The amount of options, directions, and aesthetic approaches you can choose from simply deciding which textures to use in your web design is mind boggling. Texture is one of the most versatile elements of web design being used currently, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be experimenting with texture in your designs. Sure, not every design benefits from even the most subtle texture, but you might be surprised how much texture can bring a design to life.

What Is Texture?

Texture is an interesting element of web design in that most texture is created as an illusion. Texture as most people recognize is a tactile sense, determined by the touch and feel of a 3D surface. In design, we refer to texture as visual texture, which gives a 2D surface the appearance of tactile, 3D texture. This is why some of the … Read More »

Last week we went through the process of creating a clean blog theme layout in Photoshop. Now, let’s transform the visual concept into a working HTML/CSS prototype web page before finishing everything up as a complete theme next week. We’ll build the page structure with clean HTML, then style up as much as possible using CSS styling to create a lean website design that still replicates the original concept.

If you missed last week’s tutorial, we created the homepage concept for a WordPress theme called Ticket Stub. It’s based on the idea of movie review, but the clean layout and basic styling keeps it generic enough to be used for any topic.

View the Photoshop design tutorial

We can recreate the majority of the design using pure CSS styling, but we’ll still need to export a couple of image files. … Read More »

With so much of photography being focused on still life imagery, and using said imagery to evoke emotion, we wanted to shift gears. Turning our focus instead on some of the awesome captures of photography in action. Those perfect pics that freeze a moment, stealing it from its momentum and forward drive, while still carrying so much of that action and energy with it. Welcome to Photography in Action: Performing Arts.

Below is a showcase of some very inspiring photographs by some talented artists who trained their eye on the performing arts to steal moments from. So much life bursting forth from each one that it is hard to not feel their push as you browse through them. Take a look and get inspired.

The Arts in Action

Burn the sky by bast-86

red lights by idiot-drug-hive

In Motion 20’58 … Read More »

If the content is the King, we can say SEO is the Queen. 1WD has already brought you a lot of articles on SEO to help you optimize your blog and make it search engine friendly so you can increase your traffic and your sales. Today I will talk about WordPress SEO Optimization, being that it’s the most used platform by self hosted blogs. They say that WordPress is SEO Optimized which is the reason they use it, but it’s not fully SEO Optimized and so to reach the 100% you have to put in a little hard work apart from all the plug-ins we suggested already.

Its pretty easy to submit your blog or website to the search engines by just copying your sitemap’s URL and hitting the next … Read More »

I’m always up for sharing great resources and today marks the release of a new eBook by Alex Mathers; 9 Steps to Being Your Most Powerful Creative Self‘*.

I’ve always been a fan of Mather’s writing (and his blog’s colour scheme), and it was just last year that I reviewed his other eBook ‘10 Steps to Powerful Online Self Promotion for Creatives‘* which I highly recommend.

Anyway, Mathers emailed me recently about his upcoming release and I asked for a review copy so I could read it through before the official release. He kindly obliged. I thought it was great & was worth sharing, so … Read More »