptake. So to show how responsive design can be applied in retail, here are 10 examples of ecommerce sites built using responsive design.

The importance of proper site structure and organization

The structure and organization of your site is so important and it doesn’t get as much attention as things like copywriting and link building (don’t get me wrong, those are crucial, I just think we need to look at the structure too, we don’t want it feeling left out!)If you haven’t recently evaluated the structure of your site, now is a good time to do that.

10 CSS3 Pricing Tables For Professional Websites

CSS3 is the latest version of this amazing stylish language called Cascading Style Sheet. In this post you will find the perfect solution for placing pricing tables on your websites with style of CSS3. This post features the best 10 CSS3 Pricing Tables for professional websites. All the pricing tables are professional and created by the best designers of the world. Do share this post with your friends to help us spread the word.

Top Web Apps for Web Designers

Whether you are a freelance web designer, or have a position with a company, having some help never hurt. There are tons of apps on the web that can help web designers learn new techniques, design, and coding. Using these apps you will be able create a stunning web design without a problem.

Quick Tip: Give Your Website an iOS Home Screen Icon

With more mobile web users than ever, it’s important to keep your branding strong. Let’s go one step further than the standard favicon and help your website stand out by creating icons for use on iOS and Android home screens.

The post Weekly News Roundup – 11 January 2013 appeared first on Design Reviver.

The week is coming to an end and that means it is time for us to look back on the week that passed, the best design news, resources and other goodies. This week we look at 30 Stunning User Interface examples, how you can provide unique value to your clients, 9 pitfalls of of web hosting and how to avoid them, furthermore we take a look at how you can make your website more tablet friendly as well as great ways to use the website footer.

30 Stunning User Interface Examples

User interface is extremely important for any type of application because without an intuitive design, the user will probably try to find an alternative to that app. The success of web applications and websites depends in how effective the user interface design is. Designing a good user interface however is a very challenging task. According to Apple, a great application has the focus on content. Simply, it must be realistic and must take full advantage of device capabilities to enable enhanced interaction. A user interface that is unattractive, convoluted, or illogical can make even a great application seem like a chore to use, so when you design the UI, you must have in mind how your users think, act and work. In this article you can see 30 gorgeous examples of user interface design for various types of applications.

6 Easy Ways to Make Your Website Tablet Friendly

There are nearly 70 million tablet users in the U.S. alone, a figure that has doubled from the year before. This means that nearly 30% of the country’s Internet users are browsing on a tablet device. Tablet traffic to e-commerce sites grew by 348% from 2011 to 2012, overtaking smartphone traffic for the first time. With the tablet market as young as it is, its footprint is only going to expand. This trend sends a strong message: If you haven’t already, now is the time to prioritize your website’s design considerations for tablet functionality. Ignoring this could negatively impact your website’s overall conversion rate, return visits, sales and more.

21 Inspiring Examples of Illustrated Elements in Web Design

For our last web design inspiration list of 2012 we decided to gather examples of beautiful illustrated elements in web design. We believe that illustrated elements can give a nice touch and personality to a design. From subtle illustrated details to complete colorful sketched pages, the key is finding the right amount to use for each project. So today we have several different approaches on how to incorporate illustrated elements in a website. Enjoy!

The device-agnostic approach to responsive design

Techniques, technology and terminology change constantly in web design, and keeping up with them is crucial to your success in online design and development. Device-agnostic and responsive design are two of the current hot terms being bandied around in technology circles, and often in the same sentence. With the increasing use of a wide variety of internet-enabled mobile devices, web designers and developers are encouraged to keep work responsive; adapting content and design elements to the limitations of whichever device is being used. However, labelling responsive design as a technique using the device agnostic approach is a tricky business. What exactly is the device-agnostic approach, and is it even necessary to identify it as an approach to responsive design?

3 Ways Designers Can Provide Unique Value To Clients

If you’ve ever purchased organic food from a grocery store or farmer’s market, you know that it can be, well, pricey. Some people report as much as a 300% increase in their grocery bill when they buy organic versions of their regular groceries. And is it worth it? Staunch fans of organic living claim that it is.

38 Modern List Styles in Website Designs

I want to use this showcase as a peek into modern list styles and design trends. Web designers can be found all around the world who have been studying the creating the newest market trends. These designers are the molders and shapers of our future design community. It is exciting to see how these ideas take shape and form into larger archetypes over time.

9 Web Hosting Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

If you’re ready to move off Blogge and onto a web hosting service, you’ve probably got a lot of other things on your plate as well. The world of web hosting can be complex and confusing, but we’re looking out for you.  We know you want a simple solution tailored to your needs, and with great support services. We all do. But great web hosting is really different for every client. We’ve done the research and found nine scenarios that are either red flags, or should be avoided altogether.

16 great examples of website footer design

When starting any website project, it’s natural to want to concentrate your design efforts on the homepage and the header. As a result, the footer often becomes an afterthought – relegated to a poorly designed dumping ground for copyright information, legal disclaimers and spammy SEO links. But it shouldn’t be this way.

