Web design news & thoughts: 2010

FontPark is a great big database of free fonts—for personal and/or commercial use—that'll work with Windows, Mac and Linux.

http://lifehacker.com/5634062/fontpark-is-a-searchable-sortable-database-of-over-70000-free-fonts

With 70,000 free fonts it can be hard to narrow it down, so FontPark has a bunch of filtering and sorting options so you can browse only the top fonts, for example. You can also search the site if there's something you're looking for in particular. If your typographic gluttony doesn't cap off at 70,000, you can also find great free fonts at DaFont (our take), The League of Movable Type, and Urban Fonts.

Tools and Resources for Grammar, Copywriting, Spelling and More - Noupe Design Blog

So much of the web is based around written content that it’s important for anyone who works online to have a good grasp of language, including grammar and spelling. But it’s not always easy to find reputable sources that can teach us these things if we didn’t learn them in school (or retain them for long after). Below are over thirty great resources for learning more about grammar, vocabulary, copywriting, and more. If you have more resources you’ve found helpful, please share them in the comments

25 Free SEO Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox | FreelanceFolder

Designing and Producing Creative Business Cards: Techniques and Details - Smashing Magazine

Plenty of creative business card showcases are available out there. Many of these are beautifully done and well thought out, and they serve as inspiration for those who would like their business card to be more than the standard rectangular piece of paper. Yet little explanation accompanies these examples, and figuring out just how to bring your idea to life can be overwhelming, to say the least. This guide is meant to help you decide which technique is right for you, how to correctly prepare the files and what to look for in a printer.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Ultimate Photoshop toolbox

http://www.noupe.com/photoshop/the-ultimate-photoshop-toolbox.html

Toolbox

WordPress theme releases Sept 7

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/09/07/wordpress-theme-releases-for-0907/

The League of Moveable Type

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Microfilmmaker Magazine - Reviews - Website Review: WIX.com, Pg. 1 of 4

Wix.com is a flash based web site creator. It allows you to create a site based off of templates (which some are really nice and very customizable) or you can start from scratch from a blank slate.

It offers drag and drop features along with a seemingly unlimited amount of clip art, animations and other little additions that can add a spark to your site

48 Beautiful Web Design Interface From DeviantArt in August'10

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Website Speed and Performance Checking Tools

Friday, September 3, 2010

WordPress in Demand on Elance � WordPress Publisher Blog

5 Free Social Media Icon Sets for Back to School | BloggingPro

Blogging Pitfalls: Why You Can’t Stop Promoting | BloggingPro

The Pitfall
Whenever we launch a new blog, we are initially very eager to promote it. We tell our friends, our family and anyone else who will listen. We leave comments, we get active in the community and swap links whenever we can. In short, we fight for every visitor and celebrate every comment.
However, as sites grow we become less aggressive about that fight. We don’t promote as actively, ignoring our Twitter, avoiding leaving comments and not working with other webmasters. A lot of it is pure practicality. It takes more time to run a busier blog (more email, more comments, more spam, etc.), thus reducing the time available for promotion, but much of it is that bloggers feel they have move past promotion, as if it were just a phase.
Unfortunately, some bloggers take this to an extreme and rest on their laurels a bit too hard. They stop promoting, they stop producing top-flight content and they effectively cut off the engine that has pulled their blog to where it is. The result is that blogs carry on for a time, then slow down, then stagnate and eventually begin to stop.
For bloggers who have traffic as part of their goal, this can be a very devastating problem to have and a stagnate blog or one losing traffic is at much higher risk of abandonmentthan one that is actively growing.
So how do you prevent this from happening to your site? The answer is quite simple.

Blogging Pitfalls: How to Avoid Lazy Writing and Editing | BloggingPro

Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/mind-blowing-wordpress-plugins/

Tips for Using Virtual Assistants and Personal Outsourcing

By Matthew Carpenter at Six Revisions.com

Personal outsourcing isn’t quite the hot topic that it was two years ago. With virtual assistant firms available left and right, could-be assistants have become less of a unique work accessory and much more of a sustainable, ubiquitous business addition.

