Last year we did a post on 80+ Green Living Sites. This is an update on that, with more than 100 new and/or improved sites for everything from decreasing your carbon footprint to finding green jobs, environmentally-friendly shopping, and more.

Green everything is hot right now, and there’s no sign that it’s going to slow down any time in the near future. What are your favorite sites for green living? Tell us more in the comments.

Carbon Footprint Calculators, Other Tools and Carbon Offsets

The Carbon Account – Reduce your carbon footprint and share tips with others.

RoofRay – An online tool that uses satellite photos to help you design and compare photovoltaic arrays.

GreenIQ – Measures your carbon emissions and overall environmental footprint. Also includes a blog and other helpful information.

Carbonrally – Lets you compete in challenges to reduce your environmental impact with others in your area or worldwide.

COzero – A site that calculates your carbon emissions and then shows you ways to reduce and offset them.

CO2Stats – Automatically purchases renewable energy for your website based on your site’s environmental footprint.

3Degrees – Find out your carbon footprint and then support climate change fighting projects.

Carma – Online carbon monitoring of power plants and power companies.

Charitable Giving

ImprovingYourWorld – Vote for your preferred charity or cause on this site, and they’ll get a portion of donations based on the number of votes they receive.

MicroGiving – Choose a cause to donate to and then see the results that your donation brings.

TimeBank – Volunteer your time based on who you are and your schedule to worthy causes.

Pledgie – Raise money for a cause or start your own cause.

Giveo – Donate to a cause or start your own.

nabuur.com – Online volunteering platform that links volunteers with local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America to find solutions to local problems.

JustGive.org – Tools to make charitable giving part of every day life by connecting donors with causes they care most about.

Firstgiving – Online fund raising pages you can share that let you raise money for any US nonprofit.

BringLight – Connects donors with charities who describe specific funding needs, so you know exactly where your money is going.

CareBadges – Create website badges for causes you believe in.

Six Degrees – Create online badges and become a celebrity for your cause.

GivingPal – Shop through this site and a portion of your spending is donated to a charity of your choosing.

ChangingThePresent – You can sponsor a pig, help a deaf child, provide clean water, or any number of other tangible charitable gifts through this site.

CharityNavigator – Independent charity evaluations of over 5,300 American charities.

MissionFish – Fund raising tools for raising money on ebay.

CrowdFunder – Tools for raising money for whatever your cause is.

Noza – Helps charities find donors.

MicroPlace – Find people all over the world who are looking for someone to invest in them to help them work their way out of poverty.

Stuff Your Rucksack – Volunteer to transport items when you travel to people who need them (such as bringing a school some books or bringing clothes to an orphanage).

ripple – Fight poverty by searching through this site, or donate directly.

Rainfall of Envelopes – Makes it easy to receive or give money gifts for any event, including charitable fundraisers.

DonorsChoose.org – Provide students in need with materials and resources that public schools are often lacking.

good2gether – A platform that helps distribute relevant charitable information across media sites all over the Internet.

The Point – Get people to pledge to give money or take action, wait for enough people to pledge (reach the “tipping point”) and then have members follow through on their pledge, sure that they will actually make a difference.

Communities, Networking and Dating

Edenbee – An online community dedicated to reducing your carbon footprint.

EthicalSingles – An online dating site for environmentally and socially responsible singles.

Eco Treadsetters – An online green community sponsored by the Yokohama tire company.

EcoSpace – An online community of people who want to create positive change.

2People – A community aimed at building the public mandate for solutions to global warming.

Hugg – User-submitted green news from all over the Web.

Gaia Community – A social network of individuals committed to changing the world.

Veggie Community – Social networking for vegans, vegetarians, and raw foodists.

Green-Passions – Online dating and social networking for green singles.

Care2 – Green social networking site that includes news, groups, ecards, and more.

Creative Citizen – An online community dedicated to finding creative solutions for green living.

Greenopolis – Collaborative and interactive education website that brings together communities, organizations, foundations, corporations and universities to reward people for making positive environmental changes in their lives.

Segway Social – A social network for Segway users.

Out For A Ride – Social networking for bicycle riders.

AlternativeEnergy.com – Social networking, news and more for the alternative energy industry.

traxtuff – Network for loaning and borrowing things, as well as tracking the things you’ve borrowed or loaned out.

Razoo – Social network for promoting social responsibility.

EMwomen – Social networking dedicated to empowering women to make a difference in their world.

OffsetX – Social action network that allows you to “offset” (vote against) anything you want, whether it’s a politician, business, disease, or whatever.

Ladder to Heaven – Promotes the sharing of good deeds performed by users or others.

Changemakers – A platform for open source social innovation that produces global action frameworks that draw on the work of social entrepreneurs and seed collaborative action.

Just Cause – Read stories about people making positive change, learn about creative solutions to problems in the world and share your own ideas.

Green Business, Money and Careers

do the right thing.com – Online business ratings based on environmental and social impact.

EnvironmentalCareer.com – An online job search engine for environmental jobs.

SustainableBusiness.com – News () and networking for green businesses to help them grow.

justmeans – Sustainable and socially responsible business and stock information.

Local Information

Earth 911 – A site that provides local recycling and product stewardship information.

Greenopia – A local green living guide.

Green Map – Maps of green living, cultural, natural and civic resources for communities around the world.

Ecovian – A local green living directory.

Projects & Action-Based Sites

1Sky – An online political action site that is focused on getting the federal government to act on climate change by 2010.

Catalog Choice – Opt-out of catalog mailing lists to reduce your junk mail.

ProQuo – Opt-out of junk mail lists (you can also opt-in to offers you actually want to receive).

GreenDimes – Another service that guarantees to stop up to 90% of your junk mail.

41Pounds.org – Stop 80-95% of unwanted catalogs and junk mail. The name comes from the approximately 41 pounds of junk mail the average American adult receives each year.

stopthejunkmail.com – Fully automated service for opting out of junk mail lists.

RoadSharing – A carpooling coordination site.

PickupPal – Connecting drivers and passengers to save money and reduce environmental impact by carpooling.

Recycling

RecycleBank – An online rewards points program to encourage recycling.

Scoodi – Trading, buying and selling locally to keep things out of landfills.

Throwplace.com – Find a good home for your unwanted stuff instead of throwing it away.

Search Engines, Directories & Guides

Forestle – A search engine that saves .1 square yard of rainforest for every search you do.

Greenseng – A search engine that helps offset your carbon emissions through CO2Stats.

Green Planet Search – A green search engine that also includes recent news, events, and more.

Twitoosearch.com – An environmentally conscious search engine with a black search background.

Eco-find – A green search engine that displays eco-friendly living tips on the homepage.

GreenRenter – A directory of green residential and commercial buildings and rental vacancies.

EcoTrotters.com – An online guide for ecologically friendly travel.

Ecocho – A green search engine that plants two trees (offsetting a ton of greenhouse gases) for every 1,000 searches performed.

Greensie – Another green search engine.

Green Link Central – A human edited green search engine.

Greenona – Another green search engine that shows the top 500 searches, top 100 clicked results, and more.

Low Impact Living – Provides information to reduce your environmental impact, including information on green products and practices.

Fivelimes – Green living directory, including green products, green news and discussion boards.

CDM Bazaar – A platform for exchanging information on Clean Development Mechanism projects from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

blue egg – Eco information directory.

Shopping & Products

Guide Me Green – An online directory of green companies and brands that includes forums and a newsletter.

EVO – A site that includes green product ratings, services and information.

TheFindGreen.com – A green products search engine.

Greenzer – Green shopping directory.

Eco Monkey – Eco-friendly shopping directory.

Rate It Green – A green products directory that features community ratings.

Greener One – Green ratings for mainstream products.

VegBay.com – Online green auctions.

GreenDeals Daily – Online shopping deals on green products.

GoodGuide – Find environmentally friendly products that are safe and healthy.

Video & User-Generated Content

Protect The Human – Site for sharing videos, pictures and links to promote human rights.

ViroPOP – A video network just for green videos.

Other Resources

love earth – The BBC’s site for environmental topics, including their environmental programming.

Pixily – Save paper and trees by organizing your documents online.

folia – Garden organization app that lets you track sprouting, blooming, and harvests in your garden.

Green Thing – Sends a monthly email that includes a green thing to do for the month.

askCHARITY – An online charity contact directory for media professionals.

Below are more than 35 resources for creating better wireframes, including tutorials on different methods and a variety of tools available.

1. Wireframing Articles

Here are more than twenty wireframing articles, guides, and tutorials to help you improve your wireframing process. There’s information on everything from paper wireframing techniques to using programs like Adobe Illustrator for the wireframing stage of your designs.

Wireframes Magazine
This site offers tons of resources and articles about wireframing. They include wireframe samples, UI tools, and job listings, as well as a place for designers to share their wireframes and wireframing tips. Popular articles have covered prototyping with the 960.gs grid system, graph paper sketch layouts, and wireframe moodboards.

Wire Frame Your Site
A great introduction to the benefits of wireframing from Sitepoint. It offers a three-step approach to wireframing in addition to expounding on the benefits of using wireframes, including their ability to let you foresee potential problems before you get into the nitty-gritty of designing.

Ajax Wireframing Approaches
A post in a series from Particletree about prototyping Ajax, this covers wireframing techniques. This article covers three excellent methods of wireframing dynamic content: Keyframing, stacking and TOP (Turn On Possibilities), as well as outlining the benefits and drawbacks of each.