Workless: A Clean & Classy HTML5, CSS3 Framework

Workless is a clean & classy HTML5, CSS3 framework that helps you to get your project up and running as fast as possible and helps prevent repetitive tasks. It standardizes CSS, improves usability and interaction, sets base typography to help vertical rhythm and readability and adds helper classes to style elements easily. You can either start with the base setup, or drop the files and assets into your current project and simply reference the CSS and Javascript files in your source. Once you’ve done this you can then begin adding your own application specific CSS.

Creating WordPress Themes That Sell – 5 Guidelines You Should Know

Considering the fact that WordPress is the most popular Content Management System out there and serves many users, it’s no wonder that developers feel encouraged and motivated to create themes for WordPress. After all, the gigantic size of the WordPress’ user base simply means that themes created for WordPress are likely to be used by many people, thereby giving developers good returns for their hard work.

The post Weekly News Roundup – 4 January 2013 appeared first on Design Reviver.

In today’s news round-up we feature four powerful and new jQuery plugins that will add plenty of cool functionalties to your sites or applications.

Phono – jQuery Phone Plugin

Phono is a simple JQuery plugin and JavaScript library that turns any web browser into a phone; capable of making phone calls and sending instant messages. You can even connect to SIP clients; all with a simple unified API.
Phono – jQuery Phone Plugin

Wijmo – jQuery UI Widgets

Wijmo is a complete kit of over 30 jQuery UI Widgets. It is an extremely dangerous mixture of jQuery, CSS3, SVG, and HTML5 that when combined become an unstoppable force on the web.
Wijmo – jQuery UI Widgets

SlideNote – A jQuery Plugin For Sliding Notifications

SlideNote is a customizable, flexible jQuery plugin that makes it easy to display sliding notifications on your website or in your web application.
SlideNote – A jQuery Plugin For Sliding Notifications

IMGr – jQuery Image Rounder

IMGr is a jQuery plugin for rounding image corners. The script utilizes CSS3 in modern web browsers, and VML in Internet Explorer 8 and below.
IMGr – jQuery Image Rounder

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

In today’s news round-up we have a small, yet cool, selection of useful tools, apps and resources for web designers. First up, we have a wonderfully useful jQuery plugin Quovolver) for displaying quotes in a stylish way, next up we have a small, yet very handy app for generating a grid (Gridulator) and finally a fun time-killing bookmarklet that can destroy everything on a web page.

Quovolver – a simple jQuery plugin for revolving quotes

Quovolver is a simple extension for jQuery that takes a group of quotes and displays them on your page in an elegant way.
Quovolver – a simple jQuery plugin for revolving quotes

Gridulator – Make pixel grids, lickety-split

Tell Gridulator your layout width and the number of columns you want, and it’ll spit back all the possible grids that have nice, round integers. Just the thing for pixel-based design folk. There are inline previews, courtesy of the canvas element, and when you’re all set Gridulator can crank out full-size PNGs for you, ready for use in your CSS, Photoshop docs, or what have you.
Gridulator – Make pixel grids, lickety-split

Hello, want to kill some time?

Hello, want to kill some time?

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Slideshows and image galleries are all the rage at the moment, there are loads of new techniques, plugins and tutorials cropping up everywhere. In this design news round-up we have chosen our favorites from recent weeks.

SIDEWAYS – jQuery fullscreen image gallery

Sideways is a simple, yet elegant fullscreen image gallery created with the jQuery and some simple CSS.
SIDEWAYS – jQuery fullscreen image gallery

Full Page Image Gallery with jQuery

In this tutorial you can learn how to create a stunning full page gallery with scrollable thumbnails and a scrollable full screen preview. The idea is to have a thumbnails bar at the bottom of the page that scrolls automatically when the user moves the mouse. When a thumbnail is clicked, it moves to the center of the page and the full screen image is loaded in the background.
Full Page Image Gallery with jQuery

Orbit: A Slick jQuery Image Slider Plugin

Orbit is a killer jQuery plugin that lets you create a simple, effective and beautiful slider for images of any size, and even includes some parameters for making awesome captions and a sweet timer.
Orbit: A Slick jQuery Image Slider Plugin

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

JQuery is a framework for JavaScript which was released in 2006. The whole framework was developed by John Resig, an American Resident, Currently working with Mozilla Corporation as a JavaScript Tool Developer. Although there are many other JavaScript frameworks jQuery has been proven best in all the frameworks. The other frameworks like MooTools, Spry, midori, qooxdoo also allow you to manipulate the client side HTML content, but jQuery became very popular among all these because of its flexibility, easy coding standards and ability to deliver robust outcomes. In simple language jQuery makes the tasks done by JavaScripts easy, fast and understanding. One can manipulate css, content, images, HTML attributes and even the server side data by implementation of Ajax with jQuery.

In simple language jQuery makes the tasks done by JavaScripts easy, fast and understanding. One can manipulate css, content, images, HTML attributes and even the server side data by implementation of Ajax with jQuery.

