No matter how slick your designs are for your clients or employer, there are always little ways to bring more functionality into the studio. By studio, I mean your design software and Photoshop remains the top designer choice. One of the reasons for this popularity is the number of add-ons or plug-ins available that extend the design power of Photoshop.

The range of extensions varies from filter effects to tools that add whole design functions such as 3D effects and menu builders. There are many great sources on the web for add-ons that allow you to present more eye candy in any design work for web sites, posters, brochures, etc.
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Popularity: 1% [?]

Is Photoshop too expsensive for you, and you don’t want to go to jail for obtaining a copy via illegal methods? Here is a list of free, as in beer and as in speech, alternatives.
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Popularity: 1% [?]

Sometimes text rollovers are not the only buttons requested for web pages. Rollover buttons with images for onmouseover and onmouseout states have been coded for some time. Dreamweaver is very useful for simple ‘point and click’ functionality here as it quickly sets up image rollovers. However, clean code needs minimum JavaScript and more xhtml compliancy; in other words, use CSS.

CSS solves many issues when it comes to creating rollover states and is quite straightforward if you have basic CSS skills. I shall show you step by step how to create image rollovers using CSS only.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

If you are like myself, you may get the most out of visual learning, and hands on learning. With video tutorials, you can do just that. The other great thing about video tutorials, you not only get one way, but multiple ways to collect the information in the tutorial. Here are some great video tutorial sites to learn Photoshop from.
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Popularity: 2% [?]

As designers, if we are truthful, there are some aspects of the job we dread doing, either because they are repetitive, not challenging, or just because we don’t like doing them. Those things can range from making yet another CSS design with rolled corner element or to such things as tweaking font attributes to get “that look” that we wanted. Here are some sites and tools that will help you be more productive, and take out some of the boring aspects of design.

Clearing CSS Rules
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Popularity: 2% [?]

When creating a new design, it is sometimes hard to think of what you actually want to do. At the same time, our creative ideas can be hindered because we have to create a professional looking site. Well here are some comic inspired tutorials which could translate into some professional designs.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

Finding tools that make a designer’s life easier is a constantly progressing part of the software industry. With CSS becoming more recognized as the standard and tools being capable of handling all types of media, it then comes down to usability. How user friendly is the software and how can it reduce development time?

HTMLPad 2008 wins in these areas for various reasons. The convenience of its interface is immediately noticeable. The reading panes can be selected from the view menu such as the property inspector, code explorer and file explorer. Just sifting across the menus reveals a set of powerful features. The HTML and CSS style wizards make it easy for anyone to format their templates. It includes the tool HTML Tidy which is effective for detecting bad markup.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

APIs can be really useful when developing your site. By using APIs, you can increase the features of your site at little to no cost. Not only do you have additional features, but most APIs are easy to use and implement into any site design. There are many sites that offer APIs, sites such as Google, Facebook, TWitter, and Digg all provide APIs. Google has an extensive set of APIs (http://code.google.com/more/#products-products-accounts) which harness the power of their products. Google likes to apply their internal slogan to their products and not be evil in keeping developers on the outside, looking in and wishing they could create their own sites using the same features. Here is a list of common, useful, and/or powerful APIs from Google.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

One of the popular trends in web development right now is the use of Ajax. You don’t have to go far on the web before you run into a site that is using Ajax. Here are five tutorial sites, where you can learn Ajax.
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Popularity: 5% [?]

There is some debate as to what web 2.0 actually is. Most people in the industry despise the saying Web 2.0, since there is very little difference in the actual programming used to display websites. Some people debate that web 2.0 refers to the features which are on the web now, and yet another group says that web 2.0 is just shiny graphics. If you are part of the latter group, here are some Web 2.0 graphic tutorials for you.

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Popularity: 4% [?]