100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

Smashing Magazine2009-11-24T20:28:58ZWordPresshttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/feed/atom/Julia Mayhttp://www.flashmint.com/69 Sexy Portfolio Designs To Inspire Youhttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/?p=173252009-11-24T16:05:03Z2009-11-24T15:28:35Z

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in 69 Sexy Portfolio Designs To Inspire You

in 69 Sexy Portfolio Designs To Inspire You

Today designing a unique, compelling portfolio has become a crucial task for designers, studios, companies and everyone whose business is on the Web. Not only does it help one stand out among the numerous competitors, but it is also a great tool for self-expression and demonstration of skills.

Now designers face new challenges in attracting the capricious web audience – a plain web page with a project list on it is out of date and boring, while fancy Flash websites with intricate navigation are annoying. Fortunately, despite all difficulties beautiful and artistic designs are appearing in an endless stream. Designers skillfully use all the benefits of the digital age and create websites that are rich in effects and eye-popping yet simple and accessible.

In this post you can see a collection of 69 new, ingenious and beautiful portfolio designs that will hopefully become a decent inspiration source for you. The collection includes both Flash and HTML websites, however all the designs are stuck to the balance of visual attractiveness and usability. Notice that every screenshot is clickable and leads to the website itself.

69 Exquisite Portfolio Website Designs

This By Them
The portfolio of This By Them is done in cool retro style. Just look at these awesome graphics and regard for details! Neat accordion slideshow pattern enables to navigate the site at ease.

Nora Rose Travis
Creative idea, contemporary style, exquisite implementation of clever JavaScript & CSS hooks make the portfolio of Nora Rose Travis look magical. And now a trick (not for the faint of heart!): open this design in IE6. See? Internet Explorer kills the design magic.

Carlos Cabrera
This design successfully combines features of portfolio and online store. It provides easy accessibility and navigation; plus, featured works floating in the background deliver additional efficiency and visual appeal.

ThousandMinds
A super stylish dark web design with enjoyable navigation.

Alt Design

Puppetbrain
A funky old-school design with a funny curious character running all through the website.

Huan David Perafan Baez
A beautiful Flash website with horizontal navigation and amazing uninterrupted illustration in the background. The preloader is impressive here as well.

Sahar Design

Attack of the Web

Somos la pera limonera

PSD to XHTML Conversion

Nick Hand
The portfolio of Alaska-based designer Nick Hand looks awesome with its vintage grunge background, sleek transition effects and transparent areas wrapped in dotted lines. Great example of one-page portfolio design.

Corking Design
This beautifully dark website belongs to Daniel Cork, a web designer from Manchester, England. Nifty texture, elegant logo and typography implemented in this design are really striking.

CreativeThe
Each section of this single-page portfolio has its own background texture and graphic elements that are interwoven very smoothly. Urban graphics at the bottom of the page unites all section designs and contains navigation bar and copyright info. Such design technique can be rarely seen today; it’s really beautiful and unconventional.

Mutant Labs
Mutant Labs studio claims to be a new breed of media scientists. Well, the scientific experiment on their portfolio style was a success – we’ve got an original and tasty design.

Nosotros
Beside clean and simple layout, the portfolio of the creative agency Nosotros provides prominent data visualization and infographics.

Camellie
While many websites in our collection integrate several elements that make up a beautiful design, Camellie’s portfolio highlights the only element that dominates the overall design theme. Splendid, original illustration is the very spice that makes this site look awesome.

Imaginaria Creative
Beautiful textures, large typography in the backgrounds, warm colors and smooth transparency result in an exquisite website design.

Mika Mäkinen
Although this website is Flash based, it won’t confuse you with cluttered interface and complicated navigation. Instead, it is straightforward and beautiful. Among the major features of Mcinen.net are liquid resolution, large-scale layout and wonderful photographic background on the main page. Excellent work!

Atomic Cartoons Inc.
Wonderful single-page portfolio with vertical navigation. Atomic Cartoons did justice to themselves by featuring amusing illustrations throughout the website.

Toy.ny
This “toy” is really worth “playing” with. Sober colors and unobtrusive, minimal Flash animation which beautifully renders the typo, provide an enjoyable visual and content exploration experience.

Fat-Man Collective
The portfolio of Fat-Man Collective is really something. The way this “lovely bunch of digital creatives” combines simple navigation, amusing Flash effects and original content presentation will win your sympathy immediately.

Project 365
Light and clean one-page portfolio of Project 365 looks fresh and positive, mostly due to lovely doodle typo used in this design.

Filipe Carvalho
Classy typography and good color management is what makes this portfolio design stand out.

Mikio Inose
The portfolio of the Japanese interface designer Mikio Inose has a sleek, Apple styled design. Bright colors and wide space in the header, non-standard fonts in the post titles and one-column layout make this design unique.

Diego Latorre
Sexy design of Diego Latorre’s portfolio won’t leave you cold. Here everything from textures to the smallest graphic element is about details. Nothing left hanging here, great work indeed.

Esteban Muñoz
Neat black-and-white portfolio design is featured by original line-art illustration that sticks to your mouse cursor and can be moved around the bottom of the page.

Nouincolor
Style, laconism, individuality.

25AH

Safarista Design

Kashmir Creative
The portfolio of Belgium business communication agency Kashmir Creative looks stylish and contemporary. Much of this is due to the choice of colors and a professional photo filling up the background of the site.

Kyle Steed
The header of Kyle Steed’s portfolio is beautified by his own hand drawn font “Steed”.

Arteye

Whyisbox

Synch Media
A cool robot illustration and all this cheerful geometry make this design look positive and fresh.

Blue Pixel

Daniel Kusaka
Although personal portfolio of Brazilian graphic designer Daniel Kusaka is based on Flash, it loads fast and provides good content accessibility. Colorful clues chaotically stretched about the project gallery, as well as good work with thumbnail lighting, make this design look topnotch.

Garbadge.ro
You may be confused with the navigation of this website at first, but you will quickly figure out how to get to the work gallery and the personal stuff of designer George Petrescu. This Flash-like motioned grid is developed by means of fancy jQuery.

Pirolab
Again, lots of awesome visual effects here and no Flash!

Joby

Kidd81
A big fun in this one. No doubt, this cartoonish, childlike design took some really adult skills to be done.

IAAH
This design is everything but ordinary. As the guys from IAAH say, this site is meant to challenge the concept of space and how it is perceived within the browser window. Experimental layout may frustrate the advocates of simplicity and usability standards, but if you enjoy approaches that push the boundaries of web design, portfolio site of Iamalwayshungry studio will appeal to you.

Glasshouse
The portfolio of Cape Town based digital communication studio Glasshouse is beautiful, original and well developed.

Laureano Endeiza
This portfolio design offers a wide range of various options – you can switch between several design themes, filter displayed portfolio categories and read the site both in English and Spanish. Great!

Nide.inc
If grid layouts are classics of web design, this Japanese website is avant-garde, without fail.

MopStudio
The border between originality and weirdness is rather fuzzy here. Perhaps it will take us, Western culture representatives, a few years to understand the delicate philosophy of Japanese web design.

Paravel

45Soh Tanakahttp://www.SohTanaka.com5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developershttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/?p=179022009-11-23T17:36:07Z2009-11-23T12:41:19Z

This post is the the next installment of posts featuring "Useful Coding Solutions for Designers and Developers", a series of posts focusing on unique and creative CSS/JavaScript-techniques being implemented by talented professionals in our industry. A key talent that any Web designer must acquire is the ability to observe, understand and build on other people's designs. This is a great way to develop the skills and techniques necessary to produce effective websites.