What was once a quirky but useful tool for the digital age has become standard — nowadays it’s rare to find a small design firm without a personal outsourcing strategy.

But while personal outsourcing has become popular, it’s certainly not a process that’s loaded with security and simplicity. Virtual assistants are notorious for packing up at random and leaving employers with projects in a state of limbo.

While thousands turn to personal outsourcing as a way of simplifying their workday, many find it achieves the exact opposite.

Managing your online assistant(s) doesn’t need to be a painful exercise, particularly with the right staffing strategy on your side. Apply these eight tips and you’ll see a noticeable increase in how efficient, effective, and worthwhile your outsourcing endeavors are, no matter how small or large your team is.

1. Never Rely on Just One Service Provider

For most people, one full-time outsourced employee is enough to complete basic tasks and manage extra work. Regardless, it’s important to keep a backup planned, especially if your work is subject to deadlines and urgent "complete by" dates.

Online assistants are known for disappearing at the worst possible times, particularly when they’re contacted through a semi-anonymous contract bidding website. So keep a backup provider ready, whether through a loose email connection or by switching through providers for different tasks and projects.

By splitting your workload across multiple assistants, you’ll end up less exposed to fallout from failed projects and mystery disappearances.

Use Elance or another outsourcing service to build a database of prospective full-time assistants.

2. Increase the Duties of Your Assistants Gradually

Three years ago, 43 Folders carried an excellent article on the psychological barriers surrounding personal outsourcing. Not surprisingly, one of the most common objections to outsourcing basic tasks is the trust factor — people are largely skeptical that a low-cost employee can manage their workload effectively.

The obvious solution to this is rarely taken, largely because people are opposed to outsourcing entirely out of fear. Guide your assistants into the position slowly bygradually increasing the importance of submitted tasks and you’ll end up with a small stable of effective, trustworthy remote employees.

For example, you could start with simple tasks such as booking an appointment, searching for a hotel, or tracking down a piece of software.

Assign the same job to multiple employees and you’ll gain an understanding of who among them are proficient enough for the position — and who aren’t.

With just a week of testing and a small budget, you can put together a team of assistants that are stress-tested and capable of taking on the work you need completed.

3. Sort Your Tasks by Importance

It’s tempting to send your assistants a hundred-item list of tasks to complete, asking them to report back at the end of the month for the next chapter in a project. While this strategy can work well on long-term employees and experienced providers, it’s unlikely to mesh well with new hires.

Mistakes become more apparent without direction, and when communication is cut down, it’s much harder to eliminate errors and refine the type of work you need completed.

Work on a day-by-day basis with new employees, offering new tasks and providing feedback after they’re completed.

By cutting your major projects into smaller action-related groups, you’ll be able to focus on efficiency and eliminate mistakes before they become a liability. Start by requesting a daily progress report from assistants, and expand the reporting period as mistakes are ironed out.

4. Be Specific and Detailed with the Tasks You Assign

Ask an assistant to rent a car in New York and you could end up with a two-seat compact car conveniently located fifty miles away in New Jersey. Of course, that’s no use to you — what you wanted was a family van available for pickup from the airport.

The damage is obviously greater when applied to offline tasks, but online projects can easily go just wrong when essential details are overlooked.

Instead of asking your assistants to complete a task, ask to have a task completed according to a detailed set of instructions. Offer unspecific instructions and you’ll be met with work that’s equally inaccurate.

It may seem like an anti-productivity move at first, but offering more detailed instructions will lead to more accurate and effective output from your assistants and outsourced staff.

5. Separate Emails for Outsourced Tasks

Using your regular email address to manage staff will lead to disaster. With just a few remote assistants, messages will quickly pile up and make it near impossible to read correspondence from other contacts, let alone respond to them.

Collaborating on work requires a surprising amount of back-and-forth communication, giving you a good reason to separate outsourcing-related emails from other email.

We recommend communicating with assistants via email; the vast majority of collaboration suites out there are too bloated and ineffective to work for small, one-off tasks.