The Importance of Wireframes in Web Design and 9 Tools to Create Wireframes
A great overview of why wireframing is a good idea, along with tools for creating your own. This is a really comprehensive article that covers everything from creating wireframes to working with clients during the wireframing process to the benefits of wireframing over visual design in the early stages of a website design.

20 Steps to Better Wireframing
An awesome collection of twenty tips for creating better wireframes. Some of the objectives covered include being clear about your objectives, getting everyone involved and avoiding over-designing your wireframe. Added up, these tips should make anyone’s wireframing process easier and more efficient.

Get Wireframing: The All-In-One Guide
A complete roundup of wireframing guides, techniques, tools, and more. It’s a great resource post with links to other sites, including a section for techniques, tools, examples, paper prototyping, and wireframing articles, among other links.

The Importance of Wireframing
A great article on why you should wireframe, along with resources to get your started. It’s a great rundown of the benefits of wireframing, including its ability to help clients focus and what they can teach you about your clients.

Pwireframing: Paper Wireframing
This is probably one of my favorite wireframing techniques. It’s a paper-based method, but goes way beyond just making some rough sketches. The photos included really help solidify the technique in your mind.

Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device
An article detailing tne designer’s reasons for using wireframes and their purpose. It really covers the personal wireframing experience of the author, including what they get from wireframing beyond the obvious results. Examples are included (both the wireframes and final site design).

Wireframing Over the Shoulder
A video showing a full wireframing process from start to finish by From the Couch. This is an actual fast-forwarded video of a designer sketching out a complete wireframe of a real site on paper.

The ‘Boxing Glove’ Wireframing Technique
A guide to a big-picture wireframing technique. This is an incredibly simple and straight-forward technique that emphasizes three elements wireframes should help to clarify: proposition, concept, and context.

Framing the Problem
An article about wireframing from ClickZ. This article focuses on creating wireframes that answer three simple questions: What types of visitors need to be persuaded? What actions do they need to take? What information do they need to take action?

SEO Wireframing
A guide to wireframing for search engine optimization purposes from SEOmoz. It describes the wireframing process strictly from an SEO perspective and reminds designers to keep in mind things like key functions for each page and building navigation with relevant keywords.

HTML Wireframes and Prototypes: All Gain and No Pain
A guide to using HTML for wireframing and prototyping websites from Boxes and Arrows. It touts the benefits of creating HTML wireframes over visual-only types and offers up extensive information about creating your own HTML versions.

The Ancient Art of Wireframing
A look at the history and benefits of wireframing. It also looks at more modern techniques appropriate for dynamic websites and offers up new standards for contemporary wireframes.

“I Need to See It”—Wireframing for a Richer Web
A discussion of some of the issues and solutions for wireframing rich media applications. This article also talks about the benefits of both interactive and “high-fidelity” wireframes, including definitions for each and how to go about creating each.

Better Perspective in Wireframing
A huge list of tips for creating better wireframes. It outlines tips like putting functionality first, focusing on the user experience and working to a deadline.

Wireframing Using InDesign
A downloadable guide to wireframing using Adobe InDesign, along with a sample file you can experiment with. The content comes partially from a workshop that was presented at a Communication and Multimedia Design course at Rotterdam about wireframing.

I <3 Wireframes
This site aggregates wireframe images from Flickr. It’s a great place to check out if you’re not sure what method of wireframing will work best for you, or if you just want to see how other people are approaching wireframing.

Website Wireframes
This is a great overview of wireframing, including brief reviews of a number of wireframing tools. It includes tips for creating wireframes and an overview of the tools available for it.

Wireframing Web Applications
An article focused specifically on wireframing web apps as opposed to less complicated websites. This is an excellent guide to the particular challenges presented when wireframing dynamic applications and includes an overview of tools appropriate for creating dynamic wireframes.

Content Wireframing: Ducks Meet Row.
A great guide to wireframing your content. This article covers the particular challenges and requirements of wireframing a site’s content, as opposed to just it’s structure and functionality.

How to Create Website Wireframes
A complete wireframing how-to from About.com. This article is broken down into four parts: the focus of wireframes, what a wireframe should include, how to create a wireframe and the benefits of wireframing.

How to Wireframe
Here’s a video tutorial for creating a wireframe. It also includes tips on creating better wireframes, like using a grid to line everything up and adding everything you think you’ll need and then removing things afterward.

Speed Wireframing with Nick Finck
A video outlining Nick Finck’s wireframing process. The wireframe created is done using OmniGraffle and a wireframe stencil kit.

2. Wireframing and Mockup Tools

There are a number of tools available beyond just pen and paper to help you build wireframes for websites and online apps. Below are a few options, as well as some roundup posts to help you choose the right solution for you.

Pencil Project
A Firefox plugin that lets you do GUI prototyping right in your browser. It includes all the standard drawing tools you’d expect, plus it’s cross-platform compatible and can accept user-defined stencils.

Web Design: Top 5 Wireframing Tools
A review of five wireframing tools from CMS Wire. Tools included are OmniGraffle, MockupScreens, iRise, Axure, and MindJet MindManager.

iPlotz
A tool to create clickable and navigable website mockups. There are free and paid plans available, with prices ranging up to $495.

Jumpchart
Another tool for creating clickable website mockups. Jumpstart has free and paid plans, with prices ranging up to $50/month.

Wireframes
A brief article with a huge list of wireframing software, both desktop and web-based.

Hot Gloo
A wireframing app designed for designers and programmers. The beta version is currently free to use.

Building a Website Wireframe in Illustrator
A great guide to using Adobe Illustrator for your wireframes. This is a very complete tutorial, complete with screenshots taken during the process.

Balsamiq Mockups
A web-based wireframing and mockup tool. There are free and paid version available. The paid one is $79.

Wireframing Web Applications
An article comparing three different wireframing tools, both desktop and web-based, including Gliffy Online and Balsamiq Mockups.

Templatr
While Templatr is generally thought of as a template generator, it can work really well as a wireframing program. Just choose the layout you want to use and customize it as much or as little as you want.

Websites designed for children have been largely overlooked in web design articles and design roundups, but there are many beautiful and interesting design elements and layouts presented on children’s websites that are worthy of discussion and analysis. There are also a number of best practices that are exclusive to web design for children’s sites — practices that should usually not be attempted on a typical website.

This article will showcase a number of popular commercial websites targeted towards children, with an analysis of trends, elements, and techniques used to help keep children interested and stimulated.

Design That Stimulates the Senses

Humans are mentally stimulated by a number of factors, and this is especially true with children. Successful children’s websites implement a number of elements and design principles that create an environment suited for a child’s personality and interests.

Bright, Vivid Colors

Bright colors will easily capture and hold a child’s attention for long periods of time. Although color choice is a primary factor in designing any type of website, this is especially true when designing a website for children since colors make a big impression on children’s young minds. Color choices and combinations that would likely be rejected or laughed at when designing a typical website may be welcomed on a website for children.

How many of the color combinations used in the screenshots below would succeed on a website aimed at an adult audience? Not many. So, when designing a site aimed at kids, use bright, vivid colors that will visually stimulate in an unforgettable way.

PBS KIDS

Herman’s Homepage

Funbrain Playground

A Happy Mood

Kids will remember and return to a website if their experience is a happy one. Elements can be incorporated into the design to ensure that a cheerful, positive mood is presented.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse creates a happy mood by making Mickey himself a visual focal point on the page. His happy face and body language help enhance this happy feeling, creating a welcome atmosphere.

The Play-Doh website creates a happy mood using a beaming child as the focal point.

The Fifi and the Flowertots website has a large smiling Flowertot character in visual focus, creating a happy mood.

Elements From Nature

Children are stimulated by recognizable elements that they can relate to. Because children’s experiences in life are limited, some of the things they are most familiar with are found in nature. Natural elements such as trees, water, snow, and animals are used in the websites shown below. In many cases, these elements are overemphasized through size or simplicity of design.

The Disney website alters its theme depending on what product is being promoted. In this screenshot, they use a Grand Canyon-like landscape to create a memorable visual experience.

Discovery Kids uses an underwater theme.

Club Penguin presents an arctic theme.

CBC Kids uses a seasonal theme based on simplistic, eye-catching graphics.

PopCap Games uses a grassy landscape in front of large rays of sun.

Larger-Than-Life Design

Large design elements have proved to be effective in all types of web design, demonstrated by the fact that large typography, large buttons, and large call-to-action areas have become commonplace in modern design. Because children are naturally drawn to simple, obvious, and recognizable objects, websites designed for children will increase their effectiveness through the use of large design elements.

Animated Characters

Large, animated, speaking characters are a fascinating and captivating way to grab and hold a child’s attention. Many sites designed for children use this element effectively.

Barbie

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Disney Princess

Thomas the Tank Engine

Barney & Friends

Depth in Design

Children like to let their imaginations run wild in a world that looks and feels real. This kind of atmosphere can be created through depth in design elements. This might include extruded shapes, shadows, landscapes, beveled effects, shiny gradients, or floating objects. Often, many of these elements are present in cartoon-like displays, as shown below.

The Webkinz® “Adoption Center” uses shadows, a life-like character, and other 3-dimensional elements to create a design that has depth.

Poisson Rouge creates a deep, realistic atmosphere using a window that looks outside at the sun, along with a number of other 3-dimensional elements.

Rainbow Magic creates depth in their design through a Flash-animated landscape scene that moves as the user hovers over different elements.