With that in mind, let's look at some clever techniques developed and used by top professionals in the Web design industry. We can use their examples to develop our own alternative solutions.

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

This post is the the next installment of posts featuring “Useful Coding Solutions for Designers and Developers“, a series of posts focusing on unique and creative CSS/JavaScript-techniques being implemented by talented professionals in our industry. A key talent that any Web designer must acquire is the ability to observe, understand and build on other people’s designs. This is a great way to develop the skills and techniques necessary to produce effective websites.

With that in mind, let’s look at some clever techniques developed and used by top professionals in the Web design industry. We can use their examples to develop our own alternative solutions.

1. Designing a Slick CSS Timeline

Designing a timeline is one of the tasks that frequently need to be solved when it comes to the design of portfolios. Some designers present the timeline as an image, others use plain text or use a good old table. We found an interesting CSS-based solution of a timeline over at 37Signals.com. While timelines are usually designed horizontally, this one is vertical, zig-zagging down each time slot.

How is this done?
To achieve this zig-zag effect, we will be floating each row. By assigning an “even” class, we are able to specify a different style for the right-aligned time slots, controlling their colors and alignment.
See the demo.

Here is the HTML:

<div class="timeslot">
	<span>2009</span>
	<p>Duis acsi ullamcorper humo decet, incassum validus, appellatio in qui tation roto, lobortis brevitas epulae. Et ymo eu utrum probo ut, jugis, delenit.
	</p>
	</div>
	<div class="timeslot even">
	<span>2008</span>
	<p>Duis acsi ullamcorper humo decet, incassum validus, appellatio in qui tation roto, lobortis brevitas epulae. Et ymo eu utrum probo ut, jugis, delenit.
	</p>
</div>

And here is the CSS:

The default timeslot will float left and have a 100-pixel padding to the right. This leaves room for the year (<span>) to sit to its right. I also used absolute positioning for the year so that I could easily switch from left to right without worrying about colliding float issues.

Add a class of even to each even row, so that we get it right-aligned in red and the year positioned to the left.

.timeslot {
	width: 235px;
	float: left;
	margin: 0 0 10px;
	padding: 10px 100px 0 0;
	border-top: 3px solid #ddd;
	position: relative;
}
.timeslot span {
	position: absolute;
	right: 0;
	top: 27px;
	font-size: 3em;
	color: #999;
}
.even {
	float: right;
	padding: 10px 0 0 100px;
	border-color: #ca0000;
}
.even span {
	left: 0;
	color: #ca0000;
}

2. Custom Page Styling, CSS Drop Caps and Footnotes

One website that is truly unique is Jason Santa Maria’s. What’s impressive about Jason’s website is that each article and blog post is entirely unique, with its design tailored to the content. Looking at a recent article, “Mathematics of the Tootsie Pop,” we’ll go over a few techniques that stand out for us.

1. Custom Page Styling in WordPress

The first question that came to mind when visiting Jason’s blog was, “How did he give each post a unique design?” You can achieve this simply by referencing a custom style sheet to override the website’s default style. By using a combination of custom fields in WordPress and understanding CSS specificity, you can freely give each post a design of its own. So, how is this done?

Step 1. Customize post with custom style sheet
Start by creating a new style sheet, and name the file to match your post’s title. With a good understanding of CSS specificity, you can customize the look and feel of the post.

Step 2. Create custom field values
Log in to your WordPress admin area, and go to the edit page for the post. Scroll down to the “Custom Field” area, and enter a new custom field name called “customStyles”. Then, for the value of that custom field, enter the full URL of your custom style sheet.

Article 1 D in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

Step 3. Call the custom style sheet
Open up the header.php file in your custom theme, and above your <title> tag, add the following:

<?php $customStyles = get_post_meta($post->ID, "customStyles", true);
if (!empty($customStyles)) { ?>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $customStyles; ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php } ?>

In this step, we’re checking if a custom field of “customStyles” exists. If it does, then it will inject the value within the href of the style sheet reference.

Custom field tutorials:

CSS specificity tutorials:

2. Creating Drop Caps

Article 1 B in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

Drop caps are commonly seen in print design, but with the recent rise in popularity of Web typography, this technique seems to be becoming more common. We have various ways of achieving this technique.

Here is the HTML you would use:

	<p><span class="dropCap">E</span>ros decet bis eligo jumentum brevitas vel abigo iusto commoveo ex abigo, euismod ulciscor. Bene enim vulputate enim, nisl illum patria. Enim te, verto euismod in nisl lucidus. Capio incassum quadrum nunc ex proprius praesent et quod. Autem in commoveo similis nostrud turpis paulatim quadrum, tristique. </p>

Plain-text drop caps
Plain-text drop caps can be achieved with just a few lines of CSS. Until Web typography advances, and the @font-face standard becomes more widely supported, this is probably the easiest way to achieve drop caps. See demo.

Here is the CSS:

.dropCap {
	float: left;
	font-size: 5em;
	line-height: 0.9em;
	padding: 0 5px 0 0;
	font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

To jazz up your plain text, check out the following tutorials on enhancement:

Text-replacement drop caps
Here, we are simply substituting an image for a letter, using a combination of text-indent and background image. See demo.

Here is the CSS:

.dropCap {
	text-indent: -99999px;
	background: url(drop_cap_e.gif) no-repeat left 5px;
	height: 50px; width: 55px;
	float: left;
	display: block;
}

While this technique is perfect for Jason’s post (because he uses only one drop cap), if you plan to use multiple drop caps, you should look into using CSS sprites. Mark Boulton offers a great example of this technique.

jQuery-based Drop Caps
A few years ago, Karl Swedberg of LearningjQuery.com introduced an awesome way to incorporate drop caps using jQuery. Please notice that using jQuery for presentational purposes may be not a good idea and contradicts the strict separation between the presentation and behaviour layers, but it does solve the problem nevertheless. You may want to check out Karl Swedberg’s drop-cap plugin that does a better job of keeping the presentation and behavior layers separate by simply wrapping a span around the first letter (with appropriate classes). That way you can style the letter however you like with CSS. Also check out the tutorials below:

3. Footnotes

Footnotes are another interesting part of Jason’s post. The red stripe that bleeds across the page really accents the footnotes well here.

That bleeding red stripe can be achieved by nesting two DIV tags: the parent DIV, which contains a repeating background image (positioned at the bottom), and a second DIV, which is the actual fixed container where the content lies. This way, the red stripe follows the end of the content and aligns perfectly with the footnotes.

Article 1 F in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

3. Text Flow

Like Jason Santa Maria, Dustin Curtis has his own way of giving each post a unique style. In the example below, you can see the interesting way in which the text flows down the page beside the pictures of the MRI. This technique is quite simple to do and is a good use of relative positioning.

How is this done? The text flow seen in Dustin’s design can be achieved by giving each text block a relative position, a fixed width and fixed coordinates. His post has a mix of large backgrounds, text replacement and relatively positioned text blocks.

Sample HTML:

<p class="small"
	style=" position: relative;top: 260px;width: 430px;left: 290px;">
		<strong>At its core, it is the "artful" hemisphere.</strong> Abstract thinking, intonation
		and rhythm of language, artistic ability, and the perception of joy from music are centered here.
		The right hemisphere specializes in thinking about big picture ideas and overarching themes holistically
		instead of linearly.
</p>

Although inline styles are typically not recommended, this would be a rare exception. Create a global class name for the default styling of all text blocks (margin, padding, text size, color, etc.), and use inline styling for the page-specific design (coordinates, width, etc.). See demo.