Set up a secondary email address or have your current email accountautomatically sort messages from assistants into a new folder or label; not only will this lead to a better ability to focus on important tasks without distraction, but you’ll also be able to automate task recording and build a separate history of communications with your staff.

6. Shop Around and Be Patient

Post an advertisement on any leading assistant website and you’ll be inundated with applications, most of which just aren’t very good. From spelling mistakes to nonsensical sentences, it’s far from uncommon to find that your first attempts at personal outsourcing are met with a questionable set of replies.

Resist the temptation to pack in the towel and stick at it — finding good assistants takes time.

Allow for at least a month when searching for a long-term online assistant, just as you would when hiring offline staff.

Cutting the process short may lead to short-term productivity gains and a quick search, but it’ll inevitably result in long-term losses due to missed opportunities and rash choices.

Spend the first few weeks trialing several different assistants and you’ll end up with a high quality hire — someone who is likely to generate long-term results and reduce your outsourcing stresses.

7. Be Nice and Professional

The employer/virtual assistant relationship is similar to the client/freelancer relationship. Whether you opt for a long-term hire or simply choose to outsource to assistants on a per-project basis, remember that you’re working on the other side of the transaction this time.

In essence, be the type of client that you like working with — your assistants will appreciate it, especially if they work with other people too.

If you plan on working with an assistant for an extended period, go out of your way to keep work efficient for them too. The goal of personal outsourcing is to increase your efficiency, and as unusual as it may sound, the greatest way to increase your efficiency is to ensure that your staff are able to work efficiently too.

Put the hours in and work out a strategy with your assistant(s); it’ll save you time and increase the amount of work they can complete for you.

8. Use Productivity Tools and Resources to Help You

Have you experimented with personal outsourcing? Before you take the plunge and hire your own online assistant, use these resources and productivity tools to ensure you go about it the right way.

The International Virtual Assistants Association has its own code of ethics, information for freelancers, and a directory of qualified virtual assistants – the perfect hiring resource.

Elance and oDesk claim thousands of virtual assistants and task-specific freelancers. Indian outsourcing firm GetFriday has a staff of over 150 personal assistants from $15 hourly.

A.J. Jacob’s piece on personal outsourcing from Esquire offers a humorous look at the possibilities of personal outsourcing.

Productivity expert Tim Ferriss compares fourteen different personal outsourcing companies and virtual assistant providers.

Story

Thursday, September 2, 2010

How to Use Illustrations to Spice Up Your Web Design Work

A collection of mini icon sets

Icons can add a lot of meaning to a website or web app design.

Used appropriately, they can make it faster for your visitors or users to complete the tasks they need to complete. But not every website design has space for normal, full-size icons (often 32×32 to 48×48 or sometimes even larger).

That’s where mini icons can come in handy. With the smallest versions of these icons sometimes coming in as tiny as 8×8 pixels and the largest generally being 16×16 pixels (though sometimes they’re slightly larger than that), they can fit into virtually any design.

And there’s a huge variety out there that can fit with almost any aesthetic style. Here are more than 35 of the best sets of mini icons out there (most featured here are free, though we’ve included a few premium sets, too).

[link] A collection of mini icon sets

Color theory in web design: Blue theme designs

This article is dedicated to color theory and the use of colors in web design. Whether you are a designer or blogger who needs ideas for a color scheme or a designer in search of some color inspiration. My hope is that this site will give web designers a better understanding of color theory and the importance of colors as it applies to web design. Blue is the color of the sky. Blue is also one of the easiest color to work with, and also give a clean and bright look to your website design. Since Blue is one of the commonly color used in web design I have present to you Well designed blue websites.

read story at Themeflash

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Craftsmanship in Designing Websites

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/craftsmanship-in-designing-websites/#more-3958

With high pressure from clients and crazy development schedules for web designers, it is easy to forget to spend the proper amount of time crafting a design.
In the interest of speeding things up, it’s tempting to skip over small details. This is an easy pitfall to which to succumb, but in the end, it can hurt your overall career.
This article will share methods and simple tools for building better portfolio pieces, having happier clients, and imbuing your work with more value.

