Free Designer Resources for your WordPress Theme: Icon Sets

Sometimes all it takes to add the finishing touch to a drab design is choosing the right design element. There are numerous resources available online but sometimes it gets too overwhelming to search for them. We’ve found a few design resources that you might be able to incorporate into your WordPress theme design:

Free Outline Icons from Vandelay

these minimalist, outline style icons designed by Grandiz for Vandelay Designs will go well with Swiss-style, white spaced WordPress themes.

Free Brands Icons from Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is giving away Simple Icons by Dan Leech. This set contains 100 white icons that have transparent backgrounds and can be used for popular websites, apps and organisations.

Free WordPress Post Type Icons from Fribly

Add some style to your custom posts with these sticker type icons. Icons are transparent and in png format. They include: status, link, quote, video, audio, image, gallery and aside. May be used for both personal and commercial projects.

Social Media Icons from Harkable

These sharp and sleek social media icons will add polish to any WordPress theme. Add that extra wow to your website using these icons. (PSD and PNG format)

Clean and Colorful Social Media Icons for 2013 from Mascot Agency

These simple yet vibrantly colored icons have that Windows 8 graphic quality about them. More icons are included in the actual download.

Icons are a great way to add a signature look to your website when done the right way. Enjoy these free resources to add that signature look to your site.

17 Awesome Adobe air apps for designers

One fine day I was trying to fill in an important official form online on my Mozilla Firefox’s browser. After spending about half an hour I reached the last few questions of the form. One question there asked me to click a checkbox to answer but I could see no checkbox on the screen. After wasting a lot of time reading the instructions and every possible detail over and over again I asked for advice from my friends. One person told me that I should try to refill the form on Internet Explorer. I tried it and now the checkbox appeared and I successfully completed and submitted the form online.

The problem just described occurred because the form was designed to work especially for Internet Explorer. You see, designing an application for all systems is tedious as one has to tweak the runtime code again and again to make it compatible to work with different systems. Here is where Adobe AIR jumps in. If an internet application is designed using Adobe AIR then it will automatically work for all systems and browsers.

Technically speaking:

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash and Flex technologies, and Action Script to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on a broad range of devices including desktop computers, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. AIR allows developers to use familiar tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver®, Flash Builder®, Flash Catalyst®, Flash Professional, or any text editor to build their applications and easily deliver a single application installer that works across operating systems.” – Adobe’s website.

Adobe AIR has a wide array of apps that can help designers design better applications. Below I have selected 17 of them.

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Creative WordPress Themes September 2013

The latest crop of new WordPress themes that are coming out are all inspiring and filled with features and functions all wrapped in pretty packages. Here are the latest WordPress themes to whet your creative juices:

Gridstack Responsive Agency Theme

GridStack Premium WordPress Theme is a unique and beautiful easy to use portfolio theme for agencies, artists, graphic designers, and freelancers. The theme’s extra wide and parallax-style media complemented by the clean and modern title rotator make it a perfect solution for showcasing photos, illustrations, videos and audio. It is responsive and automatically resizes to accommodate a variety of devices – computers, tablets and mobile phones.
It is also Ajax-enabled, allows you to display your brand logo on screen, and is SEO optimized, ensuring a consistent user experience while maintaining best practice SEO standards.

Big Gallery Photography/Portfolio WP Theme

BIG Gallery Premium WordPress Fullscreen Photography Portfolio Theme is an impressive way to showcase your photos on a grand scale made possible with the creative use of CSS3 and Javascript. Fullscreen WordPress themes are tricky especially when showcasing photographs that highlight the photographer’s composition intent. Some themes make photos look cut or stretched and lose their original intent. You have 4 full screen slideshows to choose from where you can fill the screen with the whole image, or automatically adjust images to prevent them from being cut. You have the option to change the slideshow type for every page and even play music or turn it off if you prefer.

Jarvis One Page Parallax WP Theme

Jarvis Premium WordPress Theme is a one page parallax WordPress theme for corporate, agency, nonprofit, freelancer or general business that includes features such as: MailChimp subscription support, 12 homepage variations, stunning parallax effect sections, Premium Revolution slider, background video support, ultra-responsive (including sliders), 6 navigation styles, advanced styling customization features with tons of customizable backgrounds for each section (unlimited colors, images, built-in patterns), ajax contact forms, Font Awesome icons, unlimited skins, awesome extensive theme documentation and help support, and other functions and features.

Craft Responsive and Retina-ready WP Theme

Craft Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern theme designed for creative agencies, design professionals, graphic designers, and freelancers dabbling into creative design. This retina-ready flat designed theme built with HTML5 and CSS3 includes many modern features such as graphically intuitive shortcodes, ultra high resolution graphics, advanced theme options panel, mobile ready sliders (FlexSlider 2), classic and masonry blog styles, paginated/ajax portfolio pages, and several page templates applicable to other business or web applications.