CSS:

.textflow {
	font-size: 1.2em;
	color: #2d2d2d;
	margin: 20px 0;
	padding: 5px 0;
	position: relative;
}

HTML:

<div class="textflow" style="width:300px; left: 680px;">
  <p>Ad, natu virtus, ut ea, tristique aptent illum iustum abigo ad vulputate gravis melior quae.</p>
</div>

CSS positioning tutorials:

4. Combo Carousel Breakdown

Over at Technikwürze, we have found a carousel with a combination of animation effects. This is no ordinary carousel. For this example, rather than go over specific techniques, we’ll discuss the logic behind this unique carousel.

How is this done? As you can see, when clicking on a member’s thumbnail, three primary animations are triggered:

The member bio slides in horizontally,
The profile image slides in vertically,
The grid of member photos updates, and the height of the container adjusts.

To begin, the full member profiles are floated so that they appear side by side. We use overflow: hidden; to mask the non-active profiles. Here is a visual demo of this carousel’s logic:

Article 5 Default in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

1. Horizontal animation
Each time a thumbnail is clicked, jQuery calculates how far the profiles need to slide over. This is the classic horizontal-sliding carousel effect.

Article 5 B in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

2. Vertical animation
Once the active profile slides into position, the image for the profile slides down. To begin, all profile images are position -190px above the frame. When jQuery detects that the horizontal animation has been triggered, it slides the profile image down.

Article 5 C in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

3. Vertical animation
During the transition to the active profile, its height is calculated and the container is adjusted. This way, the container stays snug and does not leave any excess white space at the bottom.

Article 5 D in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

Carousel tutorials and plug-ins:

Graceful Degradation

The team at Technikwürze also implemented a fall-back option for this carousel. With a smart use of CSS, it crafted this page so that anything JavaScript-driven is tucked away. The resulting page is clean and accessible to all users.

Carousel Fallback in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

5. Beautiful Typographic CSS-Based Ratings

Over at Web Appstorm, we have an interesting way of showing ratings with CSS. This CSS-based system can be achieved using absolute positioning and an image of the maximum rating.

How is this done? Here is the HTML and CSS:

<span class="the_score">8</span>
<img class="ten" src="http://web.appstorm.net/wp-content/themes/appstorm_v2/images/ten.gif" alt="">

.tabdiv .the_score {
	font-family: "Myriad Pro", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
	font-size: 110px;
	line-height: 110px;
	font-weight: bold;
	position: absolute;
	top: 30px;
	right: 100px;
	color: #262626;
	text-align: center;
	letter-spacing: -17px;
}
.tabdiv .ten {
	position: absolute;
	top: 80px;
	right: 45px;
}

Alternative Solution

If you would like the maximum rating to vary, you can achieve this effect using the following alternative method.

Article 4 B in 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

HTML:

<div class="ratingblock">
	<span class="rating">8</span>
	<span class="max">10</span>
</div>

CSS:

As you can see, .max is absolute positioned, has a transparent background and is layered above .rating. That way, if you need to adjust the maximum rating, you can do so without modifying any images.

.ratingblock{
	position: relative;
	height: 100px;
}
.ratingblock .rating {
	font-size: 8em;
	padding: 0 5px;
}
.ratingblock .max{
	display: block;
	background: url(rating_bg.gif) no-repeat;
	position: absolute;
	top: 0; left: 0;
	font-size: 5em;
	width: 50px;
	height: 60px;
	padding: 40px 0 0 50px;
}

Final Thoughts

By examining the techniques others have used to achieve unique and inspirational results, we expand our foundation in Web design. It’s a great way to learn and push ourselves to ever-higher levels. Stay hungry and keep learning!

(al)

60Sergey Chikuyonokhttp://chikuyonok.ruZen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Codehttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/?p=160722009-11-21T22:59:35Z2009-11-21T18:58:00Z

In this post we present a new speedy way of writing HTML code using CSS-like selector syntax — a handy set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. It was developed by our author Sergey Chikuyonok and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

How much time do you spend writing HTML code: all of those tags, attributes, quotes, braces, etc. You have it easier if your editor of choice has code-completion capabilities, but you still do a lot of typing.

We had the same problem in JavaScript world when we wanted to access a specific element on a Web page. We had to write a lot of code, which became really hard to support and reuse. And then JavaScript frameworks came along, which introduced CSS selector engines. Now, you can use simple CSS expressions to access DOM elements, which is pretty cool.

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code

in Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code

But what if you could use CSS selectors not just to style and access elements, but to generate code? For example, what if you could write this…

div#content>h1+p

…and see this as the output?

<div id="content">
<h1></h1>
<p></p>
</div>

Today, we’ll introduce you to Zen Coding, a set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. Originally proposed by Vadim Makeev (article in Russian) back in April 2009, it has been developed by yours truly (i.e. me) for the last few months and has finally reached a mature state. Zen Coding consists of two core components: an abbreviation expander (abbreviations are CSS-like selectors) and context-independent HTML-pair tag matcher. Watch this demo video to see what they can do for you.

If you’d like to skip the detailed instructions and usage guide, please take a look at the demo and download your plugin right away:

Demo

Demo (use Ctrl + , to expand an abbreviation, requires JavaScript)

Downloads (Full Support)

Aptana (cross-platform);
Coda, via TEA for Coda (Mac);
Espresso, via TEA for Espresso (Mac);

Downloads (Partial Support, “Expand Abbreviation” Only)

TextMate (Mac, and can be used with E-text editor for Windows);
TopStyle;
Sublime Text;
GEdit;
editArea online editor;

Now, let’s see how these tools work.

Expand Abbreviation

The Expand Abbreviation function transforms CSS-like selectors into XHTML code. The term “abbreviation” might be a little confusing. Why not just call it a “CSS selector”? Well, the first reason is semantic: “selector” means to select something, but here we’re actually generating something, writing a shorter representation of longer code. Secondly, it supports only a small subset of real CSS selector syntax, in addition to introducing some new operators.

Here is a list of supported properties and operators:

E
Element name (div, p);
E#id
Element with identifier (div#content, p#intro, span#error);
E.class
Element with classes (div.header, p.error.critial). You can combine classes and IDs, too: div#content.column.width;
E>N
Child element (div>p, div#footer>p>span);
E+N
Sibling element (h1+p, div#header+div#content+div#footer);
E*N
Element multiplication (ul#nav>li*5>a);
E$*N
Item numbering (ul#nav>li.item-$*5);

As you can see, you already know how to use Zen Coding: just write a simple CSS-like selector (oh, “abbreviation”—sorry), like so…

div#header>img.logo+ul#nav>li*4>a

…and then call the Expand Abbreviation action.

There are two custom operators: element multiplication and item numbering. If you want to generate, for example, five <li> elements, you would simply write li*5. It would repeat all descendant elements as well. If you wanted four <li> elements, with an <a> in each, you would simply write li*4>a, which would generate the following output:

<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>

The last one–item numbering is used when you want to mark a repeated element with its index. Suppose you want to generate three <div> elements with item1, item2 and item3 classes. You would write this abbreviation, div.item$*3:

<div class="item1"></div>
<div class="item2"></div>
<div class="item3"></div>

Just add a dollar sign wherever in the class or ID property that you want the index to appear, and as many an you want. So, this…

div#i$-test.class$$$*5

would be transformed into:

<div id="i1-test" class="class111"></div>
<div id="i2-test" class="class222"></div>
<div id="i3-test" class="class333"></div>
<div id="i4-test" class="class444"></div>
<div id="i5-test" class="class555"></div>

You’ll see that when you write the a abbreviation, the output is <a href=""></a>. Or, if you write img, the output is <img src="" alt="" />.

