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Freebie Friday: 4 Chipped Concrete Brushes
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33 Hot New Freebies from the Dribbble Community
The designers over at Dribbble are exceptionally talented in a wide range of skills. You can always find work of illustrations, vectors, patterns, and graphics for the web & mobile. Some designers are even nice enough to offer their work for free download to the community. As such I’ve put together a collection of the newest freebies in 2012 you’re sure to love. Minimal Chrome Browser Window Nautical Icon Set Free White iPhone 4S Mockup Freebie: Settings Menu Cuisine Icon Free UI Icons Comments Form PSD iPhone App/Game Free PSD To-do Icon Playlistnow.fm Inspired Search bar NES Icon Battle Vintage Book Texture 350 Free Vector Web Icons PSD Sliders Mini-Flags Icons Ultralight UI Kit Alien Webkit Freebie Seamless Textile Texture Washing Machine Icons Freebie – Social Keyboard Dropdown Buttons Wood Display Frame Freebie Android 4.0 UI Free PSD Video Player Depth Interface Revised Chrome Freebie PSD Woodapp Sign-in Page TV Icon Freebie PSD UI Simple Design – Music Player Mega Web Elements UI Kit Stylish Music Player Darkchest PSD Switches Dark Login Dribbble
Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Vintage Paper Textures
Freebie Friday: 7 Script Handwriting Brushes
These brushes are each 2500px and will be a versatile addition to your toolbox, allowing you to add subtle antique writing effects to your work. Preview Download .ZIP
Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Beach Stone Textures
How Web Developers and Designers can Work Together
Within any field of application production you often find the workload split between design and development. It’s a simpler process to let the designer handle creating the user interface while the developer codes it into reality. This is the case for desktop applications, mobile apps, and especially websites. In this article I want to share a few ideas for how web designers and developers can work together with each other in harmony. It can be a struggle to keep everyone on the same page. Especially when you’re sharing documents and graphics between a group of 4+ web professionals. It’s super important that the team is willing to compromise and work together in problem solving. But as always, these ideas are much easier to understand than apply into real-life situations. Outlining the Project Before even starting on a project it’s a good idea to round up your team and have a quick planning session. Whether it’s just you and a partner or a studio of 5 or more employees – a solid plan is almost essential. Everyone should feel comfortable sharing their ideas and offering feedback on the project at large. Often times the webpage design and user interface will need to be the first priority. Without a full design, developers cannot do much work aside from coding the “bare-bones” skeleton for a web app. During this initial planning session have the designer(s) taking notes for references. Everybody should eventually commit to a single idea and push forward with it vigorously. It’s also true that the development process should take longer than just designing a mockup. Even on a team of 3 or 4 developers it will require days(or even weeks) of coding. This is because a website is built on the frontend HTML/CSS/jQuery along with a possible backend system through any number of programming languages. The best way to ensure each of these processes goes smoothly is to get everybody thinking on the same terms early-on. Communication is Key More than anything else you need to have strong communication skills within your staff. If the team cannot express their ideas properly then there is little hope for the project to be successful. Developers can often keep up with sharing ideas on the frontend design – this just includes logos, gradients, patterns, menus, and other important interface elements. However designers are trained to think in terms of colors and usability. They may not fully understand the inner-mechanisms for how a web application will function. If you happen to land a designer who also understands frontend coding this is exceptionally lucky! Web designers who can also lend a hand in the frontend code are more integrated into the development scene. This will dramatically cut down on the time and pace of your each project. Of course, this shouldn’t be expected as the “typical” scenario considering it does take a bit of real studying to understand these languages. But your communication skills will go a lot further – especially during the initial design stages in preparing a mockup layout. The communication between developers is just as equally important. If you have a team of devs who cannot explain their code to each other then things will fall apart very quickly. I like to setup a project