Navigation and Call-to-Action Areas That Stand Out

In any website design, navigation and call-to-action areas should be focal points. Children’s website designers can oversimplify these areas so that children can navigate easily. Text-based navigation on children’s websites would not be as effective as large buttons and graphics, because they would lack visual focus on a page.

Peppa Pig has a horizontal navigation bar that includes large icons and easy-to-read descriptions for each item.

The Winnie The Pooh website incorporates their navigation bar into their “forest” theme, using large wooden graphical elements that won’t be overlooked by the user.

Sesame Street has an easy-to-locate horizontal navigation bar, along with large call-to-action areas.

My Little Pony uses text-based navigation, creating a less-graphical experience, which allows focus on the content elements. This might be ideal in some situations, but on a children’s website a graphic-based navigation bar is more likely to be effective.

User Interaction

Probably one of the most important ways for a children’s website to succeed is to include elements that allow a child to interact with the site in some way. Children don’t want to do intense reading or research; they want to play and be entertained.

On a typical website, certain design elements are viewed as distracting, unusable, and cumbersome. On a child’s website, those same elements are viewed as an effective means of attracting users.

Interaction Through Animation and Sound

Effects and experiences created with Adobe Flash are discouraged in typical modern web design, but on children’s sites there is almost no other option. It’s true that JavaScript animation and effects have come a long way because of the many JavaScript libraries available, but the ease with which complex animations can be created with Flash makes this method the first choice for many commercial websites designed for kids.

The Pauly’s Playhouse site, like most of the websites featured in this article, is built entirely in Flash.

The Hot Wheels website includes an animated “car of the day” that zooms onto the screen when the page loads, creating visual interaction.

Roary the Racing Car has a brief “flash intro” with a “skip” button. This is an old-school trend in typical web design, but is an effective means of catering to a child-based audience. The intro animates through a road until the characters appear on the horizon. This helps the user feel as though they’re personally entering Roary’s animated world.

The Yahoo! Kids navigation bar is created with Flash and makes sound effects and animates when its items are hovered over. This trend is very common on many of the sites featured in this article.

Interaction Through Video

Television is known to captivate child audiences for hours, which is why “Saturday morning cartoons” have for decades been a lucrative part of the broadcast schedules for many TV Networks. Similarly, video on a child’s website adds a fun, interactive, and educational aspect to a site’s content.

Kids’ CBC – Video

Yahoo! Kids Movie Guides

National Geographic Kids – Videos

Interaction Through Games

What child does not enjoy playing games? One of the most effective ways to entertain, educate or otherwise occupy a child on a website is to include a “games” section. Almost all the websites researched for this article include games that educate, stimulate, and allow direct interaction, while also incorporating many of the design elements already discussed. Below are some examples.

CBeebies – Gordon the Garden Gnome

Toy Story – Woody’s Big Escape

Disney Pixar’s World of Cars allows users to create, share, and race their own custom cars.

Printable Elements

Kids like to have something tangible to take with them, to help them remember their experience. Printable pictures and colouring pages allow kids to have a keepsake of their experience, while giving website owners an opportunity to enhance and promote their brand outside of the computer screen. Below are some examples of printable colouring pages on kids’ websites.

Pingu Coloring Pages

Crayola Digi-Color

Peppa Pig Colouring Pages

Thomas and Friends Online Colouring

Teletubbies – Print To Color

Unconventional Methods

We’ve already discussed a number of elements that, in modern typical web design, are now considered unconventional. Sound, animation, and large obtrusive graphics are often frowned upon in typical web design. On children’s websites, these elements help the user experience. Other unconventional elements and design choices are discussed below.

Changing the Cursor

This is absolutely viewed as a bad practice in standard web design, but can be a fun, effective way of adding a playful element to a kids’ website theme. This can be done using dynamic HTML, but is more often done via Flash.

The cursor on the Discovery Kids website turns into a snapping bear trap graphic.

The cursor on the Sesame Street website is followed by a yellow star when it hovers over standard HTML elements, and turns into a yellow star surrounded by smaller animated stars when the cursor is moved over clickable Flash elements.

Talking Navigation

Sometimes a navigation bar will produce sound effects, but in other cases, the navigation links will sound out what they represent in a cheerful voice.

The PBS KIDS navigation bar speaks using children’s voices, when the user hovers over it.

The CBeebies navigation bar uses a voice to sound out the destination of each navigation item.

The Bob the Builder navigation bar speaks to the user on mouseover.

The Fifi and the Flowertots features a speaking navigation bar.

Breaking the Grid

While traditional modern web design techniques have embraced the benefits and aesthetics of grid-based design, kids’ websites can break free from an overly structured layout to create a unique world that a child will enjoy experiencing.

This is not to suggest that using a grid as the basis of the design is wrong. It may be beneficial to start with a grid, then design elements outside the grid in a controlled manner. This flexibility in design and layout is demonstrated on a number of the sites already discussed, but is also evident in the navigation bars of the examples below.

The navigation bar on the Spongebob Squarepants website is slanted, going against convention in typical grid-based web design.

The Hannah Montana website features navigation bar graphics that break the grid.

The In the Night Garden website features a very unusual navigation bar design that bears little resemblance to that found in a conventionally-structured design.

Below are some examples of websites that utilize a more rigid, grid-based format, and as a result are not as unique, memorable, or captivating as some of those already considered in this article.

Kids WB is rigid, and not as memorable.

The Crayola website is somewhat old-school with its grid format and vertical navigation.

Neopets is also designed on a more structured grid.

Granted, in some cases a stronger grid-based design would be necessary if the audience was an older child audience, as is the case with SI Kids, shown below.

Taking Responsibility

If you are attempting to reach the minds and hearts of young, impressionable people through an online experience, you are entrusted with a weighty responsibility. Children are mentally fragile, and easily affected by what they see, hear, and touch. There are certain factors that need to be addressed on every children’s website, to ensure no harm is being brought to the children.

Promoting Education

Games and other interactive elements should be created not just to promote your company’s brand and identity, but to help educate and train young minds in a beneficial and positive way. Promoting education through games and activities will show that your company cares about the user and how their online experience might affect them in the future.

Online Learning Games from Fisher Price include games that vary according to age group.

Funbrain promotes itself as “The Internet’s #1 Education Site for K-8 Kids and Teachers.”

Information for Parents

Parents will be keeping a close eye on their children’s internet habits. Many children’s sites are aware of this, so they include information that is geared towards parents. Sometimes this is in the form of a tip, as is the case with the Sesame Street games website, or simply a navigation item that points to a parent’s section.

Sesame Street Games includes a “Parent Tip” box.

BEN 10 has a “Parent Stuff” link in their primary navigation bar.

Thomas the Tank Engine includes a “parents” link.

Usability Testing

Finally, one of the best ways to help build a successful online experience for children is through watching children navigate and interact with your site’s games and other unique features. Not all companies will have the budget for extensive testing, but almost all will have the ability to do at least a minimal amount of testing — even if it’s with just one child. This will allow you to see the site through a child’s eyes and make any necessary modifications, the same as would be done in any usability tests.

Companies like Disney, Sesame Street, and PBS, of course, have been studying the behaviour of children for years, so many of the examples showcased above could be utilized to form the basis for a successful children’s website, even if no usability testing is done.

Conclusion

Here is a summary of both conventional and unconventional best practices for designing a website for kids.

Conventional Best Practices

• Create elements that are large and visually memorable
• Use bright, vivid colors that stimulate the senses
• Incorporate elements from nature
• Create depth in the design
• Add navigational elements that are large and easy to find
• Use video
• Include printable elements
• Break the grid
• Make modifications based on usability testing

Unconventional Best Practices

• Create a happy, playful mood
• Use animated characters
• Use graphic-heavy navigation bars
• Use Flash animation abundantly
• Embed motions and sounds that trigger on page load
• Include a “games” section
• Change the cursor to contribute to the theme
• Add voices to navigation rollovers
• Be accountable to both children and parents

A web designer who has worked on a children’s website would likely say that it was one of the most fun and interesting projects they’ve had the privilege of working on. If you ever have the opportunity to create a user experience that is geared towards children, be sure to follow some of the proven methods demonstrated on many of the sites discussed here, and your website will have a good chance to be a big hit with children.

However, you don’t need to muddle through numerous Photoshop features and extensions for every design problem. You can use professional suggestions instead, e.g. professional step-by-step tutorials which provide excellent results and thus can save you a lot of time.

One year ago we’ve presented a hand-picked collection of Photoshop tutorials. Now it’s time for a fresh portion of healthy Photoshop learning material. This article provides professional Adobe Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. Although the authors of the tutorials rarely provide the information about the used version, we tried to pick only those tutorials that can be used with both CS 3 and older versions of Adobe Photoshop.