How does Zen Coding know when it should add default attributes to the generated tag or skip the closing tag? A special file, called zen_settings.js describes the outputted elements. It’s a simple JSON file that describes the abbreviations for each language (yes, you can define abbreviations for different syntaxes, such as HTML, XSL, CSS, etc.). The common language abbreviations definition looks like this:

'html': {
'snippets': {
'cc:ie6': '<!--[if lte IE 6]>\n\t${child}|\n<![endif]-->',
...
}, 

'abbreviations': {
'a': '<a href=""></a>',
'img': '<img src="" alt="" />',
...
}
}

Element Types

Zen Coding has two major element types: “snippets” and “abbreviations.” Snippets are arbitrary code fragments, while abbreviations are tag definitions. With snippets, you can write anything you want, and it will be outputted as is; but you have to manually format it (using \n and \t for new lines and indentation) and put the ${child} variable where you want to output the child elements, like so: cc:ie6>style. If you don’t include the ${child} variable, the child elements are outputted after the snippet.

With abbreviations, you have to write tag definitions, and the syntax is very important. Normally, you have to write a simple tag with all default attributes in it, like so: <a href=""></a>. When Zen Coding is loaded, it parses a tag definition into a special object that describes the tag’s name, attributes (including their order) and whether the tag is empty. So, if you wrote <img src="" alt="" />, you would be telling Zen Coding that this tag must be empty, and the “Expand Abbreviation” action would apply special rules to it before outputting.

For both snippets and abbreviations, you can ad a pipe character (|), which tells Zen Coding where it should place the cursor when the abbreviation is expanded. By default, Zen Coding puts the cursor between quotes in empty attributes and between the opening and closing tag.

Example

So, here’s what happens when you write an abbreviation and call the “Expand Abbreviation” action. First, it splits a whole abbreviation into separate elements: so, div>a would be split into div and a elements, with their relationship preserved. Then, for each element, the parser looks for a definition inside the snippets and then inside the abbreviations. If it doesn’t find one, it uses the element’s name as the name for the new tag, applying ID and class attributes to it. For example, if you write mytag#example, and the parser cannot find the mytag definition among the snippets or abbreviation, it will output <mytag id="example"><mytag>.

We have made a lot of default CSS and HTML abbreviations and snippets. You may find that learning them increases your productivity with Zen Coding.

HTML Pair Matcher

Another very common task for the HTML coder is to find the tag pair of an element (also known as “balancing”). Let’s say you want to select the entire <div id="content"> tag and move it elsewhere or just delete it. Or perhaps you’re looking at a closing tag and want to known which opening tag it belongs to.

Unfortunately, many modern development tools lack support for this feature. So, I decided to write my own tag matcher as part of Zen Coding. It is still in beta and has some issues, but it works quite well and is fast. Instead of scanning the full document (as regular HTML pair matchers do), it finds the relevant tag from the cursor’s current position. This makes it very fast and context-independent: it works even with this JavaScript code snippet:

var table = '<table>';
for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
table += '<tr>';
for (var j = 0; j < 5; j++) {
table += '<td>' + j + '</td>';
}
table += '</tr>';
}
table += '</table>';

Wrapping With Abbreviation

This is a really cool feature that combines the power of the abbreviation expander with the pair tag matcher. How many times have you found that you have to add a wrapping element to fix a browser bug? Or perhaps you have had to add decoration, such as a background image or border, to a block’s content? You have to write the opening tag, temporarily break your code, find the appropriate spot and then close the tag. Here’s where “Wrap with Abbreviation” helps.

This function is pretty simple: it asks you to enter the abbreviation, then it performs the regular “Expand Abbreviation” action and puts your desired text inside the last element of your abbreviation. If you haven’t selected any text, it fires up the pair matcher and use the result. It also makes sense of where your cursor is: inside the tag’s content or within the opening and closing tag. Depending on where it is, it wraps the tag’s content or the tag itself.

Abbreviation wrapping introduces a special abbreviation syntax for wrapping individual lines. Simply skip the number after the multiplication operator, like so: ul#nav>li*>a. When Zen Coding finds an element with an undefined multiplication number, it uses it as a repeating element: it is outputted as many times as there are lines in your selection, putting the content of each line inside the deepest child of the repeating element.

If you’ll wrap this abbreviation div#header>ul#navigation>li.item$*>a>span around this text…

About Us
Products
News
Blog
Contact Up

You’ll get the following result:

<div id="header">
<ul id="navigation">
<li class="item1"><a href=""><span>About Us</span></a></li>
<li class="item2"><a href=""><span>Products</span></a></li>
<li class="item3"><a href=""><span>News</span></a></li>
<li class="item4"><a href=""><span>Blog</span></a></li>
<li class="item5"><a href=""><span>Contact Up</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>

You can see that Zen Coding is quite a powerful text-processing tool.

Key Bindings

Ctrl+,
Expand Abbreviation
Ctrl+M
Match Pair
Ctrl+H
Wrap with Abbreviation
Shift+Ctrl+M
Merge Lines
Ctrl+Shift+?
Previous Edit Point
Ctrl+Shift+?
Next Edit Point
Ctrl+Shift+?
Go to Matching Pair

Online Demo

You’ve learned a lot about how Zen Coding works and how it can make your coding easier. Why not try it yourself now, right here? Because Zen Coding is written in pure JavaScript and ported to Python, it can even work inside the browser, which makes it a prime candidate for including in a CMS.

Demo (use Ctrl + , to expand an abbreviation, requires JavaScript)

Supported Editors

Zen Coding doesn’t depend on any particular editor. It’s a stand-alone component that works with text only: it takes text, does something to it and then returns new text (or indexes, for tag matching). Zen Coding is written in JavaScript and Python, so it can run on virtually any platform out of the box. On Windows, you can run the JavaScript version of Windows Scripting Host. And modern Macs and Linux distributions are bundled with Python.

To make your editor support Zen Coding, you need to write a special plug-in that can transfer data between your editor and Zen Coding. The problem is that an editor may not have full Zen Coding support because of its plug-in system. For example, TextMate easily supports the “Expand Abbreviation” action by replacing the current line with the script output, but it can’t handle pair-tag matching because there’s no standard way to ask TextMate to select something.

Full Support

Aptana (cross-platform);
Coda, via TEA for Coda (Mac);
Espresso, via TEA for Espresso (Mac);

Partial Support (”Expand Abbreviation” Only)

TextMate (Mac, and can be used with E-text editor for Windows);
TopStyle;
Sublime Text;
GEdit;
editArea online editor;

Aptana is my primary development environment, and it uses a JavaScript version of Zen Coding. It also contains many more tools that I use for routine work. Every new version of Zen Coding will be available for Aptana first, then ported to Python and made available to other editors.

The Coda and Espresso plug-ins are powered by the excellent Text Editor Actions (TEA) platform, developed by Ian Beck. The original source code is available at GitHub, but I made my own fork to integrate Zen Coding’s features.

Conclusion

Many people who have tried Zen Coding have said that it has changed their way of creating Web pages. There’s still a lot of work to do, many editors to support and much documentation to write. Feel free to browse the existing documentation and source code to find answers to your questions. Hope you enjoy Zen Coding!

(al)

178Callum Chapmanhttp://www.circleboxblog.com/The Big Showcase Of Online T-Shirt Storeshttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/?p=148402009-11-20T15:14:41Z2009-11-20T13:22:24Z

T-shirts, as you'll surely agree, play a big part in the design world. Sometimes, we designers don't get the kinds of projects we want, and so we are left to apply our creativity in some other way, many of us opting to submit graphics in t-shirt competitions or printing them ourselves and selling them through shopping cart systems such as BigCartel.

In this post, we bring you a showcase of online t-shirt store Web designs, all of which serves as a great source of inspiration for Web designers, graphic designers and even illustrators.