50-amazing-free-icon-sets

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/50-amazing-free-icon-sets/

There are a lot of free icon sets out there for you to use. In this collection, we rounded up a few icon sets from all over the web that you can use in your design projects.

The hundreds of featured icons here are diverse in their styles: glossy, hand-drawn, realistic, textured are among the design themes you’ll find. I hope you find a handful of icon sets that you’ll bookmark, download, and use!

iCandies Icon Set: 60 Free Icons For Your User Interfaces and Apps

From the good folks at SmashingMagazine

Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek and geeky style or provide crisp, attractive icons for your modern and fashionable-looking interfaces. All the icons in this pack — 60 icons in total — are designed in Round Rectangle shape.

[clicky thingy]

25 Websites to Download Free Stock Photo for Your Projects

If you are searching for free stock photo databases, there are quite a few sites on the web that do that, and even at high quality: there are sites that are made by artists or designers for other artists and promote sharing their creations, there are also others which have a double policy, offering both photos for sale and for free, in distinct sections, and there are also sites which offer exposure to new talented photographers who are willing to collaborate.

[link]

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

A Tangled Web: Understanding the IRS's Stance on Website Design Costs

[Story]

Website design costs that aren’t costs of software are deductible in accordance with useful life. The time for deducting website design costs that are costs of portions of the design that aren’t software depends on the expected useful life of these non-software portions of the design. Thus, these costs must be amortized over the number of years that it is expected that the non-software portions of the design will be used in the business (except if it is expected that these non-software portions of the design will have a useful life of no more than a year, in which case the costs can be currently deducted).

Website content that is advertising is generally currently deductible; the treatment of other content costs will vary. Advertising costs are, generally, currently deductible. Thus, the costs of website content that is advertising are, generally, currently deductible.

Website content that isn’t advertising will be currently deductible, or amortized over a multi-tax year period, depending on its useful life.

The deductibility of some website costs that are business start-up costs is limited. Where website costs that would otherwise be currently deductible are paid or accrued before a business begins, the taxpayer can elect a current deduction for a limited amount (up to $5,000) of start–up expenditures in the tax year in which the trade or business begins.

However, this $5,000 amount is reduced (but not below zero) by the amount by which the cumulative cost of start-up expenditures exceeds $50,000. The remainder of the start-up expenditures can be claimed as a deduction ratably over a 15-year period.

The above principles, and others that affect the deductibility of website costs, suggest ways in which the individual or company launching the website can take charge of the treatment of website costs. For instance, an individual or company who contracts for a website design that qualifies as software, and who seeks the favorable tax treatment that applies to the costs of developed software, can, if acceptable as a business matter, include, in its written agreement with the developer/contractor, terms that will put the risk that the software won’t perform on the individual or company. Another example of a way to manage the tax treatment of website costs is detailed, descriptive allocations of costs, both in contracts and in internal records.

If you are considering launching a business website, we would like to discuss with you further—and help you implement—the above planning steps or others that will help you manage the tax treatment of your website costs.

45 free tools for designers

How To Prevent And Minimize Errors: Part III

As much as we might wish it weren’t so, we know errors are going to happen on our sites and in our applications. So far in this series of posts we’ve looked at the different types of errors that may occur along with some strategies for guiding users to take correct actions. This week we’ll finish up with a discussion of strategies designed to prevent errors and minimize the effects of errors when they do occur.

Read story in full

Best Website Design Trends for 2011

Shuutervoice reports

Website design is the face of a website that tells the story about its body, previously it was done to stylize the site but with the advance of web technology, designing is a part of interface synchronizing the site with tabs and links. As the web technology is advancing with the invention and modification of languages, designing is getting a whole new role of improvising the website content with proper looks.

The changes are going to affect deigns in the coming future is the new languages and standards browsers going to adapt in the near future. Along with Apple, many of the web designers have deserted building animations in flash and instead they are using JavaScript which is far more stable and less buggy, another added advantage of JavaScript is the less size of application files unlike flash which takes time to load for slow connections. Designing in JavaScript has opened a whole new set of options which was not possible for any design in flash.