Before jQuery, whenever it comes to animation or sliding, the only thing came into everyone’s mind was Flash. But after jQuery, one is totally ignoring using flash wherever possible. The main reason behind this is not that jQuery is the best over flash, but the implementation of jQuery over flash is better, easy and quick. Whenever one needs to place any flash content in their website, the client browser must be supportive to show the content of the flash. i.e. A Flash player is always needed. Now, as the flash player is needed, what would happen is that the control for that content is given to the flash player by the browser and hence the third party comes into existence costing the speed of the website. So if the browser is not fully able to load the content of a web page by its own, and requires some other application to show some part of the page, it will definitely take more time to load the page. And what about the users who do not have flash player in their browser at all? They will first need to download it as an add-on and then only they will be able to serf the page fully, which definitely lessens the interest of the visitor.

Where as in jQuery every kind of animations are possible as the Flash gives and need not the third party application to load or run a code and content. It is because most of the browsers introduced till date in this world which supports JavaScript, also supports jQuery, remember – jQuery is the framework for JavaScript. Look, how easy it is! One more benefit of jQuery over Flash is that any naïve developer or programmer can easily handle it with little sweat, but Flash is not any Tom-Dick-&-Harry’s cup of tea. Hence, the ultimate benefit of jQuery is less men power, as the developer himself can create the animation and scripting. To use jQuery is also very simple, one just need to add only a single file called jquery.js (jQuery Library) and little code in the HTML page where the magic is to be done. jQuery provides slider, menu bar, image rotation, image fading, text animation, interaction between client side and server side data, and whatever you can think of.

That’s the reason you would see the jQuery more and flash less in the recent websites. Flash is totally becoming or I can say became obsolete from the world of Web. Now days one would prefer flash only if they have a special requirement of the flash action scripts. Other than this don’t expect the anymore use of the Flash in the websites now.

Few advantages of jQuery over flash are:

1) jQuery is compatible with every browser.

2) jQuery is also compatible with iPhone, iPad, cell phones etc. which Flash is not.

3) jQuery is very less in size and a single jQuery can create as many animations, sliding and other effects. But in the case of Flash you will need individual flash files for every animations and sliding.

4) jQuery is a freeware where as if one want to develop something in Flash one would need to purchase a Flash Development Suite.

5) Flash files are always large in size. On the other hand jQuery file is less than 60kb in size.

6) Flash always need the upmost skill to create even a single simple stuff, but in jQuery any one little familiar with HTML and JavaScript can easily create anything.

These are very few, but the list is very long. There are only two disadvantages of jQuery over Flash, which are:

1) jQuery does not give high 3D effects and,

2) JavaScript can be disabled from the browser which will disable jQuery too.

Few examples of the jQuery artwork like flash are given below:

1) http://webdesignledger.com/tutorials/13-excellent-jquery-animation-techniques

2) http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/web-development/jquery-animation-tutorials/

3) http://www.queness.com/post/1942/10-stunning-examples-of-jquery-animations

Sometimes to get your development juices flowing you just need a meaty project or an in-depth tutorial that you can sink your teeth into and lose yourself for a few hours in coding bliss. And that’s what we have for you today, three tutorials that will satisfy your code craving! They are not only roll-up-your-sleeves and put-on-a-pot-of-coffee good but they will also introduce you to some of the latest CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery techniques.

A jQuery, CSS3 & HTML5 Hover-Based Interface

In this awesome tutorial you will learn how to create a useful hover-based user interface using jQuery, CSS3, HTML5 and @font-face. The project you’ll be creating could easily be used for a portfolio or business site and the concepts you’ll learn could certainly be used to expand the idea further.
A jQuery, CSS3 & HTML5 Hover-Based Interface

Dynamic FAQ Section w/ jQuery, YQL & Google Docs

In this tutorial, you will build a dynamic FAQ section. The script, with the help of jQuery & YQL, will pull the contents of a shared spreadsheet in your Google Docs account, and use the data to populate the FAQ section with questions and answers.
Dynamic FAQ Section w/ jQuery, YQL & Google Docs

How to easily create charts using jQuery and HTML5

For years, Flash was the only solution to display a dynamic chart on a website. But thanks to modern techniques, the dying Flash isn't needed anymore. In this tutorial,you'll be shown how easy it is to transform a basic HTML table into a profesionnal looking chart using visualize.js, a very useful jQuery plugin.
How to easily create charts using jQuery and HTML5

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

There really is no limit to what can be achieved with jQuery. And when it is in the right hands those limits are challenged all the time, constantly pushing back its seemingly endless boundaries by developing fresh and creative techniques. In this design news round-up we have collected our favorite recent jQuery tutorials.

Super Ajax Polling/Voting System using JQuery, Ajax, PHP and MySQL

Super Ajax Polling/Voting System using JQuery, Ajax, PHP and MySQL →

jQuery Quickie: Slot Machine Style Navigation

jQuery Quickie: Slot Machine Style Navigation →

How To Create A Great Contact Form

How To Create A Great Contact Form →

Music Portfolio Template with HTML5 and jQuery

Music Portfolio Template with HTML5 and jQuery →

A Simple Movie Search App w/ jQuery UI

A Simple Movie Search App w/ jQuery UI →

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).