You may be interested in the following related articles:

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in The Big Showcase Of Online T-Shirt Stores

in The Big Showcase Of Online T-Shirt Stores

T-shirts, as you’ll surely agree, play a big part in the design world. Sometimes, we designers don’t get the kinds of projects we want, and so we are left to apply our creativity in some other way, many of us opting to submit graphics in t-shirt competitions or printing them ourselves and selling them through shopping cart systems such as BigCartel. In this post, we bring you a showcase of online t-shirt store Web designs, all of which serves as a great source of inspiration for Web designers, graphic designers and even illustrators.

You may be interested in the following related articles:

T-Shirt Store Web Design

Shirt Fight t-shirts
This t-shirt store combines various retro and vintage elements in quite a creative way, resulting in a vibrant and memorable design.

The Hipstery! Mystery T-Shirts
Another t-shirt store that uses retro elements to appeal to customers. Notice how well the design of the website reflects the themes found in the “Mystery T-Shirt.”

Design by Humans
The simplistic design and generous white space allow the products to breath. A stylish and rather large slideshow on the home page advertises the latest products.

Dripping in Fat
Dripping in Fat is a store dedicated to creating t-shirts with a distinct message, all designed by some of the best designers around the globe! The modern, colorful design evokes a clothesline, with some awesome Flash animations.

Glennz Store
Glennz Tees began after the owner, Glenn Jones, became successful at Threadless.com, with over 21 shirts in print. He teamed up with some friends to produce a collection of tees for like-minded people. The sensible, clean design draws all of the user’s attention to the t-shirts themselves.

Take a TeeTake a Tee is a small company dedicated to providing high-quality designs printed on great t-shirts. It is also always on the look-out for new designers to join its expanding team. The horizontal lines and drop-shadows on this simple yet stylish website make for awesome effects.

Itself
Itself offers limited-edition clothing. The store allows designers and illustrators to submit their own work and join its creative community. The elegant, stylish website has a great color scheme and makes good use of social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Supermotif
Supermotif is yet another place to buy great t-shirts and submit your own designs. The website uses the dark photo in the background to its advantage, presenting the professionally photographed products against a white background.

The Affair
The Affair sells a collection of beautiful designs printed on high-quality shirts. The Flash animation makes this website designs fun: you could spend hours making the models spin around and show off their t-shirts!

Storenvy
This site is a social store community which features T-Shirts and T-Shirts-sellers worldwide. A vibrant, yet very clean design.

Labrador
Labrador is a small independent label offering t-shirts with great animal-inspired designs. The website is incredibly simple, with loads of white space. It uses awesome Flash effects to produce a scrolling washing line, as well as a Labrador logo with wagging tail!

Shirt City
Shirt City is a custom t-shirt store. You can upload and print your own designs or purchase existing designs.

Type Tees
Type Tees is part of Threadless but dedicated only to typography-based t-shirts. It obviously makes great use of typography to promote and sell its products.

Ugmonk
As the market continues to become saturated with overly complex, cluttered designs, Ugmonk’s mission is to provide high-quality products with simple, fresh graphics. The incredibly stylish dark design, bright color and colorful macro photography make this website a memorable one.

Limitees
Limitees has a huge selection of tees, hoodies, jackets, sneakers and accessories, all with fresh designs. The wooden typography-based design works wonders for the incredible products.

To Write Love on Her Arms
To Write Love on Her Arms sell some great typography-based t-shirts and a lot of other great apparel. The modern, sleek dark design is up there with the best of them. It also uses social networking websites such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to its advantage.

Cloth Moth
Cloth Moth was founded by Joshua Merritt, his wife and a long-time friend. Together, they produce quality apparel products and sell them to the world. Their simple yet modern Web design uses dashed lines for stitches, a great complement to the other hand-drawn elements.

StatAttak
StatAttak is a small in-house company that produces some awesome hand-printed designs. It has a one-page portfolio, with some great JavaScript tricks. Excellent!

Shicon
Shicon is a great place to look when you’re restocking your wardrobe, because it always has a nice selection of tees. It is always on the look-out for new designers, so send in your designs! Its website has attractive typography-based headings, diagonal pinstripes, bold colors and great photography techniques.

Agnés B
Agnés B is a French clothing store that sells t-shirts by artists and by itself. The limited colors, with bursts of red and colorful backgrounds, make the main content on this website stand out.

Johnny Cupcakes
This store has a classic blog style, with an unusual navigation menu and vintage design elements. The website has all kinds of knobs and buttons and loads of seamless patterns, textures and illustrations.

teextile
Another vibrant t-short store that boldly presents selected shirts near the top. The store allows the community to vote and comment on t-shirt designs as well. Every day, one design is promoted to the home page.

Burn Suburbia
Burn Suburbia is a clever store: each t-shirt reflects the designer’s home city. Designers hail from London, Newcastle, Brooklyn, Tokyo, Phoenix, Toronto and other cities, and the product selection is increasing. The city photograph in the background works well with the general concept.

Custom T-Shirts
Custom T-Shirts is based in the EU. Its sell a selection of limited-edition t-shirts to suit different moods, and you can customize the products. The design itself is superb and appropriate: it looks like a t-shirt; the logo being the t-shirt label and the navigation menu items being the pins and badges. Great idea!

Streetshirts
A vibrant, trendy design that appeals to the store’s target audience: youth. Flash is used heavily and makes it possible for customers to customize their t-shirt design.

A Better Tomorrow
A Better Tomorrow (or ABT) sells t-shirts made with love. It also runs an ongoing design contest. The website design makes use of patterns, which add visual interest to the header and sidebars.

Ampersand Shoppe
Ampersand is a t-shirt store dedicated to t-shirts that feature, as you might have guessed, the ampersand (&). The one-page store has a very simple design, and the white space makes it incredibly simple to use.

Busted Tees
Busted Tees is run by the same guys behind CollegeHumor. They’re always on the lookout for new artists, so drop them a line! They make use of textures and patterns to make the various sections of the website stand out.

CafePress
CafePress is a great place if you’re on the lookout for a new t-shirt. You can also sign up and create your own t-shirt store! Its modern and clean Web design makes great use of drop-down menus, and a JavaScript slideshow on the home page advertises its newest products.

Yack Fou
Yack Fou focuses on selling t-shirts, although it does sell other products, such as hoodies, buttons, stickers and posters. The awesome design makes great use of the striped, seamless pattern and the illustrated dream cloud at the bottom of the page.

Yellow Bird Project
The Yellow Bird Project is a non-profit organization that sells fabulous t-shirts to raise money for charities. The design has hand-drawn elements, with plenty of color for a great personal touch.

Zazzle
Zazzle is yet another popular t-shirt website that allows you to purchase t-shirts and sell your own designs. It also deals in other products, such as cards, mugs, skateboards and shoes. The design is slightly cluttered but gets the point across quickly, with links to many products from the home page.

Chop Shop Store
Chop Shop is a one-stop shop for like-minded individuals. It offers great clothing to satisfy the nerdy cravings in us all, without our having to ask for it. It also sells original artwork. The textured wooden backgrounds (you can choose from four types of wood) designs make this design live up to its name, and they look great.

Cosmic Soda
Cosmic Soda is a great place to buy some pretty cool t-shirts and to submit your own tee graphics for a chance to earn a percentage of sales. The simple abstract design, with a lot of hand-drawn elements and a lined paper background, makes this website a beauty.

DesignGive
DesignGive is a website for designers, by designers. It gives artists the opportunity to create and sell apparel on the website, and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.

Riot Creations
Riot Creations is a hub for designers and t-shirt aficionados from all around the world to buy great t-shirts and submit their own designs! The great design, with its graffiti-style typography, makes the website super-easy to use. The colorful photographs and illustrations make this design designs pop.