But as the time is moving ahead, programmers and designers are search for better productive solutions like CSS3 or HTML5 which has variety of rendering animation within the consolidated boundary of ethical designing but not limited to new definitions like advanced typography, in-built transitions and 360 degree virtual resolution. These new features are quite popular now in the beginning stage and have a bright chance to be adopted by the mass in the coming year of 2011.

Web 2.0 Design standards are popular now a day with glossy and shady outlook and may remain like that for some time until anything replaces that soon. Big texts with matching sets of color are fashionable for any website with proper navigation in the home page. Those days are gone when the introductory page of any site was made completely with flash and sometimes used to show loading resulting in keep the user waiting for a couple of minutes, speed and simplicity are one of the main criteria now and that is exactly why HTML5 standards are coming into main trend, its fast, stable and it can deliver in a wide versatile format.

Design with HTML5

Typical notebook type or column like designs are out of fashion and retro or magazine like design is going to take its place in the upcoming 2011. As the display are more being widescreen with LCD, TFT & LED monitors, single page designs are going to be popular where anyone can scroll their way to find anything interesting. Typography has always been popular with print style designs are will be developed more for its mat finished flair.

One of the changes that are going to be integrated into the designs of 2011 is that they are going to be less spacy, before time blank space was used to increase singularity of any topic but now a days space costs money so even the banners of the homepage are full of advertisements or related links designed perfectly so that does not look like the subject running out of space.

Browsers play a vital role in web which is racing to be faster and give more features to the customers within accustomed space, so designs are going to get lighter so that it takes only a fraction of second to load in any standard server, sloppy designs with huge animation or details are going to be totally out fashioned as they slow down the server while accessing. JavaScript came into action replacing Flash very recently but that also is completely refurbishing itself to meet the current standard of HTML5 which is a lot faster with added facilities over the Flash or JavaScript designing standard.

In 2011, web designing is going to go through a moderate style change of how designs were done before, designers used to made designs by HTML or CSS but as technology advanced, newer programs came with better facilities, that’s one of the reasons flash is outdated in professional designing and the use of strong color has been abandoned as its hurts the eye. Gimmick or huge animation has left its place and professional light designs with navigations are going to take its place in 2011.

We will be watching the change closely and will be updating in the future for further changes in the field of web designing.

10 Android Apps Every Web Designer Should Know About

With the dominance of Apple’s iPhone in the recent years, Google’s Android OS seems to have been left in its shadows. However, this is only because the iPhone was released long before any Android device. Nevertheless, as the popularity of Android grows (and its growth is staggering) so does its range of apps.
In this article are the top 10 Android apps for people who make websites, enabling them to be productive whilst on the go.

1. AndFTP (free)

Do you need access to your web servers on your Android mobile device? AndFTP is just the app for the job. Capable of uploading, viewing, and updating files from anywhere, it can be a lifesaver if you need to edit your (or your client’s) site without a desktop/laptop handy. It also supports multiple domains from FTP, SFTP and FTPS connections and has an excellent user interface for a first-generation Android app.

2. SilverEdit (free)

A simple source code editor app, SilverEdit lets you code up full HTML, CSS, PHP files that you can save to your phone or send to your email account. Combined with AndFTP (above), you can build and push websites with your Android handheld device! At the moment, it still suffers from functionality problems on certain Android devices, but is getting more stable with each version release (version 3 is currently in development).

3. Photoshop (free)

Adobe brings the ever-popular Photoshop to the Android platform. Unfortunately–but as to be expected–it has limited functionality compared to its desktop counterpart, but does include the essential basic image processing functions such as crop, rotate, filters, and image saturation adjustments. It also allows you to share your work on Photoshop.com.

4. View Web Source (free)

If you come upon a mobile site that you want to study whilst you’re browsing the Mobile Web, View Web Source allows you to inspect and download the entire source code of the page to its text editor. It gives you the ability to edit and manipulate the code, make comments, and save the file on your phone (or send to your email account).