Photo- and Picture Editing and Processing

• MP3 Player Design
  In this tutorial you will learn how to design a product in Photoshop. The product is a RCA Lyra X3030 portable media player. Although the chances are, you are thinking “why would I need to make it?”, the reason for this tutorial is to teach people the techniques used for mocking up a product design.
• Magic Lighting Effect
  How to create a nice light and magic effect.
• Beautiful Lady Effect
  Learn how to combine some brushes and color adjustment to make a beautiful lady effect.
• Selecting & Extracting Hair – Masking Tutorial – Extraction Tips
  One of the most challenging montage or masking jobs in the profession of post-production editing is the hair lift. When the model has long flowing hair and the subject needs to change location many post-production artists call in sick.
• Add a Dreamy or Misty Effect To Your Photos
  This quick tutorial will show how to add a really cool dreamy or misty effect to your photos. This tutorial works best with nature related images.
• Improving the Quality of Photos
  Improve the look of your photos by playing with some simple Photoshop techniques.
• Fake Model Photography
  With a very little effort, you can take existing photographs of everyday scenes and make it look like they’re actually of miniature models.
• Displacement Water
  Creating a realistic water surface in Photoshop is quite a challenge because it is the distorted reflection of the surroundings that makes the water look liquid. The displace filter is an excellent tool for making this distortion.
• Making Skin Beautiful
  Not everyone has a beautiful skin. This tutorial will help the photographer put their models in the best light so to speak.
• Photoshop tutorial and Post-producted glasses
  To save your time think to photo retouch especially frosted glasses.
• Professional “glamour style” photo retouch
  This is the first chapter of a main tutorial divided in six parts. In this one you will learn how to photo retouch the skin of a model in a few steps. Better results can be obtained by using a graphic tablet instead of a mouse.
• iMouse — creating Apple mouse
  Simple and elegant. Apple mouse. Is there anyone, who doesn’t want graphic like that? Let’s have a look at creating this mouse in Adobe Photoshop. 3 pages.
• Give Your Photos a Retro Comic Book Effect
  How about a fun effect for your incredibly boring photo albums? Creating a old comic book effect for your photos is easy and the results are visually appealing. More fun is achieved when adding captions to your photos using comic book fonts and design elements.
• Space and Planet Tutorial
  The techniques below will show you how to create an image similar to the final result I have obtained below although the image below took 3 hours to paint with alot of fine detail work, you will still get the idea.
• Faking HDR in Adobe Photoshop
  This HDR tutorial shows quite easy way to fake HDR foto in Photoshop. You don’t need to shoot into RAW or take photos with different exposure – one JPEG is enough. If you can work with masks in Photoshop, you have an advantage. Part of tutorial is HDR action for download.
• 11 Super Awesome Photoshop Movie Effects
  11 most-favorite movie-effect tutorials. From Scarface to Sin City to Pirates of the Carribean to 300, we’ve got 11 great ways to go Hollywood on your photos.
• A movie-effect with Photoshop
  This tutorial explains how to turn your photo into the movie-like image using Adobe Photoshop.
• Visual effects in the style of 300
  Here’s a little Photoshop guide to mimic the 300 style. The effects could also be applied to video in After Effects with a similar setup.
• Reflective Bubbles
  For my most recent work I wanted to create bubbles that would reflect my subject in a believable yet magical way.
• Bringing a Stone Statue to Life
  Learn how to take a stone statue and alter it to look life-like.
• 4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop
  “In this tutorial I will be demonstrating some quick, easy methods for adding drama and/or interest to your shots. As far as I know, these methods should work for both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.”
• Devil’s Eye
  Some eyes are just too pretty, but I bet some of you would change that if you could. I am going to try to explain how to make eyes look more sinister, And remember this is coming from a begginer,so bare with me. Photoshop CS2.
• Beautiful lighting FX effect in Photoshop
  This tutorial will show you how to make a beautiful lighting effect on scatters by using Photoshop. Keep in mind that I only provide the basic guidelines to creating this type of effect. There are tons of possibilities if you spend time to play with the settings and keep your creativity wide open.
• Water Drops
  So simple, and realistic, these water drops (and optional ice drops) are also simple to do anywhere, anytime.
• Creating a glass ball
  In this tutorial you will learn how to create a glass ball in photoshop using some simple tools and techniques. Any version of photoshop can be used.
• 3D Ice Cube
  In this tutorial we’ll try to build a realistic 3D ice cube. Usually this kind of stuff is done with the help of some 3D software like Maya or 3DMax, still we’ll try to use Photoshop tools to do the work.
• Alienize: Transform a person into an alien
  In this tutorial is written how to create a very cool looking alien using Adobe Photoshop. Grab a picture of someone and get ready to alienize it.
• Water Spirit – Drawing Fire
  This tutorial will show You how to place a fire on someone’s hands.
• Creating a 3D effect with image editing software
  Here’s how to make a neat effect to make it look like the subject of a photo is popping out of the background. This can be done with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) or Photoshop.
• How to use Photoshop to create Product Box?
  How many times you wanted to create cool product box for some of your products? Sure, there are many ways, and with new Photoshop you have even more options to create boxes.
• Super Fly Box Maker
  These boxes can be used to advertise almost anything (not just software). This is great if you want to catch a viewers attention, and it also gives your product display a more professional look and feel.
• Flaming Hair
  Tutorial with some simple brushing techniques, and a bit of color tweaking, you can spice up your photo.
• Create a Realistic Torn Paper Effect
  Torn paper is one of the key elements to achieving the distressed / collage look. This tutorial covers a few simple steps in Adobe Photoshop to create a realistic looking torn paper effect taking you on your way to Destroying the Web 2.0 Look.
• Creating a Mac-Type Background in Photoshop
  This tutorial is about making a “mac” style background. You can use these in all sorts of situations, including the obvious – your desktop as well as part of your designs or for corporate work (powerpoint presentations, flash work etc). Naturally you wouldn’t want to use this exact set of steps, but following them will give you a good idea of the technique. Good luck!

Drawings, Paintings, Cartoons

• Sexy Girl Comic With Photoshop
  This tutorial describes a way to create a sexy comic girl from a paper sketch.
• Skin Painting Tutorial
  Learn how to paint a realistically looking skin with Photoshop.
• Making of The Blues Singer Leaves Town
  This picture was done in a hot summer day, in the memory of an old anime series I used to watch as a kid, about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Historically, it’s off from that period, but it’s the feeling of summer, childhood fascination and nature that I wanted to re-create. It’s also a tribute to music. 4 pages.
• Fox Fire Tutorial
  Converting from hand-sketched picture to a digital masterpiece.
• Easy Watercolor Painting Effect
  In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to easily make a photo look more like a watercolor painting. This photo effect works best on images where maintaining rich colors and strong contrast is more important than keeping any fine details, since you’ll be losing a lot of detail with this effect.
• Soft Cell Shading
  Learn how to paint softlry, as a variation of cell shading, eventually going through a total of seven stages.
• Sketch to Paint
  Digital artist David Cousens reveals how to develop a sci-fi art sketch in Adobe Photoshop using the airbrush and a few nifty tricks.
• Portrait Painting
  Learn how to draw a portrait from a hand-drawn sketch.
• Drawing a Cute Boy
• Drawing from a reference photo
  The original photo: I locate it on the bottom layer to use for some initial tracing, primarily to save time and get the perspective correct. Some people prefer not to trace.
• Comic art style
  This is a method that you can use to produce abstract art using Adobe Photoshop. Randomness, detail, colors and contrast plays of course important roles now.

Texteffects

• 3D typographic effects
  Photoshop is an astounding post-production tool – and here Nik Ainley of Shiny Binary shows you how to add the wow factor to 3D text using Photoshop’s art tools.
• Slow shutter text effect
  Learn how to create this stunning slow shutter text effect using just Photoshop.
• Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text
  Take typography one step further by having text falling from the sky in a burning inferno. Yes, this is the text-on-fire tutorial to end all tutorials. It uses a little Illustrator for the text and a lot of Photoshop to burn up the screen!
• Smooth Glass Type
  Here’s a quick way to create some nice looking translucent glass type that’ll work great on any background, made completely with layer styles.
• Recreate the ‘Bee Movie’ Text Effect
  In this quick Photoshop tutorial we’ll be recreating the ‘Bee movie’ text effect, you know, the one you’ve seen all over the place over the last few months?
• Plastic Jelly Style
  In this tutorial we’ll be using layer styles to make a plastic-gel type style that you can easily apply to text and shapes. You can download the PSD file from the link at the bottom of the tutorial to just copy+paste the styles.
• Combine 2 text layer styles
  Learn how to apply a combination of multiple text effects.

Buttons, Logos & Menus

• Create A Leopard ‘X’ in Photoshop
  With the recent release of Mac OS X Leopard, I’ve decided to create a tutorial where you can create your own ‘X’. This tutorial is a great exercise in using the dodge and burn tool as well as working with selections.
• Orb Button Effect
  This set of tutorial will show on how to create a very basic mouse over effect in html/css. Therefore this tutorial will spilt into 2 parts:
• Interface Orbs
  Shiny glass orbs have been popular fixtures for web interfaces and application skins for quite some time. In this tutorial, we will be going over a technique for making a standard interface orb.
• Creating Logos on Glass Surfaces
  In this mini tutorial you will learn how to create a convincing logo that is embossed in the surface of a beer glass.
• Photoshop Button Maker
  In this simple tutorial we’re going to create a clever little way of making little buttons using a couple of layers and one interchangeable image layer. As always you can download the sample PSD at the bottom of the tutorial to follow along and copy layer styles out of.
• Design Watercolor Effect Menu
  This is a two-part tutorial on how to create an artistic and un-typical CSS list menu as seen on Web Designer Wall.
• 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed Seal/Badge Photoshop Tutorial
  In this quick Photoshop tutorial I’m going to show you how to design a sweet-lookin’ a golden badge, pretty much like this one I’ve designed below. For this tutorial I’ve used the example ‘100% satisfaction guaranteed seal/badge.
• A Little Window…
• Glossy-Style Carbon Fibre Navigation Set
  This is a kind of glossy, carbon fiber navigation set.
• How to Design Mini Icons
  Numbers of people have asked me how to design my popular Mini Pixel Icon pack. In fact, they are relatively easy. All you need is just some basic Photoshop skills.
• Designing a Safety Icon
• Eye-Popping Banner Ad Tutorial
  Nobody clicks on them, but they still exist. This tutorials shows how you can create iPod nano Ads with Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Techniques

• Color adjustment tutorial
  This tutorial shows how to get more mood into your pictures via Adjustment Layers and some other effects.
• Vector Polishing Techniques
  This tutorial includes 9 Photoshop techniques that will show you how to add more depth, color, contrast, and texture into your vector art.
• Advanced Black and White Conversion
  In this tutorial, we will convert an RGB image to Black and White using Photoshop CS3’s new improved Black and White features.
• Actions Tutorial
  Toning With Duotones, Tritones And Quadtones
• 101 Hidden Tips & Secrets
  An overview of professional suggestions, tips and tricks for Adobe Photoshop users.
• Using Actions to Automate Tasks
  While Adobe Photoshop has a host of automation tools, one of the most versatile and powerful of them is called an action. In fact, some of the other automation commands, such as batches and droplets, derive their functionality from actions.