University of Whatever Clothing
University of Whatever sell tons of great apparel at great prices. It uses grungy and noisy textures and vintage photo frames to draw attention to certain parts of the website.

deviantWEAR
The store for deviantART is a great place to find anything labelled “art.” It sells a great collection of t-shirts, hoodies, bags and collectibles. The design of this sleek and easy-to-use store is based on that of the main deviantART website.

Dropdead Clothing
Dropdead Clothing is aimed at fans of metal music and sells a range of incredible illustrated t-shirts. After clicking through the Flash-animated splash page, we find a simple yet easy-to-use store. A slideshow on the home page advertises the latest products, with some pretty awesome photography, too!

Emptees
Emptees is a place where the world’s best designers and tee enthusiasts can come together on common ground to show off, talk about and love tees. Another simplistic theme, with a large area on the front page dedicated to the “tee of the day,” followed by a selection of colorful thumbnails of other products.

Go Ape Shirts
Go Ape Shirts is a store that has simply a huge collection of awesome t-shirts. The simple design, custom clothesline navigation menu and seamless striped pattern for the background make the content pop!

Happy Webbies
Happy Webbies is a huge collection of t-shirts for “Web nerds.” All of the designs are available for downloading as desktop wallpaper. With an incredibly simple yet modern design, the whole store is made up of a grid of colorful illustrated thumbnails.

i/denti/tee
i/denti/tee has a huge collection of music-inspired t-shirts, all produced by Edun Live. The design is a sleek black and white, with bursts of color from various buttons and clothing shots.

La Fraise
La Fraise is a French company that sells a collection of limited edition t-shirts, all of which were submitted by designers. The colorful illustrated header pulls the otherwise simple website together, making it one of the sexiest in this showcase.

Look Zippy
Look Zippy is a worldwide store offering organic and environmentally friendly shirts at low prices. You can submit your designs for a chance at a cash prize. The striped patterns make areas like the navigation menu stand out.

Mr Poulet
Mr Poulet sell some of the nicest t-shirts in the world, all of which are fair trade. It also has an ongoing design contest. This fun and colorful website presents its products in an old golden frame, making them stand out from the less-important content.

Nerdy Shirts
NerdyShirts believes that printed tees are one of the best ways to express yourself. It has almost 100 designs to choose from. The website design makes the content stand out with an illustrated cloud background, and it reserves a small area at the top of the page to advertise its latest products.

Oddica
Oddica’s focal point is its artists and how they interpret ideas and how that looks on t-shirts. It has a huge collection of awesome tees, starting at just $10. The design is minimal, helping the user concentrate on what’s most important: the products!

Rumplo
Rumplo’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to find their new favorite t-shirts and to give designers great tools to promote and share their killer work. The simple HTML-based design gets straight to the point!

Scrap Graphic
Scrap Graphic is a Japanese-based t-shirt store that sells tons of awesome abstract designs and the odd poster print, too. The minimalist website design makes great use of the simple repeated image in the background, giving the website a unique look.

Select
Select is a distinct line of Threadless that sell t-shirts by emerging artists alongside well-known artists. It releases a new t-shirt every Monday. The minimalist design is almost all black and white, except for the t-shirt graphics themselves, making you give all your attention to the great t-shirts.

Shirt Pizza
Shirt Pizza was created by Paul Ocepek after a pepperoni-induced dream. It sells a huge selection of t-shirts with different toppings. Shirt Pizzas header is the hit of this design: a traditional over-head price board, the likes of which we’ve all seen at our local take-out joint.

Skreened
Skreened use a new CMYK printing process to produce cost-effective t-shirts, even single orders. Browse the gallery to purchase existing designs or upload your own! The patterns and shadows bring this simple website design to life.

Spreadshirt
Spreadshirt is a platform for personalized apparel. Buy existing designs or create a store to sell your own. Spreadshirts uses a slideshow on the home page to advertise new products and makes great use of dashed rules, which tie in with its logo and different areas of the website.

TeeTonic
TeeTonics aim is to offer the best designed and highest-quality tees, all of which have been created by fellow designers and rated by users. TeeTonic uses Flash animation, bright colors and thumbnail arrangements to make its website stand out from the rest.

Threadless
Threadless is one of the ultimate t-shirt stores. It releases new t-shirts every Monday and has an ongoing competition for us designers, so start submitting! The layout is almost entirely made up of thumbnail images of its latest products, with a small area at the top of the page set aside to advertise its latest offers.

Tokotoukan
Tokotoukan is an online store based in Greece, with a selection of t-shirts made from 100% original patterns. Its designs have a lot of textures and custom shapes, making for a truly unique and attractive look.

Tshirt Axid
Axid produces unique and cool t-shirts that are available exclusively online, although it is looking for other venues in which to sell its products. The repeated background image makes for a very interesting design and helps the user focus on the center of the page, where the t-shirts are!

Tshirt Store
Tshirt Store sells designs on 100% certified ecological cotton. It designs for itself and in cooperation with other talented designers and is always looking for new designers to join the team. The website has a simple design that puts the focus on the t-shirts. It also has a very cool feature that allows you to search for t-shirts by clicking on a color.

Turn Nocturnal
Turn Nocturnal is a clothing company run by two guys named Matt and Jack, who love to design and sell shirts. Their simple design makes great use of white space and drop-shadows, making the content stand out from the less-important stuff.

6 Dollar Shirts
6 Dollar Shirts sells great t-shirts for $6 each… and 10 for $50! It has some designs inspired by art, TV, vintage design, military, sports, animals and more. The website makes great use of textures, strokes and dirty Photoshop brushes.

Color Overload
Color Overload is a great little store that sells a small selection of animal-inspired t-shirt designs. The store is powered by BigCartel, and its black-and-grey theme comes to life with the bursts of bright color.

Von RoxyVon Roxy produces t-shirts aimed squarely at the creative design community: a lot of its designs feature the typefaces we all love. The website is a simple HTML layout, with a textured banner header that immediately focuses your attention on the products.

Beautiful/Decay
Beautiful/Decay has a great collection of t-shirts, hoodies, buttons, jewelry, wallets, stickers, prints and magazines: you have to check it out! The simple, easy-to-use website is hosted on indiemerchstore.com.

Graniph Tshirts Store
A nice little t-shirt store that is always on the look-out for open-minded people with great ideas, whether illustrators, designers, artists or photographers. The website is easy to use, has a Flash slideshow on the home page and lets you search by clicking on color squares.

RIPT Apparel
RIPT Apparel is a new online t-shirt retailer based in Chicago that specializes in one-of-a-kind designs. T-shirts are available for 24 hours, after which the design is not sold again. The website has a lovely modern design that makes great use of jQuery lightbox plug-ins and grungy textures.

Tee Fury
Tee Fury has been releasing limited-edition t-shirts since 2008. It releases a new tee everyday, but every tee is available only for 24 hours, so it is indeed limited. The simple black-and-white design has a real hand-drawn feel to it, due in large part to the cool little creatures at the bottom of the page!

Full Bleed
Full Bleed is a great little store with plenty of t-shirts to choose from. It restocks most of its tees regularly, so no limited editions here! It also has a simple website: grayscale, other than the t-shirts themselves. A great way to make those shirts pop!

Lowdtown
Lowdtown is a store based on a fictional town. It offers limited-edition streetwear tees that anyone with an eye for design would enjoy. Lowdtown’s website is all about the content: the great shirt designs are set off by a black-and-white layout and sandwiched between a simple but stylish header and footer.