workspace where everybody can collaborate online together. It provides a digital meeting place to share ideas and log who has completed which tasks on which days. Revise, Revise, Revise! Part of the process when building a website is going back and making changes where they are needed. Revisions are essential during the design process and even developers may change their mind mid-way into the project. It’s important to not get discouraged and always keep your spirits high. There is nothing wrong with changing some areas of the layout after the initial draft. Things can be looking great one day and feel very awkward on the next. Don’t be afraid to take that leap of faith and change things up! Of course, it’s important to have everybody in agreement before handling these changes. But afterwards the team should feel a lot better and be moving towards the next set of goals. Keep Designers Engaged There is also the false idea that once your designer has provided the mockups they are dismissed from much of the project’s development cycle. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In actuality you should strive to include them in other areas of testing, web performance, and user experience. Web designers are not all too ignorant of how a website runs and operates. Honestly they probably got into designing for the Internet because they have an interest in websites(go figure). Use this to your team’s advantage and have designers helping out in smaller aspects of the project. Aside from revisions there are plenty of tasks you can assign to your web designer: Building Website SEO & keywords Validating for proper HTML5/CSS3 code Checking the layout in all supported web browsers Handling graphics for marketing(banner ads, avatars, forum signatures) This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list and there are plenty of other ideas to consider. The point is to keep everybody working on something until the project is totally done and ready to be put up live. Whether you’re building a website for clients or a project of your own ideas shouldn’t matter in the slightest. Conclusion Web designers and developers are adjusted to performing two very distinct tasks. Yet without each other there would be no way for any modern website to exist. There are plenty of developers who work on their own and manage with free PSDs and their own simplistic layouts. And similarly there are lots of designers who can get by with a minuscule understanding of HTML/CSS to build up their layouts into reality. Yet when you can have a team of individuals focusing on what they know best you begin to see powerful results. This is how some of the greatest websites in the world have been constructed! Keep the positive energies flowing and make sure everybody is on board with each step in the process. Along with the ideas presented above let us know your thoughts or suggestions in the post discussion area.
Freebie Friday: 5 Cardboard Brushes
These varied brushes are the maximum resolution of 2500×2500. Each one has different characteristics, so this set will suit many different needs. Preview Download .ZIP
Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Antique Bible Textures
Freebie Friday: 4 Simple Specks and Dust Brushes
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Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Peeling Surface Textures
Win a set of Business Cards from UPrinting.com!
Here’s a great giveaway for all of you Bittbox readers! Our friends from UPrinting.com are back and they are offering a set of 250 pieces die-cut business cards. UPrinting is an online printing company that serves thousands of on-demand printing. They’ve been online since 2000 and have been established as a leading socially responsible company in the industry. The winner will get 250 pcs business cards, shipping included! The winner will be designing his/her own business cards. He/she can upload his/her own design or use UPrinting’s easy-to-use online design tool! Here are the other details regarding the prize: Giveaway Details Sizes to choose from : 2 x 3.5″ Rounded Corners, 2×2″ Rounded Corners, 1.75×3.5″ Rounded Corners, 2×3.5″ Leaf, 2×3.5 Rounded one corner, 2×3.5″ Half Circle Side, 2×3.5″ Oval, 2.5″ Circle Paper to choose from : 14pt Cardstock Gloss / Matte / High Gloss (UV), or 13pt Cardstock Uncoated, 6 Business Days Turnaround Great deal, huh? So if you want to grab this cool prize, here are the easy steps that you should do: (Required) Leave a comment on this blog post saying how the business cards would be of help to you. (Optional) Like UPrinting on Facebook and leave another comment once you did (Optional) Follow UPrinting on Twitter and leave another comment once you did That’s all! You have a total of 3 chances in grabbing this special prize. Giveaway ends April 30, 2012. Winner will be chosen randomly. This giveaway is limited for 18 years old above.