We’ve compiled 30+ Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Space and Planets for you! Check out these cool tutorials and learn awesome techniques in Photoshop in a single article. Have fun!

Space Explosion Photoshop Tutorial

This tutorial illustrates the step-by-step process in creating a space explosion-inspired image.

Tutorial: Make a Realistic Star Field

Star field image is created in this tutorial using Photoshop.

Fiery Photoshop Space Explosion Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will be guided in creating a fiery space explosion image.

Cooking with Gas

Learn to use the gas giant technique in Photoshop by following this tutorial.

How to Make a Planet

Learn to use a single texture in creating a planet in Photoshop.

Space Lighting Effects in 10 Steps Photoshop Tutorial

Ten steps to create space lighting effect in Photoshop are illustrated above.

Make the Sun with Photoshop

Get the actual footage of creating a sun image using Photoshop through this tutorial.

Create Landscapes-Part 1

This tutorial will guide you in creating a planet landscape in Photoshop.

Broken Planet Step by Step Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial, a step-by-step process in creating a broken planet is illustrated.

Another Beautiful Background for a Space Scene

Learn to create a more dramatic space scene with this tutorial.

Space Warp

Create a space warp image in Photoshop.

Lunar Tutorial

This tutorial will help you to create a lunar image.

Fire Planet-Photoshop Tutorial-5 Minutes in Real Time

In this tutorial, you will see another video of a tutorial in creating a fire planet in Photoshop.

Meta474’s Flaming Planetoid Tutorial

Learn to use airbrush, smudge and layer in Photoshop to create a flaming planetoid in Photoshop.

Photoshop Space Planet Tutorial

A video tutorial on creating a space planet is illustrated in this tutorial.

Space Environment

Use Photoshop to create a space environment.

Concentric Planet Ring Tutorial

Learn to use Photoshop filters and commands in creating planet rings.

Space Scene Design in Photoshope

This tutorial will guide you in creating a space scene in Photoshop.

Planet Ring Tutorial

Eight steps in creating planet ring are given above by using Photoshop.

Create a Space Explosion from Scratch in Photoshop

Learn to use Photoshop in creating space explosion images.

Really Cool Eclipse Effect in Photoshop

Create an eclipse image in Photoshop by reading through the above tutorial.

The Making of a Space Scene

In this tutorial you will be guided to create a space scene in Photoshop.

Space Art 101

Use Photoshop CS3 in this tutorial to create space image.

Land Planet Tutorial

This tutorial will guide you to create a land planet in Photoshop.

Nebula Tutorial

This tutorial, you will learn to create nebula images in Photoshop using several brushes and brush skill.

Tutorial: Make a Planet

Create planet image using Photoshop 7.

Create a Vibrant Space Nebula

Another tutorial on creating a nebula image is illustrated in the above tutorial.

Space Dust

In this tutorial, you will be guided to create space dust in Photoshop.

A Nebula and its Extras Tutorial

Learn to use Photoshop in creating another nebula image.

The Beauty from the Outside

This tutorial will guide you in creating a space image in Photoshop.

AHHHHH! Oy! Alien Invasion! A Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will learn to create an image of alien invasion.

Create a Spectacular 3D Space Explosion

The above tutorial will use some basic tools inside of Vue Infinite and Photoshop to create a 3D space explosion image.

Asteroide Tutorial

Learn to create asteroid image in Photoshop.

Photoshop Space and Planet Scene

Create another space and planet scene by following the steps in the above tutorial.

Touchriver is a 2 column widgetized magazine theme. Theme is enabled with javascript based custom fonts, featured post slider, About Us section, flickr gallery etc.

View Demo

2. Cypher Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: August 22, 2009

Cypher v.2 is a 2 column, paper themed WordPress theme. Built for Wordpress 2.8+. Cypher v.2 offers support for sidebar widgets, comments, custom default avatars.

View Demo

3. The Folio Elements Free Wordpress Theme

The Folio Elements theme is the perfect solution for simplistic and light weight “portfolio” type websites.

View Demo

4. Magiting Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 16, 2009

Magiting is a featured-packed and multi-colored free WordPress theme with TweetMeme retweet button. It has 2 columns, with an easy Options page for customization. Loaded with Social Bookmarks button, Twitter Account integration, Automatic Thumbnail Resizer without using a plugin or custom field, Adsense ready with lots of advertising blocks.

View Demo

5. BlueBubble – Free Premium Wordpress Portfolio Theme

Release Date: November 12th, 2009

BlueBubble is a Free, Clean, Simple Premium Portfolio Wordpress Theme for Designers, Photographer or any other creative minds! It’s designed for easy showcasing your work and it comes with some very cool features.

View Demo

6. Seven Five Free Wordpress Theme

The Seven Five is a semi-automatic “Lifestream” WordPress theme taking minimalism to an entirely new level. This theme is intended for those looking for a simple, efficient and clean solution for integrating all the services you have come to love such as Twitter, Flickr and more. Of course, the Seven Five theme provides all the standard blogging functionality of WordPress as well.

View Demo

7. Vodpod Free Wordpress Theme

A fully featured and free video WordPress theme which works seamlessly with Vodpod.com.

View Demo

8. LiveTwit Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: August 13, 2009

This super cool theme streams real time tweets on blog automatically.

View Demo

9. Foodiary Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 2, 2009

Foodiary is magazine Wordpress theme with 3 columns widgetized footer and advanced features.

View Demo

10. Matiyaga Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 26, 2009

Matiyaga is a featured-packed and multi-colored free WordPress theme with TweetMeme retweet button. It has 2 columns, with an easy Options page for customization.

View Demo

11. Spexel Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: 29 November, 2009

Spexel is a premium quality WordPress theme, AJAX powered featured content, twitter & flickr ready, multi-column, multi-layout, multi-style and built on a very effective design for any kind of website. Completely SEO optimized and Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict & CSS 3.0. Also, Spexel can be customized from a highly advanced Options Page that has over 145 different options!

View Demo

12. Rockstar Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 30, 2009

Adii’s previous custom design for his successful personal blog is now available as a free theme. It’s simple layout, and clean colour palette means easy customizations to this neatly coded theme on the ever-popular WooThemes framework.

View Demo

13. Bueno Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 25, 2009

Bueno is a clean, minimalistic design which just oozes sophistication in both it’s typography & structure. Stripped of all fancy design elements; the reader’s focus should be on the great content that you produce. Bueno is perfect for the regular (and not-so-regular) blogger.

View Demo

14. Mainstream Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 23, 200

A vibrant personal blog theme with a colourful selection of styles, built on WooThemes flexible theme framework, boasting a selection of theme options.

View Demo

15. Meta-Morphosis Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: April 24, 2009

Meta-Morphosis is a visually-rich personal blog, with a magazine layout approach. Incorporating some nifty javascript font replacement and javascript widget slider in the footer, Meta-Morphosis should meet all of your personal blogging needs.

View Demo

16. Signal 37 Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 13, 2009

Clean typography, a web 2.0 palette, heavily inspired by 37 signals and their wonderfully clean and focussed designs, Signal 37 is here.

View Demo

17. Pork&Beans Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 19th, 2009

View Demo

18. Fresh Mortar Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 11, 2009

Fresh Mortar theme is an ultra-flexible magazine/news premium theme as a result of mashup between Fresh News and Mortar.

View Demo

19. Paper Wall Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 10th, 2009

View Demo

20. Smashing Multimedia Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: August 22, 2009

Smashing Multimedia is a unique, flexible and advanced WordPress theme for artists, photographers, podcasters, designers and users.

View Demo

21. Glassical Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 7th, 2009

Glassical is a glossy two column, widget ready and WordPress 2.8 compatible WordPress theme designed for passionate bloggers.

View Demo

22. Sigyn SM Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 14, 2009

The theme has a unique grungy design that stands out and can serve as a good baseline for your Magento-powered online shops.

View Demo

23. Scherzo Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 4th, 2009

A precise theme with a widget ready sidebar. Built on the idea of making your blog as readable as possible:

View Demo

24. MoneyBlog Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 23, 2009

View Demo

25. Tipz Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 27, 2009

View Demo

26. Ekologic Free Wordpress Theme

Ekology is the new free premium wordpress theme from web2feel.com. This is a magzine layout theme with thumbnail enabled miniposts, Featured post slider with images, Featured Video section, Customizable About us section, Customizable Banner ads, Google adsense enabled etc.