Supermaggie
Supermaggie is a lovely, personal t-shirt store started by two partners who met in college. It also sells incredible scarves, so check it out! The website is plain HTML but works incredibly well for the business.

Subliminal Clothing
Subliminal Clothing is a small company that offers very few t-shirts at any one time. However, the t-shirts it does sell are incredible and very well designed. The website is powered by the popular BigCartel. Simple typography and a great color scheme make this website beautiful.

200 Nipples
200 Nipples is a great little shop that sells one design at a time, and 100 in all (just enough to cover 200 nipples). Each t-shirt is individually numbered from 1 to 100, which also determines the price. That’s right, number 100 costs $100! The simple HTML-based website does the job well.

Panic Goods Apparel
Panic Goods sell some designs awesome screen-printed t-shirts, all of which are printed on the highest-quality fabric around. It has an incredibly stylish website that features a seamless textured pattern and plenty of white space.

Glamour Kills
Glamour Kills weaves together threads of culture. Its products—including tees, hoodies, bathing suits and denim—combine a rock ‘n’ roll edge with chic modernism. Its website has plenty of awesome typography, textures and patterns.

Bang Bang T-Shirts
Bang Bang T-Shirts is a UK-based t-shirt company. It sells high-quality products at low prices and is always accepting design submissions. The vertical typography on this otherwise simple website add visual interest.

Worm Sign T-Shirts
Worm Sign supplies a range of DJ-friendly and music-inspired t-shirts. It has a simple three-color website that looks a touch inspired by Twitter.

Linty Fresh
Linty Fresh has a nice selection of t-shirts, buttons, belts and necklaces, as well as great bundle and mystery packs. The seamless charcoal-gray-and-black background pattern is enlivened by bursts of lime green.

T-Shirt Hell
T-Shirt Hell is where all the bad shirts go. It’s full of funny, rude and weird t-shirt designs, with thumbnails presented against a dark, grungy layout.

Camiseteria
Camiseteria has a huge selection of designs, including clothes and bags for children and infants. You can submit your own designs and vote on others from the community. The minimal but beautiful textured website has bursts of fire-orange to jazz things up.

Red Bubble
Red Bubble is a great little shop that sell tons of t-shirts. It also features all kinds of art, photography and writing. The simple, modern, stylish design has bursts of red that designs complement the light grays.

About the Author

Callum Chapman is a young freelance designer from Cambridge, UK. He writes for his own blog at Circlebox Blog and tweets all day long on interesting design subjects. Drop him a line!

(al)

63Paddy Donnellyhttp://blog.iampaddy.com/The Death of The Boring Blog Post?http://www.smashingmagazine.com/?p=186232009-11-19T18:13:48Z2009-11-19T14:34:19Z

Let's face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?

Because installing a WordPress theme is so easy, anyone can have a blog up and running in minutes. While this is great, and we now have a wealth of blogs on countless topics, perhaps it’s too easy? Just thinking about the endless hours of effort that a print designer puts into creating the custom layout of a magazine article makes one respect the finished product so much more. A few individuals out there, though, are really breaking the mold of the blogosphere.

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in The Death of The Boring Blog Post?

Let’s face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?

Standard Blogs in The Death of The Boring Blog Post?

Too Easy?

These guys aren’t using standard WordPress themes or cutting corners to make their lives easier. Rather, they are challenging themselves and producing some fantastic content. Pushing yourself to create original layouts and designs customized to the content of each post is a fascinating and entertaining way to build a blog.

But why has this trend of melding blog post and magazine article, the “blogazine,” not caught on with the masses?

The <cringe> Trend</cringe> with a difference

Skill Button in The Death of The Boring Blog Post?
Patience Button in The Death of The Boring Blog Post?
Dedication Button in The Death of The Boring Blog Post?
Effort Button in The Death of The Boring Blog Post?

Hearing the word “trend” makes us designers shudder because we picture overused glossy buttons, drop-shadows and reflections.

But the blogazine trend could be unlike other trends for a few special reasons

Designing a creative layout for each new blog post, based on the content itself, requires skill, patience, dedication to the content and, most of all, effort on the part of the designer!

Let’s now look at three people who exhibit all four qualities:

The Pioneers

Jason Santa Maria

is one of the early innovators of this style of blogging and has been creating custom blog post designs since June 2008. With a background in print design, Jason had a vision to create a blog more in the style of a magazine, rather than obey the established rules of blog design.

While, yes, this is a redesign of sorts, I’m considering much more a rethinking.
~ Jason Santa Maria

Jason’s blog posts are fascinating and cover a wide range of topics, including design, typography, books, photography and film. The differences in the designs are sometimes just subtle changes in background or typography, but each conveys an entirely distinct message that it couldn’t if it was uniform with the rest.

Sometimes the changes are radical, but every one still has an element of “Jason-ness.” The header and footer are usually consistent, but even without them, you can still tell a Jason Santa Maria post from a quick glace.

We’ve made so many advancements in how we publish content that we haven’t looked back to what it is we’re actually creating. Many of us see the clear separation between things like print design and web design, but I’ve really been questioning the reality of why things are this way.
~ Jason Santa Maria

We Web designers don’t want to be regarded as lazy. Do we?

We have some of the most creative and inspiring designers in our profession, so why don’t we show our true potential in our blog articles?

Dustin Curtis

Dustin got a lot of publicity with his open letter to American Airlines, in which he suggests a dramatic redesign and rethinking of its online customer experience. The articles on Dustin’s blog are incredibly fascinating, and this user experience designer has clearly put serious thought into each one.

I got the chance to speak with Dustin about his work:

Q: What prompted you to create a “blogazine” instead of a traditional blog?

I’m never satisfied with my work. Invariably, two weeks after finishing a design, I feel like I can do better. When I originally tried to design my blog, I kept finishing a design, hating it and starting over. This happened ten or twelve times until I finally gave up. Eventually, I realized that each post could stand on its own and be its own design that fit the content. Despite the holdbacks of HTML and CSS, it has worked much better than I had even anticipated.

Q: Does having a blogazine really boost your creativity when it comes to creating a post?

The blogazine style does seem to boost creativity, and by a huge amount. I feel an intense amount of freedom when I’m not constrained by the box of a pre-formed design. I can open Photoshop and use it as a word processor with design functionality. The design really does complement — and become — the content, because they are built simultaneously, without regard for any of the other stuff on the website.

Q: Where do you get your inspiration for your blog articles?

I get inspiration from everywhere. I’m fascinated by medicine and the human brain. So many of my articles center on interesting things that I’ve learned while studying neuroscience. Sometimes I’ll start with a single word, like “sleep,” and develop it into a whole article as I research the fringes of the field. There’s really no set source of inspiration.

Q: Advantages?

The main advantage is one I didn’t anticipate. Doing a blogazine article requires a lot more work than a traditional blog post, and that has kept me on my toes; because such a large investment is required, I publish only what I feel are my best articles.

This seems to keep the quality fairly high. I start four or five articles for every one I publish. If I had a normal blog, that wouldn’t be the case — the other four articles would be published too, even though they wouldn’t be as good as the ones I do end up publishing.

Q: Disadvantages?

The biggest disadvantage is that CSS and HTML are terrible technologies that weren’t designed for page layout. They were designed for structured content presentation, like for a newspaper, where all the elements throughout the website are the same and are re-used. But I’m trying to make a magazine, where the content and presentation are inextricably mixed and unique. The way presentation CSS is supposed to be decoupled from the content HTML is totally counter to the mission I am trying to accomplish, and it makes coding the articles frustrating, messy and time-consuming.

My solution to this problem has basically been to ignore convention and use inline styling for most of the presentation code and extract the website-wide presentation layer into a separate CSS document. This takes forever and is not ideal. To put it lightly, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with CSS.