5. Mobile GA (free)

The trusty old analytics favourite–Google Analytics–is now available on the Android platform. Google Analytics is the best free web service (hands down) for studying your website traffic statistics. Mobile GA (Google Analytics) uses the Google Analytics API for securely transmitting your site data without the need for third-party intermediate servers, maintaining the privacy and safety of your data.

6. Dropbox (free)

A popular app for web designers and other creatives, Dropbox–the ubiquitous cloud-based file backup tool–allows you to access a remote folder with documents you have stored on the server. Simply save files on one computer and you’ll be able to access the saved files from any computer or mobile device. The free Android app gives you mobile access to your Dropbox account. It’s a must-have tool for those who work with files and documents that need to be shared across multiple computers and devices.

7. WordPress Mobile (free)

If you maintain a WordPress site, WordPress for Android is an open source app that allows you to write new posts, edit content and manage comments, all through the lovely WordPress UI. It’s great for blogging on the go.

8. Thinking Space (free)

As a web designer, you can’t turn off your magnificent creative brainpower and you’re always brewing up creative ideas for site designs wherever you are. Thinking Space is an Android app designed for recording brainstorms and for mapping out your garbled thoughts so that when an idea hits, you’ll have a structured medium to convey them in. An excellent feature of this app is the ability to sync with Google App Engine; this means you can upload your data to the cloud and access them from anywhere via your Android mobile device or through FreeMind (the open source desktop version of the app).

9. Typography Junkies (free)

Every designer should have a good typography source of inspiration; web typography is an important part of design. With Typography Junkies for Android, you can keep up-to-date with the very latest in font news by way of videos, images, social media and much more.

10. HTML Test (free)

Need to review your HTML prowess? HTML Test is a great Android app to have if you’re just starting out in this whole web design game. The app will test your knowledge about HTML, giving you multiple-choice questions that you have to answer within a predefined time.
If you’re an iPhone owner, be sure to check out a similar list called 10 iPhone Apps Every Web Designer Should Know About.

Web Design: Reboot, or Just Upgrade Instead?

Onextrapixel muses on the redesign question, enhance or start again?

When to Upgrade

The trend of upgrading a website is based around the concept of taking the existing time, money and effort that exists from a previous web design and making fundamental core changes which remove existing issues and integrate new functionality whilst retaining the general layout and design. With these upgrades, the method of distributing and applying said fixes usually occurs on a more frequent basis and an emphasis is placed on gradual and consistent upgrades that won’t confuse the visitor.

10 free website chat widgets

sixrevisions.com has a great collection of chat tools free to use for your website.
The author Phong Thai Cao, covers these chat plugins:

Chatango
Meboo.me
JWChat
CBox
Mibew Web Messenger
Ajaxchat for WordPress
Ajax chat - Javascript version
phpFreeChat
iJab
Ajax IM

Monday, August 30, 2010

23 SEO Blogs

blog.hubspot.com reports on 23 Awesome SEO Blogs Everyone Should Read

Search engine marketing is constantly changing. Like social media and other aspects of online marketing, search engines are working to deliver better results for their users. To do this, they are focusing on new areas like localization and social search. As a marketer, it is important to keep up with all of this news, so here is our reading list of search engine optimization (SEO) blogs that will help make you a better marketer.
1. SEOmoz Blog - SEOmoz has become the gold standard for SEO information and how-to articles. Its team of contributors offers an article per day to help expand your SEO knowledge.
2. Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal and his team of talented writers break search engine and internet marketing news and discuss major industry trends impacting marketers.3. Search Engine Land - This is one of the best search engine blogs for in-depth news and analysis of the search marketing industry.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6482/23-Awesome-SEO-Blogs-Everyone-Should-Read.aspx#ixzz0y5UAfDzt

15 Portfolio websites to showcase your web design

via Dzineblog

Creating a portfolio website is a must for any designer. No one out there will know about you unless you market yourself as a brand. And this is precisely what a portfolio website does for you. You can easily design your own portfolio website if you are an artist. What really is more important is marketing your portfolio website.