View Demo

27. Mintozine Free Wordpress Theme

Mintozine is a free premium wordpress theme. It is a business style wordpress theme. It has a port folio section with image carousal, Custom text panels on the home page, Welcome message, Twitter feeds , Flickr gallery etc.

View Demo

28. Creative Press Free Wordpress Theme

Creativepress is a cms with a business template layout and blog layout mixed together. The theme is very apt for your small business websites . This will let you break away from the conventional blog format sites using wordpress

View Demo

29. Selecta Free Wordpress Theme

With video blogging being the main influencer of this design and coupled with our experience in the vlogging world you will have a theme which allows you to make your videos the main focus of your site.

View Demo

30. NewsPress Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 19th, 2009

Newpress is built under 960 grid system and packed with in-demand features such as featured post, dropdown menu, social bookmarks button, etc

View Demo

31. Zaoel Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 21, 2009

View Demo

32. FXMAG Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 26, 2009

Premium design, being built on a neutral design theme it can be used for literally any niche without much, if any, edits.

View Demo

33. FreshMag Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 28, 2009

FreshMag is a multi-layout, multi-column, multi-style highly customizable Magazine and Blog WordPress theme which features some rare options, its theme options page has about 82+ options that makes this theme extremely customizable.

View Demo

34. Blue Rooster Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 5th, 2009

The theme is a two column layout with a extra templates that can convert your blog into a CMS. The sidebar and footer are both widgetized, author and category templates included, as well as social buttons already intact. The theme style is a mix of rounded corners, flat edges and wooden elements with a schema of muted, dark colors on a plain white surface.

View Demo

35. Chronicle Free Wordpress Theme

Chronicle is a news magazine niche wordpress theme.
Theme has jquery featured news slider, News highlight section, Featured video, Tabbed content, News previews with thumbnails.

View Demo

36. LapOfLuxuryFree Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 28, 2009

View Demo

37. Magazeen Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: February 23rd, 2009

View Demo

38. Gallery Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: May 4th, 2009

View Demo

39. deStyle Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: Year 2009

View Demo

40. Irresistible Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: February, 2009

Irresistible is a visually-rich personal blog, with a little bit of a multimedia focus. Incorporating some nifty video-options and widgets, Irresistible should meet all of your personal blogging needs. Just add your content to the mix.

View Demo

41. FreebiesDock Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: January 6, 2009

View Demo

42. Vintage and Blues Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: January 28th, 2009

View Demo

43. HikoZine Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 29, 2009

View Demo

44. iBusiness Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 29, 2009

View Demo

45. Creative by Nature Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 30th, 2009

View Demo

46. Work-a-holic Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 18th, 2009

View Demo

47. TheUnstandard Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: Jul 7, 2009

The Unstandard is a split two / three column WordPress 2.6+ compatible theme.

View Demo

48. FotoFolio Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: Year 2009

Fotofolio is a free wordpress template designed for easy creation online portfolio for Visual Workers; Photography, Graphic Design, Manga, Architect, etc. Fotofolio is very simple and easy to use, please read the instalation and usage for details. Fotofolio is created by Pupung Budi Purnama

View Demo

49. Linquist Free Wordpress Theme

Linquist is a simple, portfolio oriented theme, without the usual blogging garbage. Inspired by and partially based on the fantastic Sharpfolio theme.

View Demo

50. Portfolio WPESP Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: January 21, 2009

Portfolio – WPESP Theme is a “minimalist” Theme based on the idea of portfolio created by DAILYWP. The Theme is a starting point in the creation of portfolios, using Wordpress as CMS.

View Demo

51. Fullscreen Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 10th, 2009

Fullscreen is a free one-column photography and multimedia theme for Wordpress that can be used for portfolios, photoblogs, videoblogs, and virtually anything else where you want your content to be front and center. It provides visual artists (photographers, painters, videographers, motionographers, illustrators) a better way of presenting their latest work online using a minimalist side-scrolling homepage.

View Demo

52. Astra Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 11, 2009

Striking wordpress theme with featured posts, social icons, 125×125 ads, twitter updates, threaded comments, multi page format.

View Demo

53. Bluemania Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: May 4, 2009

This is a 2 column design that includes an extremely funky and highly prominent RSS icon to draw visitors to your syndicated news feeds.

View Demo

54. Tree House Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: May 3, 2009

This is an extremely endearing design. If you want your Wordpress site to have more than a hint of cute and current, then this theme is worth a close look. It makes use of an adorable twitter icon that is sure to draw many of your visitors to subscribing to your twitter feed.

View Demo

55. Splendour Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 23, 2009

Splendour, 3 Columns premium wordpress theme for free. It comes with greate features like login panel on homepage, featured video, Adsense ready, wp-pagenavigation integrated, post thumbnails and post excerpts and much more.

View Demo

56. Simplista Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 17, 2009

Advanced clean personal portfolio type theme from WPSnow for free!

View Demo

57. Livien Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 9th, 2009

Livien is an elegant designed free WordPress theme with featured content option. Suitable for any niche. Theme Options at admin panel

View Demo

58. Layer Press Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 4th, 2009

Layer Press is free premium WordPress theme suitable for any niche. Dark style design. Theme Options at admin panel.

View Demo

59. Strownes Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 30th, 2009

Strownes is elegant and professional designed free WordPress theme with featured content. Suitable for any niche. Theme Options at admin panel.

View Demo

60. Braw Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 17th, 2009

Braw is a free premium WordPress theme suitable for any niche. Theme Options at admin panel.

View Demo

61. BrownMag Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 3, 2009

2 column free wordpress theme.

View Demo

62. Magnolia Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: 12 November, 2009

Magnolia is a Premium WordPress theme which can be used for many purposes, including personal blog or simply informative, this theme comes with many great features, which are: a beautiful dynamic slider, nice login panel with j query, 3 special developed widgets (popular posts, recent comments and twitter updates), 7 color styles ( green, marine, blue, orange, burgundy, purple, blue&purple), widget sidebar and footer and much more.

View Demo

63. ElegantRed Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 11th, 2009

ElegantRed is two columns free wordpress theme with simple, clean look, Unique and modern style, having the classic combination of white, silver, maroon and red, Ideal for Autos, Cars, technology, and other niche.

View Demo

64. HexaMag Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 16, 2009

HexaMag is a 2 columns mag style wordpress theme, which comes with Featured content slider, W3C valid xhtml/css and much more.

View Demo

65. Tarzine Free Wordpress Theme

TarZine, 2 Columns free wordpress theme which comes with many features like featured content slider, feedburner RSS subscription and much more.

View Demo

66. Spectrum Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 1, 2009

View Demo

67. Celadon Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 21, 2009

Celadon is a free theme for WordPress that focuses on great looks and usability

View Demo

68. Modern Style Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 13th, 2009

Modern Style is free premium WordPress theme, suitable for any type of website with theme options at admin panel.

View Demo

69. Softy Free Wordpress Theme

View Demo

70. Moi Magazine Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 26, 2009

Moi Magazine is a free 2 column magazine style Wordpress Theme. It looks very modern and elegant from the front end and offering vast Admin options at the back end.

View Demo

71. New York Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 3, 2009

View Demo

72. CashZone Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 25, 2009

This sleek minimalist theme comes in 2 columns with dark blue color scheme.

View Demo

73. Channel Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 16th, 2009

View Demo

74. FashionPress Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 9, 2009

View Demo

75. Corporate Life Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 9, 2009

View Demo

76. Clean Press Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: October 23, 2009

View Demo

77. Jungle Land Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 3, 2009

View Demo

78. Mainam Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 18, 2009

Mainam is a featured-packed and multi-colored free WordPress theme with TweetMeme retweet button. It has 3 columns, with an easy Options page for customization. Loaded with Social Bookmarks button, Twitter Account integration, Automatic Thumbnail Resizer without using a plugin or custom field, Adsense ready with lots of advertising blocks.

View Demo

79. Furvious Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: 25 November, 2009

A fantastic design with 5 color styles to be choose. Who says free themes can’t have admin panel?Publishing featured contents never been this easie

View Demo

80. Profile Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 30th, 2009

Profile is a light, minimalistic design which is intended for small presentational sites and works as a small business card. Establish your online presence in less than 5 minutes!

View Demo

81. Travelogue Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 13th, 2009

A very simple Free Theme for WordPress blogs of travel-related topics: travel, fishing, navigation, marine, etc.

View Demo

82. Azsands Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 5, 2009

The theme comes with 125×125 advertising space, “About me” space and a right widgetized sidebar.

View Demo

83. KeKo Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 26th 2009

KeKo is a 2 columns fixed width Wordpress theme with theme option and twitter integrated. This urban grunge style theme is suitable for use on any niche blogs such as music, personal, social, etc.

View Demo

84. Phloggin Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: May 28th, 2009

View Demo

85. Blue Station Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 6, 2009

Blue Station high quality free premium WordPress theme suitable for daily blogging. Theme has admin options page.

View Demo

86. Marangal Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 24, 2009

Marangal is a featured-packed, multi-colored and 3 columns free WordPress theme. It has an easy Options page to customize your theme. It is loaded with Feedburner Email Subscription, Twitter Account integration, YouTube Video integration, Flickr Thumbnails, Automatic Thumbnail Resizer, Adsense ready with advertising blocks.

View Demo

87. Black Motion Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 15th, 2009

Black Motion is high quality free premium WordPress theme. Suitable for any niche.