Gregory Wood

is a web designer at Erskine Design and has created his website as an experiment in art direction. Not allowing himself to use the same old templates, Greg has created a fascinating website, with custom designs for each blog post.

Well, I’ve had a blog for ages and have always been bad at keeping it regularly updated, until I custom-designed a few of the posts sometime last year. I generally hate writing about Web-related stuff (I find it all a little boring), and I love designing, so I wrote about what I wanted (music and zombies) and designed each post around the content, although still housed in my old blog layout. The reception to the posts was really nice, and I enjoyed creating them, so for my latest website I set out to cater to that same audience and keep myself happily occupied at the same time.

Q: Does having a blogazine really boost your creativity when it comes to creating a post?

I wouldn’t say it boosts my creativity – the website is more of an outlet for it. Despite spending all week being creative at Erskine Design, it’s still quite liberating to design whatever you want, however you want, with no external influence.

Usually I think of my best ideas when cycling or sitting on a tram or bus. It’s been a big thing on the Web over the years, where you get your inspiration from, and I’ve never really understood it. I think that looking at other people’s work all the time for inspiration is massively constricting. I find staring out a window for a while usually helps.

The obvious advantage is that it looks better. But the content is infinitely more captivating as well. I’m not a great writer, and I probably write a lot of bullshit, but because it’s all nicely designed, readers are drawn in and end up reading more than one post. It’s also very fun to create and helps me grow as a designer.

I guess some would say the time factor is a disadvantage, but if you love doing something, spending a lot of time doing it is justified. I can’t think of any disadvantages.

The Microblogging Revolution

Twitter, Posterous, Flickr, Facebook, the iPhone and countless other services make it incredibly easy for us to instantly post short musings, photos, video, thoughts and creations, which in turn has created a big gap between the micro post and the macro post.

Time for the ‘Macro’ post to shine

Longer blog posts with valuable content might not get the recognition they deserve, because the 140-character mindset turns people off of reading several pages of text. One way to combat this and make your content more appealing is by creatively altering the layout, using the blogazine technique.

Bridging the gap

We don’t know exactly where the world of blogging is headed in the next few years, but the increase in micro-blogging will definitely be a strong influence. Shorter attention spans call for drastic changes to the length of blog posts. Blogazines could cater to a generation accustomed to the longer articles of newspapers and magazines, becoming a bridge between the traditional article and the TwitPic.

Advantages

Forces you to think more creatively
Slipping into the habit of typing up your thoughts and clicking “Post,” without thinking about the layout of each article, is easy. By taking a little extra time for the art of blogging, your creativity will increase with your efforts.

Something different and exciting for your readers
If your copy of .Net or Computer Arts printed every article with the same layout, every month, would you still subscribe? Your readers would more likely return for new articles if they anticipate something new and rewarding.

Reduces the number of short simple posts
Your blog posts will have much more weight if you take the time to create a full article, rather than knock of a rushed post.

Makes ‘wordy’ posts more readable
If all you have is text, text, text, then people will be less likely to read it. Put a little effort into styling the content, and your post will become much more readable.

Disadvantages

It takes serious effort
Hand-crafting each blog post won’t be easy, but the rewards will be well worth it.

You need CSS and HTML experience
Anyone can download a WordPress theme and merrily post an article. But building a custom layout requires some experience with CSS and HTML.

Inconsistency
The layout of your blog will change dramatically from post to post and, if not done right, may strike your readers as being awkwardly inconsistent. Just look at Jason Santa Maria’s work. Every post is radically different for a reason, but a consistent vein runs through the posts.

No print layout experience
Because this style borrows many elements from print design, anyone who has worked only in Web design may find it difficult to change their way of thinking. Rules of typography and white space, for example, may throw you off. But practice makes perfect, and an endless supply of inspiration can be found in creative magazines.

So, is the blogazine route for you?

Obviously this style isn’t suitable for every website. It wouldn’t be practical for blogs that pump out three or four articles a day, but certain types of websites could benefit from it especially.

Portfolios

We have a habit of following trends very easily, especially in our portfolios. Instead of following the tired old practice of positioning screenshots of your work in a nice grid one after the other, why not use the blogazine technique and design a fresh page for each project according to the subject, client and color scheme?

Online Shops

Many online shops suffer from a certain blandness, following the pattern of: thumbnail grid, name, short description and then pagination. This layout may be good for usability, but there is a middle ground between scannability and visual appeal. The design changes do not have to be dramatic. In fact, drastically changing the layout would not be advisable for online stores.

CSS Galleries

A new CSS gallery seems to pop up every day, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between all of them. While some of the higher-profile examples like SiteInspire are fantastic for gaining inspiration, the constant influx of CSS galleries makes the inclusion of your own design in one of them somewhat less of an achievement. It would be interesting to see a really high-class CSS gallery adopt the blogazine technique, with a custom page made for each worthy website, using large high-quality images instead of the typical screenshots.

The websites in a CSS gallery are not all about the same topic and do not have the same style or same content, so why should they receive the same treatment and same type of screenshot? Merely for consistency? Think about a painting that is worthy of being displayed in an art gallery. Should it be given the same treatment, cut to the same size, positioned the same way? Why do we treat gallery-worthy websites this way, then?

Quiet Blogs

Bloggers often lack the motivation to keep their blog running. Many of them feel they have to keep it fresh by updating it every day, and failing to meet their own expectations results in both frustration and a neglected blog.
Updating a blog daily isn’t ideal, and more often than not…

Seven half-hearted articles a week does not equal one very polished, interesting article.

RSS readers are jam-packed with articles every day, and chances are, the articles that don’t get your full attention will get lost in the crowd. Keep your short musings and thoughts for Posterous and Twitter, and spend some real time hand-crafting well-thought-out articles. You’ll satisfy both yourself and your readers.

If you look at examples from Jason, Dustin or Greg, They do not blog that often: sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month. But the quality is always stellar.

Conclusion

You have endless possibilities to be more creative with your blog. Why stay tied down to one theme and one layout when you can experiment with your skills and push your creativity to its limit with a blogazine? With the Internet suffocating with blogs, people have developed incredibly short attention spans, and they probably won’t stop for your content if you have “just another blog.”

Why not throw away the blogging rule book and make your articles stand out from the crowd?

69 Exquisite Portfolio Website Designs

1. Designing a Slick CSS Timeline

2. Custom Page Styling, CSS Drop Caps and Footnotes

1. Custom Page Styling in WordPress

2. Creating Drop Caps

3. Footnotes

3. Text Flow

4. Combo Carousel Breakdown

Graceful Degradation

5. Beautiful Typographic CSS-Based Ratings

Alternative Solution

Final Thoughts

Demo

Downloads (Full Support)

Downloads (Partial Support, “Expand Abbreviation” Only)

Expand Abbreviation

Element Types

Example

HTML Pair Matcher

Wrapping With Abbreviation

Key Bindings

Online Demo

Supported Editors

Full Support

Partial Support (”Expand Abbreviation” Only)

Conclusion

T-Shirt Store Web Design

Related Posts

About the Author

Too Easy?

The <cringe> Trend</cringe> with a difference

The Pioneers

Jason Santa Maria

Dustin Curtis

Gregory Wood

The Microblogging Revolution

Time for the ‘Macro’ post to shine

Bridging the gap

Advantages

Disadvantages

So, is the blogazine route for you?

Obviously this style isn’t suitable for every website. It wouldn’t be practical for blogs that pump out three or four articles a day, but certain types of websites could benefit from it especially.

Portfolios

Online Shops

CSS Galleries

Quiet Blogs

Conclusion

Further reading