If you're a web designer in today's world, you are probably already using some sort of grid layout for your designs. If you're like many of us you are using the 960 Grid System. The 960 grid system has simplified building good layouts for the web, with the flexibility to build a wide variety of attractive layouts.

If you are new to webdesign, or looking to improve your layout design skills, and are not familiar with the 960 grid system, you should look into it.

If you're already using the 960 grid templates, you are probably familiar with this routine:

1) Select 'open file'
2) Navigate to the template location
3) Open template
4) Remember to 'save as...' so you don't overwrite with the design
5) 'Save as...' because you DID forget and saved the design as the template
6) Open the template again and remove all the layers with new work

Avant 5 Multimedia has released Photoshop actions that save these steps, and eliminate overwrite and clean-up problems, by having 960 grid pages that are built on-the-fly as Photoshop Actions.

You simply open up Photoshop, open your actions dialog, select your preferred grid layout, and push the 'play' button. Voila! A brand new document is created. No more navigating to the template file. No more overwritten templates, because the file is new. Improved workflow. Mistakes eliminated.

The actions come in four flavors. 16 and 12 column grids, each with the grids, or with guides only, to fit your personal preference and need for the specific project.

You can download the actions HERE

Labels: photoshop, resources, tools, web design

We've all seen the little icons floating around everywhere on the net. Icons for linking to Delicious.com, DIGG, Mixx and all the others. Those social bookmarking sites that are popping up all over the place.

If you own a blog or website, you probably already know that these sites play a vital role in growing your traffic, and helping bring back previous readers. And this traffic is the lifeblood of any successful blogger.


There are a great many sets of social bookmarking icons freely available around the net, but putting them on your page is one thing - getting them to work for you is another. And oddly, while social bookmarking sites themselves rely on people taking advantage of their functionality to stay in business, a lot of them offer no assistance to webmasters or bloggers on how to set up a link to help readers easily and quickly add their favorite sites and articles to their bookmarking accounts.

I discovered this myself, in trying to set up this - my first serious attempt at a large audience blog. I found it difficult to figure out how to set up the links, mostly relying on finding other bloggers that already had their own links set up, and examining the code. I started taking notes on how the links were set up, because I knew I would be needing these again for future websites - both my own and for my design clients, and then figured I could serve the blogging world by sharing this information with everyone.

So here it is, my first exhaustive list of Social Bookmarking links. They are set up to copy and paste the code right into your own site or blog, the only thing required being that you change the parameters to fit your own site's address (URL) and sometimes the name.

Where an item is enclosed in brackets [LikeThis] you are meant to replace the contents with your own. So if it says [title], you replace that - including the brackets - with the title of your page or article.

&title=[TITLE] becomes &title=This is my website


THE LIST

Delicious.com
http://www.delicious.com/post?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

StumbleUpon.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Digg.com
http://www.digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Design Bump
http://www.designbump.com/submit?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Technorati.com
http://www.technorati.com/faves?add=[URL]

Facebook.com
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[URL]&t=[TITLE]

Google Bookmarks
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Newsvine
http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=[URL]&h=[TITLE]

LinkedIn*
http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Reddit
http://reddit.com/submit?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Dzone
http://www.dzone.com/links/add.html?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Blinklist*
http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Url=[URL]&Title=[TITLE]

PlugIM
http://www.plugim.com/submit?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Mixx
http://www.mixx.com/submit?page_url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

Spurl
http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=[URL]&title=[TITLE]

DesignMoo
http://designmoo.com/submit?url=[PERMALINK]&title=[TITLE]


* Where there are capital letters in the URL of the bookmark host, do not change these. Changing the case will cause the link to fail. The capital 'A' in the LinkedIn url shareArticle http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle? is required. 'sharearticle' will not work.

Labels: blogging, social bookmarking, tutorials, web design

If you haven't yet discovered this gem of a site, today is your lucky day.

WebTreatsETC is one of four sister sites of the ETCNetwork. All four are sites providing resources for designers and I never miss a day without checking to see what new goodies have been made available. The sites feature background patterns, seamless textures available both as .jpg files and as Photoshop pattern collections, and huge icon collections.

All of these tools are freely available without charge for use in your design work, both personal and commercial, without credit or cost.

Amazingly, these people are not just generous enough to give away such valuable resources to the design community, they also teach you how to make these same resources yourself from scratch, with the fourth of the sites in the ETC network, TutorialsETC.

Each of the ETC Network sites are attractively presented, each site with its own unique look and feel. All are easy to navigate and will keep you busy browsing through already large collections of freebies of exceptional quality for hours. Fresh new resources are added frequently (daily!). This is one that you must add to your bookmarks!

The ETC Network: WebTreatsETC, IconsETC, BackgroundsETC, TutorialsETC

Labels: featured site, photoshop, resources

Hi!

I'm glad you somehow wandered in. Welcome. I know it's not pretty, just yet - but I wanted to get it up, and slowly develop my look and feel as I go. I'm ridiculous with my own designs. They are never perfect. I would sit and tinker for months, instead of getting information and resources to the design work - clearly more important.

Is there really room for another design blog? Yes, I think so. I needed it, so I figured other people did, as well.

I design for a living. Websites, advertising, promotional materials, and more. Everything multimedia, I do. And I love to collection resources to use in my work, whether it is sound effect samples that I use for video ambiance, or fancy vector swirls that I use when designing a brochure in Adobe Illustrator, having a huge library is important to me. And I never seem to have enough design tools for any project!

Much of the time, I do not have the resource I need, and I either have to spend the time to draw/create what I need by hand, or I need to buy it from one of many great shops around the net that supply artists with the tools they need to complete their craft. But I have to admit - I'm a total junkie for freebie tools. I love collecting them. Building a massive archive of designs, patterns, brushes and more that help me when I need to streamline my creative works.

Unfortunately, it seems I spend a lot of my time sifting through far-too-many "free" design tools that are not available for me to use in my work. And what good is that?. Too many times I've come across an article in one of the many design blogs and eZines that I follow and find something I really love. "Wow! I can really use this font...", only to visit the homepage of the creator, spend 15 minutes looking for his terms of use, and find that it's for personal use only. With a current collection of over 18,000 fonts, how am I supposed to remember that one isn't available for me to use on a CD cover that I'm making for a music producer client?

So I created this. Commercial Craft. The blog that features only tutorials, resources and other materials for multimedia designers and artists that are 100% available for use in our daily work, without restrictions that restrain us from getting the job done. And while I will feature some must-have commercial products...mostly, it's all about freebies.

And don't we all love those!