View Demo

88. Dimaggio Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: February 21, 2009

Dimaggio theme is another free WordPress theme by Led24.de for the WordPress community. The theme is a 2-column wide desing, perfect for personal and small blogs.

View Demo

89. MinaFlow Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 17th 2009

MinaFlow is a 3 columns fixed width WordPress theme. It is a Magazine style theme comes with theme option to make it easier for you to customize some of the features available on this theme.

View Demo

90. VibranTech Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: January 8th 2009

VibranTech is a two columns lime blue WordPress theme with four featured content frontpage. The four featured columns on top is best to present your featured articles or popular news to quickly catch the attention of your readers.

View Demo

91. dfBlog Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: July 3, 2009

dfBlog is a free Theme for WordPress with a web design minimalist, clear and clean, with fixed page width in two columns and the sidebar at the right side.

View Demo

92. MonkeyPR Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: September 7th, 2009

2 columns, right sidebar, widget ready, 125×125px ad spots ready, Ajax sliding header content, sticky post feature, footer content section.

View Demo

93. Apollo Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: August 26th, 2009

View Demo

94. Berita Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: May 10th, 2009

View Demo

95. Imagination Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: 2009

Imagination is a Fully Customizable WordPress Theme and comes pre-loaded with 9 different site-wide styles to choose from, with just a click.

View Demo

96. FreeStyle Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: June 18, 2009

Built for Wordpress 2.8+. FreeStyle has built-in support for sidebar widgets, comments, custom default avatars

View Demo

97. Simplicity Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: August 22, 2009

View Demo

98. Zherald Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: April 28, 2009

View Demo

99. Mystique Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November 30, 2009

Feature-packed theme with a solid design, built-in widgets and a intuitive theme settings interface… Designed by digitalnature.

View Demo

100. Calm Dream Free Wordpress Theme

Release Date: November, 2009

View Demo

If you’re a freelancer who works at home full time or most of the time, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re doing the planet a great service. By working at home you’re reducing the use of fuels and limiting the amount of pollution generated by modern means of transportation.

However, there is still a lot more you can do to help protect the environment. In this post, we’ll show you ten ways to make your home office more environmentally friendly and an even better place to work.

Let’s start by reviewing the three Rs of eco-friendliness.

The 3Rs of Eco-friendliness

The three Rs of eco-friendliness are:

• Reduce — Reduce the number of stuff you use and consume, as well as the amount of trash and pollution you produce.
• Reuse — Reuse whatever you can before tossing it out.
• Recycle — Participate in your city’s recycling program by segregating your garbage, or further reduce your garbage by recycling things instead of throwing them away.

Now that we’ve reviewed the basic eco-friendly concepts let’s move on to specific tips to help you make your office green. Here are the ten specific ways you can have a greener home office:

1. Use low VOC paint.

Volatile organic compounds (VOC) are chemicals that cause paint and other materials to have a strong, migraine-inducing odor. However, the smells are only part of the problem. These vapors can also have negative effects on our health, especially when you’re exposed indoors. So make sure to use low- or no-VOC paints for your home office.

2. Rest your feet on natural flooring.

Instead of a carpet, which requires a lot of energy and effort to keep clean, why not use natural tile, wood (more on sustainable wood below), or plain paint on your flooring. If you’re using rugs, look for those made of natural materials, like hemp or bamboo.

3. Choose “green” lighting.

Use natural light from a window, as much as possible. And, replace all your bulbs with CFL bulbs. Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) use up less energy, last longer, and produce less pollution than incandescent bulbs. They also give a warm, pleasant light.

4. Make sure your office furniture is eco-friendly.

For home office furniture, be creative and shop in thrift stores and garage sales for reusable or recyclable furniture. If you must buy something new, make sure it’s sustainable furniture — made from fast-growing woods, upholstered with organic fabrics, finished with non-toxic chemicals and paints, and locally made. Look for furniture made with wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

5. Be wise with paper.

Home offices use a lot of paper. Reduce the impact of your paper use by buying paper made with 100 percent post-consumer waste, chlorine-free, and FSC certified. That said, use paper only when you need it, and do use both sides of each sheet. By the way, you can even find paper that isn’t made from trees. You may enjoy this list of green and beautiful stationery.

Whichever type of paper you choose, make sure to put it in the recycling bin when you do dispose of it.

6. Be environment-conscious when you print.

Printer manufacturers are becoming eco-conscious as well. For example, you’ll find specific printers from HP, Dell and Samsung that claim to be eco-friendly. In general, you want a printer that’s Energy Star compliant, has a power save mode, and ink save mode. If your printer does duplex printing, then reusing sheets of paper becomes so much easier.

Refill ink cartridges rather than buying new ones. Or, dispose of your printer cartridges through companies that recycle them, such as Waste Farmers. Funding Factory buys used printer cartridges and raises money for non-profits and schools. Ewaste recycles printers and other computer equipment.

7. Be stingy… with energy.

Challenge yourself to keep reducing your electricity bill. This is good for the earth — and your wallet. Use solar-powered gadgets. Invest in smart power strips, which detect when a piece of equipment is not in use and cut power to it automatically. Otherwise, your office equipment keeps sucking up electricity even when you’re not using it.

8. Keep your air clean, fresh, and chemical free.

Add some green to your office, literally, by bringing some plants indoors. Plants absorb toxins in the air and look pretty, to boot. Use a programmable thermostat, set on a low temperature, to regulate your use of the heater in winter. Another winter tip: humidify your air naturally by hanging wet laundry indoors. In warmer months, open your windows and use an electric fan for as long as you can bear it before switching on the air conditioner.

9. Clean your home office naturally.

Cleaning supplies can also bring plenty of VOCs and other harmful toxins into your home office. Fortunately,  green cleaning supplies are becoming fashionable and increasingly available. Look for cleaning supplies that don’t contain chlorine and other bleaches and are bio-degradable. Or, learn how to use nature’s cleaners: vinegar, water, baking soda, and borax.

10. If you must leave the house…

It’s inevitable; you’ll have to leave the house sometime. If so, consider walking, biking or taking the bus or subway to your destination instead of automatically reaching for your car keys. And, if a car is in order, find somebody who can carpool with you.

How Green Is Your Home Office?

Going green is a gradual process. If you begin taking baby steps to green your home office now, you’ll soon find yourself wanting to green your entire home and your whole lifestyle. If you’d like to learn more about going green, visit our sister blog, EcoSimply.com.

In the meantime, do tell: how green is your home office?

Photo by JeffWilcox

This year we saw a growing popularity in using content sliders as a way to display several pieces of content within a limited area or to engage the user with the sliding animation. Normally this is done in a featured banner area near the top of the page. There were several jQuery plugins written in ‘09 to accomplish this type of effect, but here are our favorites.

AnythingSlider

AnythingSlider is created by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and is a fully featured slider that is widely useful.

Easy Slider

Easy Slider is a content slider that gives you the the option to choose between classic previous/next navigation or to use a numeric “pagination” style navigation.

Coda-Slider 2.0

Coda-Slider 2.0 is aimed to mimic the slider effect on the promo page for Panic’s Coda software. The original version was hacked together in 2007, but this 2.0 version is built from the ground up.

Image Galleries

The days of having to use Flash to create image galleries with cross fading or sliding transitions are long gone. Thanks to jQuery these types of effects can be easily achieved with javascript. Here are our favorite image gallery plugins from this year.

Galleria

Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS.

jQuery Panel Gallery

jQuery Panel Gallery is a compact image gallery that can easily be configured. Not one image needs to be sliced or edited to work with this plugin. The plugin handles everything itself. You can even configure fading transitions per image.

slideViewer

slideViewer checks for the number of images within your list, and dynamically creates a set of links to command (slide) you pictures. Also, clicking on each image will make the gallery slide to the next picture.

Supersized

Supersized cycles images with transitions and preloading. It automatically resizes images to fill browser while maintaining image dimension ratio.

Navigation

I believe navigation is an aspect of a web site that should kept simple and easy to use. However, if there is a need to create a more engaging nav, jQuery is your best bet. Here are a few of the best from ‘09.

jquery mb.menu

Horizontal Scroll Menu with jQuery

This isn’t a plugin, but I had to include it since it is such a cool effect. It’s a horizontal scroll menu that scrolls automatically according to your mouse axis-Y movement.

AutoSprites

Forms and Tables

Working with forms and tables is probably not the most glamorous part of web design and development, but it has to be done. There were several plugins released this year to help you spice things up a bit. Here are our favorites.

Password Strength

Password Strength tries to calculate how many possibilities the hacker needs to try to guess your password.

Ajax Fancy Capcha

Ajax Fancy Captcha is a jQuery plugin that helps you protect your web pages from bots and spammers. It introduces a new, intuitive way of completing “verify humanity” tasks.

Chromatable

Chromatable allows you to easily create scrolling tables with fixed headers.

jqTransform

jqTransform is a styling plugin which allows you to skin form elements.

Uploadify

Uploadify allows the easy integration of a multiple (or single) file uploads on your website.

jExpand

jExpand is ultra lightweight jQuery plugin that will make your tables expandable. Typical for line of business applications, this feature can help you organize tables better. This way, tables can hold more information such as images, lists, diagrams and other elements.

Related Posts

Here’s some other articles that you will definitely find useful.