We have listed below 15 websites that are ideal for you to showcase and brand your design portfolio. All these websites are popular among your prospective clients and your presence in one or more of these websites is surely going to give you a massive business mileage.

1. 50up.net

50up.net is perfect for new designers and students. It has an attractive layout that is devoid of any online advertisements and gives you ample space to showcase your work. It is one of the simplest websites to use and manoeuvre through and is completely free. There is no limit to the number of images and videos that you can upload on this website. 50up.net also refreshes its Fresh List every now and then so that they can highlight the best works.

2. CargoCollective.com

If you are creative then CargoCollective.com gives you a great opportunity to show your creativity to the world. This is another ad free website that is simple in design and is easy to use. This website offers you superbly designed portfolios and also gives your prospective clients a “Follow” feature through which they can track of all their favoured designs.

3. PimpArtworks.com

For those who love photography and street art, one of the best places to showcase their work is through PimpArtworks.com. You can use this website for free for your portfolio pages and you can even use the social networking feature available on this website. This website can also be used for selling your art work where you pay a base price for the production.

4. Coroflot.com

From all creative artists to all print designers, the one website that you simply cannot do without is Coroflot.com. This website is supposedly the biggest and oldest of all the websites in this domain. You can create your free portfolio and use the networking features to reach out to thousands of visitors to this website. Everything is free and you get unlimited uploads thrown in for good measure.

5. FigDig.com

When you need high definition resolution to really make your illustrations to stand out, the website you should look to use is FigDig.com. This website uses a 1224×792 HD resolution to make your work stand out. This website also allows visitors to download samples of your work in PDF format. And the amount of publicity that you get when you make to their Hall of Fame is simply unmatched.

6. DeviantArt.com

For those of you who are into 3D graphics and fantasy art, one of the best looking portfolio websites to use is Portfolios.deviantart.com. Here you also get your personal URL so that you don’t need to share space with others and this is an absolutely free service. You can also use their four free galleries that you can use for uploading as many as 18 images.

7. Vimeo.com

Vimeo.com is ideal for those that are into motion graphics. This website stands out due to the clarity and simplicity of its design and its original content. You can upload various file formats up to 500MB a week. You can also make use of the oEmbed and API tools that can be used both by novice and advanced users.

8. Flickr.com

Flickr.com came into the limelight when it was acquired by Yahoo. This website gives you all that you get from Yahoo. You can use the website for showcasing your graphic designs and photography, online image editing and tagging. This website is massively search engine optimized and helps you publicize your work using the huge social networking platform. The flickrSLiDR API also helps you embed your Flickr portfolio into your personal website.

9. Behance.net

Behance.net gives you a platform where you can collaborate with other designers of any art category. This site also has a very clean look and you can use its popular social networking platform. You also get ample support due to the website’s “members only” rules.

10. Society6.com

Another great website to showcase your illustrations is Society6.com. You can create simple to look but effective portfolios on this website for free. This website uses similar templates like the way Flickr uses and there are no advertisements to take the visitors’ attention away. You also become part of the website’s community where everyone takes pride in promoting others’ works.

11. NOTCOT.org

NOTCOT.org displays one image of yours and then provides visitors a link to your personal portfolio. This format is very useful for the visitors because when they show some interest in a particular image, they can quickly visit your profile page and get to know more about you.

12. Mojizu.com

For character designers like you, Mojizu.com helps you create your own personal profile. You can also create your Avatar and use it to combat other Avatars.

13. Carbonmade.com

Carbonmade.com gives you ease of use to set up your portfolio that the visitors can easily browse through. This website features more than 72,000 portfolios divided into 45 categories. This is ideal for those into photography and illustrations.

14. Flavors.me

Flavors.me is slick and is a platform for gathering information from Vimeo, Netflix, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. You can make a great impression on your prospective clients using the various colour combinations, backgrounds and font styles.

15. Squarespace.com

Squarespace.com offers you more than 60 templates with navigation options and varieties of designs. You can also manage your work with ease and use the analytics report that is available 24 by 7.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Saturday, October 23, 2010

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