Freebie Friday: 7 Tire Tread Brushes
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How to Utilize Social Media Sharing Badges in your Blog
Internet marketing is the best way to slowly ramp up a crowd for your website. Repeat visitors are the attraction to help your brand sink into all areas of the web. And social media has provided just another tool for marketers everywhere to achieve this task. If you run a blog then surely you’ve seen these small badges practically everywhere. Some of the more popular digital magazines have incorporated them into the layout as a powerful marketing solution. The embed code is very easy to work with, and I highly recommend bloggers of all areas to try out a few. Selecting your Networks Before even looking into the code you should spend some time thinking about which networks are the right solution for you. Back 4-5 years ago bloggers were limited in the amount of social media badges. Digg was a powerhouse and barely anybody was using StumbleUpon (compared to 2012, anyways). But currently there are so many growing networks for both web and mobile, you have your pick of the litter! Facebook shares and Retweet buttons are very common solutions. This is probable since these markets are huge and do not cater to any specific niche. But as you break down into smaller areas you can find sharing badges for very topic-specific blogs. To provide some examples BallTribe is fantastic for sports-related posts. The community is small but engaged in the content, thus you can build a lot of traffic to your articles. Another social news community Dzone caters to the likes of web developers, server administrators, and software programmers. If you’re looking for an entire compilation you would have more luck checking through Google. There aren’t a whole lot of posts which round up social media networks. So you will have to perform some additional searching around on your own. I have a small text file saved on my computer with a list of active social communities. Supply Prime Real Estate The user experience should always come first when considering these types of changes. If many of your visitors do not care to see or use these badges they will just get in the way. And if you have too many in one place they will ultimately disrupt the flow of your content. The simplest solution is to include a whole section of social media badges in one area of your post. This could be towards the top near your header or smaller metadata. But I have found a lot of success moving badges towards the bottom of your content. Just as visitors are done reading through your post it gives them a chance to share or vote through external sites. Additionally you can build a small toolbar right above the comments section to house these vote badges. This will catch a lot of eyes from users scrolling right through the page. I have seen a few designs such as on Hongkiat’s blog where the badges actually float off to the left or right side of the layout. These become non-intrusive elements and still just as easy to access for those interested. The Hype behind Google+ Google has recently hit the market with their own social media badge. Google+ is a new network in competition with big-boy Facebook and has garnered a lot of support. It should be noted that their +1 badges behave slightly different than the majority of sharing badges. With social news you generally have visitors voting on your story, and after a certain amount your article may go popular. With other social networks like StumbleUpon your visitors just end up sharing links to their friends. But with Google+ each vote gives your post URL a little more credibility. This means when users go to search in Google your post may turn up higher in the results. Granted this +1 button is not the only factor considered within Google’s SERPS. But your ranking in Google+ does pertain directly to popularity among the online community. Submit Your own Links It’s certainly a no-brainer to consider submitting your own links to these networks. For starters it gives your profile a bit of credibility when people can find links back to your website. Additionally you have a lot more control over the amount sharing. This is especially true if you run a small network of marketing accounts. You can easily garner up a quick 5-10 retweets if you have some extra Twitter accounts lying around. Additionally you can move your posts into Digg’s upcoming area with just 15-30 votes. Most front page stories hit around 90+, so you may not make it that far without some extra support. To get your community interested in voting you have to make it as easy as possible. Nobody wants to be the first guy to submit your link into any of the networks. Who honestly has the time anymore? But if you already have the story submitted it’s a lot easier for visitors to just vote up on each of your badges. Of course, this doesn’t need to be done meticulously with every post. But certainly give credence to your more popular articles and gauge their performance over time. Adding Badges to CMS’ There are quite a few popular CMS solutions for bloggers to utilize. It’s no question that WordPress is one of the most popular options this day in age, if not honestly the most popular. But of course you’ll need to have your own web hosting unless you want to go through their own custom free services. Although WordPress does supply a steady amount of bloggers, Google’s Blogger is a free alternative which offers many of the same features. Although one big downside is that WordPress users have access to thousands of free plug-ins and template themes. Blogger and Tumblr users have a similar market, but they are nowhere as developed as Automattic. A fantastic plugin Social Media Widget is free to download and easy to install on any WordPress blog. It includes a default host of badges such as Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Delicious, and a whole lot more. If you’re looking for a specific solution check the social media tag which lists all WordPress plug-ins related to social media. Additionally there was a great post on Mashable in 2011 focusing around this exact topic. There are plenty of code examples to be found around the web, but you generally get the best results by hand-coding your own buttons. On each social networking website look through their footer links until you find the sharing page. This will include default JavaScript code to embed within your layout and save you time. Conclusion This small guide should give you an idea of how powerful social media can be. If you take the necessary precautions adding these sharing badges into your layout will almost guarantee more unique traffic. If you have found similar successful methods of Internet marketing through social media, please feel free to share your ideas in the post discussion area.
Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Abstract Blue Textures
Freebie Friday: 6 Classic Vintage Paper Brushes
Each of these very useful brushes is the maximum resolution of 2500×2500. Preview Download .ZIP