The Best Free WordPress Themes of 2009

The Best Photoshop Tutorials of 2009

The Best Free Icon Sets of 2009

The Best Free Fonts of 2009

Photoshop Tutorials

• Aging Photos
  Tips & Tricks for making photos look old
• All about Layer Mask
  It is often used to prevent some part of the layer from being seen.
• Create Your Own Planets
  The “Polar Panorama Effect” is one of ways to process photos into unique pieces of art. Tutorial by Dirk Paessler
• Creating grunge brushes
  by Veerle Pieters
  
• Creating patterns in Photoshop CS2
  “Have you ever wondered how you create a seamless pattern in Photoshop? It’s easy and it’s fun. Let me show you how.” by Veerle
• Doug’s technique for creating curtains
  Tutorial on generating fabric drapes (like curtains) in Photoshop (7, but should work in earlier versions too). Based on Doug’s “Fake satin” technique.
• Glassy Orbs in Photoshop Tutorial
  This Tutorial has come about due to a few requests. This starts with a fairly simple object, and finally ends up with the orb Design. Take it step by step.
• A Gradient Tutorial
  Written by Mike Rundle
  
• Graphic Reporter
  Digital Beauty Shop – Changing the color of hair
• Hair and Fur
  Tutorial: Realistic Hair And Fur
• ‘Me and Louie’s Sister’
  A Step by Step Tutorial – by Daniel Hammonds a.k.a Wade/Haujobb & Fairlight
• Melissa Clifton – Photoshop Tutorials, Animation, 2D, 3D and Illustration Galleries
  Pop Art Inspired by Lichtenstein,Digital Candy, Vector Art with Photoshop, Turn Photos of People into Line Art, Create Basic Line Art from Your Photos
• Painting Grass
  Tutorial on creating photo-realistic grass in Photoshop – by John Shannon
• Partial Color
  Black and white photos with just a touch of color
• Perfect Pixel Patterns
  Create perfect pixel patterns in Adobe Photoshop every time!
• PHOTOSHOP Matte Painting
  Tutorial by Sebastien Gaucher
• PHOTOSHOP Matte Painting : winter
  Tutorial by Sebastien Gaucher
• Professional changing of Eyecolor
  It might seem complicated but is in fact really easy. There are various methods of changing the eye color…Colorizing Grayscale Image,
• Ray of Light
  Use Photoshop to create and add a dramatic ray of light to your photos
• Replacing a Background
  This is a tutorial in removing a background from a picture and replacing it with another. – Tutorial by Bud Guinn
• Selective Color
  How to create a grayscale image with just a touch of color
• Softening Freckles
  The magic of selective blurring
  
• Super Silhouettes
  Channel your way to a perfect silhouette
• The Basics of Retouching People, Part 1
  The secret to losing 5 pounds–digitally!
• The Basics of Retouching People, Part 2
  Banishing bags ‘n blemishes
• The Basics of Retouching People, Part 3
  How to whiten teeth
• Vector Art with Photoshop
  Learn how to use Photoshop to create OUTSTANDING vector art
  

Libraries of Photoshop Tutorials

• Photoshop Weblog
  Famous german blog full of videos and links
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
  Tutorials are categorised to: Photo Effects and Retouch, Web Graphics and Layouts, Drawing, Animation, Text Effects…
• AdobeTutorialz
  Tutorials are categorised to: Photoshop Basics, Special Effects, Textures & Patterns, Designing, Buttons…
• Computer Arts – 2D & Photoshop
  Tutorials are categorised to: Latest tutorials, Photoshop & 2d, Web & new media, 3D & animation
• FreshTuts
  Fresh Tutorials For Photoshop. Find, search, submit and view fresh tutorials.
• GFX-Tutor
  More than thousand Photoshop Tutorials
• Graphic Design tips, tricks, tutorials using Photoshop
  A unique resource site for Photoshop® users with great tips, tricks, tutorials and graphics. Tutorials are categorised..
• Good-Tutorials.com – Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
  Good-Tutorials.com lists 11,802 Adobe Photoshop tutorials
• Heron Productions
  Tutorials – TigerPig!, Comic Book Effect, The Warhol Effect..
• Lunacore Photoshop Tutorials
  Beautify a Face, Smooth Skin , Glass Ball, Water Drops, Realistic Clouds
• PhotoshopCAFE
  Free photoshop tutorials from PhotoshopCAFE
• Photoshop Facelift
  Tutorials for photoshopping people
• photoshopit
  HALF BLOG HALF TUTORIAL site and some freebies along the way….
• Photoshop Lab
  Tutorials
• PhotoshopSupport.com
  Free Photoshop Tutorials & Photoshop Tips
• PhotoShopTutorials.de
  Texteffekte, Interfaces, Fotoeffekte, Spezialeffekte, Buttons
• Pixel Groovy
  Pixel Groovy is the social bookmarking way of finding the best tutorials and lessons
• Planet Photoshop
  Tutorials are categorised to: Effects, Photography, Text, Web…
• t-Tutorials.com
  Tutorials are categorised to: Effects, Text Effects, Photo Effects, Photo Retouch, Buttons, Textures, Drawings, Basics, GIF Animation, Website Design.
• Tutorialing
  Tutorials Multilanguage Search Engine – Animation, Buttons and Interfaces Drawing, Icon Creation, Special Effects…

The Pixel Blog
This exquisite blog belongs to a Web design and marketing company called The Pixel. Amazing graphics in the header and footer, along with a giant tree (the branches of which separate the posts), make this design pure eye-candy.

Sushi & Robots
Sushi & Robots is the journal and portfolio of Jina Bolton, a San Francisco-based designer, developer and author. If you’re looking for creative inspiration, this website is definitely a master class.

WorkAwesome
The neat desktop-themed design of WorkAwesome’s blog is definitely worth your attention.

One by Four

Jason Santa Maria

Dustin Curtis

Jack Cheng

New to York

31three

Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo, which is bookmarked by every Web design fan, was recently redesigned. The highlights are considerably enhanced usability and unique post teasers.

iA

Darren Hoyt

Point & Anchor
It’s all about the lines here. Point & Anchor’s blog design is quite engaging.

Trent Walton
Neatly combining a few uncomplicated code hooks, the founder of Paravel Web design agency, Trent Walton, has created an original, attractive blog. The presentation of each individual post and the overall layout of the blog are remarkable indeed.

Tumble

Fudge
The website of digital studio Fudge is currently under construction. Still, the way it has designed its latest news log is worth mentioning here. Photoshop interface imitating design is a neat idea. Plus, the navigation is a treat for the eye.

UX Booth

daus.trala.la

Design Intellection
This simple yet admirable blog design is achieved using HTML 5 markup. The dotted typography for post numbers is a nice touch.

Biggest Apple
The pure style of Biggest Apple’s website features a gorgeous sketch in the header and some pretty icons all around.

árbol textual

Helium Workx

Argee

Stripturnhout.be

Mark Boulton

This is a working library

LaMalla.cl (Chile)
This amazing blog belongs to a small community of creative people, a space to share links to inspirational info from all over the globe. A grayscale geometrical background and cool jQuery effects make our exploration of this website a really enjoyable experience.

Contrast
A clean style, nifty typography and hover effects make for a great blog design. Excellent work by Contrast, a Web apps development crew from Ireland.

Demain J’arrête (France)
This classy comic strip is available in French only, but the blog’s design won’t leave you cold.

Fran Fernández
The blog of Spanish singer Fran Fernández features an expressive and slightly careless-looking graphic design, which reflects the passion of the musician best.

Stéréosuper (France)
Stéréosuper is a successful duo of creative folks working in the field of multimedia. Boris and Jean-Francois are keen on karate: perhaps this explains the imaginative fighting characters in their design. The dark color scheme and hatched elements are quite appealing, too.

Music City Unsigned
This cute blog belongs to the Nashville community of emerging artists. Although it is Flash-based, you won’t have any problems with accessibility or navigation here.

Tal & Acacia
Unpretentious beauty: this is how we would describe this design. Pastel-themed graphics give it a special flavor.

Denis Chandler’s Blog (Another Blog About Stuff)
The style of this blog is fairly conventional, but look at the header! This bit of spice elevates the otherwise formal design, bringing in some splash.

Mulletized
This blog of Cape Town Web designer Brendon Grobler features an offbeat layout and great use of typography. This is what Brendon says about his blog redesign: “I tried to create something less “bloggy” and more graphic, focusing strongly on typography (which is one of my great design loves) and imagery.” The result is impressive, wouldn’t you agree?

M1K3
This blog (belonging to UI designer and developer Michael Dick) is an example of an excellent dark design.

Mark Forrester
This awesome blog-styled website is a creative outlet for Mark Forrester, a “half-baked” (his words) English/South African freelance designer and entrepreneur. The journal is easy and pleasant to navigate, and the cartoon illustrations in the header and footer are incredible. (They were designed by Cape Town-based illustrator and cartoonist Alex Latimer).

Jord & Chan
This nice duo-themed layout presents two strips of content on the same page, a very original idea. The smooth background texture adds more charm to the design.

Cog’Nition
This blog has a lovely surprise: you can change the design’s theme, choosing from two amusing cartoon-style backgrounds.

JonahL
Jonah Levine’s blog follows simplicity and a pure style. An attractive dark design, and a good use of lines.

Marcel Müller blog
Marcel Müller’s blog has a stylish, corporate look. Another good example of precise, minimalist design.

TrippingWords
This really is something striking. Everything here, from the header to the footer, is extraordinary and hyper-creative.

The Swish Life Magazine

mesonprojekt

DesignCritique

Manuel Romero