Storyline Board WP Theme

Discover Storyline Board Premium WordPress Theme – a different, creative, innovative and user friendly theme to present your portfolio, blog, online magazine, personal site or anything you may think of in a not so typical fashion. From innovative post styles (circle, square, image, text, sidebars,etc.) to unique design elements that will make your website truly stand out. This trendy and progressive product is a perfect vehicle to display your creative work/portfolio/photography gallery and amaze your visitors with an unusual new generation blog. This premium theme comes in three styles: colorful, glass, and facebook tabbed version.

Frame Photography WP Theme

Frame Premium WordPress Theme is a photographer’s virtual playground chock-full of features and options for portfolio and image gallery presentations. This premium theme HTML5 & CSS3 valid, responsive, retina-ready, comes in dark and light skin versions, has a powerful admin panel, includes a full screen, grid, and masonry style gallery/portfolio page, a working Ajax contact form, easy color management options, tons of options, and extended documentation to get your photography site up in no time.

Vertex WordPress Theme – 85th Theme from Elegant Themes

Take your website to the top of your game with Vertex Premium WordPress Theme, the 85th theme to be released by Elegant Themes. Web and graphic designers, photographers, and all kinds of service providers will surely create an impact on their clientele with this stunning theme’s distinct animation effects that will surely keep them engaged from the very start.

This premium theme is primarily geared specifically for service providers and businesses and it is perfect for businesses that would like to showcase their services and products. Dynamic animation, beautiful muted colors, clean and classic typography – all conveniently packed in this one page, long scrolling design wonder. This modern design style allows users to have a good overview of your business right at the home page – perfect for the busy client who needs answers to who, what, why, and how – pronto.

The homepage has a stunning image section that fills the full width of your browser. As you scroll down the page, you experience a 3d parallax like effect with the theme’s animation effects. Color schemes, fonts, and overall color management can be easily changed in the Theme Customizer panel with tons of options for color combinations and font choices. The theme also includes several sections among them are: a manual slider with 3d transitions, a portfolio, customer endorsements, team member bios featuring each team member’s skills and expertise level, a prominently displayed call to action button, and a widgetized footer section.

Vertex Premium WordPress Theme is fully responsive, SEO optimized, and meticulously designed in every detail to help take your website all the way to the top.

Features:

  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Responsive
  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Unlimited Colors

Vertex Premium WordPress Theme includes perpetual updates, unparalleled support, and access more than 80+ high quality WordPress themes included in every Elegant Themes membership.

Get 85 WordPress Themes For $39!

Creative WordPress Themes – May 2013

Portfolio, photography, and artistic WordPress themes are always popular. The ability to showcase images, videos, and text in one theme make it ideal for different web applications that can serve both artistic and corporate specifications. Here are some of the latest creative WordPress themes available in the market today:

Bloq

Create a lasting first impression with Bloq Premium WordPress Theme – a highly customizable theme with a fully responsive layout. The modern flat graphics and block layout format gives you that high-end graphic designer look perfect for creative agencies and freelance design professionals. This theme’s dedicated control panel allows users to configure the majority of the theme’s aesthetics and functionalities like color choices, page templates, and features such as post-formats, page templates, custom widgets, shortcodes, other theme elements that can help you create the look and branding you need.

PurePress

PurePress is a responsive and retina-ready theme that is packed with customization tools to help you create a multi purpose portfolio site. It is fully responsive and optimized for mobile devices. Features include slider choices, 6 skins, boxed and wide layout options, 8 layout options (with or without sidebar), tons of page templates. This theme is also capable of “password-protected” posts – a useful feature especially for professional photographers.

Awsm

AWSM is clean and simple, fully featured WordPress theme, perfect for creative people, freelancers or agencies. This unique theme reminds you of popular networking sites such as Facebook and Pinterest with a twist using familiar features such as the Facebook timeline and Pinterest’s masonry style grid layout. This theme is ideal for the creative freelancer who wants to display his work, projects, skills, services, and other interesting information (professional or personal). AWSM uses responsive design, stylish CSS3 and jQuery animations.

It is highly customizable with powerful theme options panel and many custom features. Another feature highlight is the option to use either a one-page layout which means your pages will scroll to its content, or the standard menu navigation which means that every page will open as a separate page on your website. You can even combine both without affecting any of your website content. AWSM is a unique and fresh take on the traditional portfolio styled theme.

Ideanosse

Create an impressive repository of your personal work using Ideanosse. Personal or creative websites need not be boring or look cookie cutter-ish with the usual predictable layout. If you are a little bit bored with what’s out there, check out this minimalist , responsive, single Page HTML5 WordPress Theme designed on Bootstrap Front End Framework. It is designed for specially small agencies to show their business online in more modern way with maximum coverage of clients. This theme can also be used for modern designers, developers & freelancers to show their works in a creative way.

The Barbershop

The Barbershop is a One Page Responsive WordPress Theme with a clean, unique retro/vintage design. The theme is packed with great Custom Post Types and Theme Options to display any kind of work on your website. Taking its playful design cue from the iconic Marx mustache, The Barbershop is a solidly designed theme that (although primarily designed for Barbershops) can be used for other website applications including your personal portfolio. This theme’s responsive development displays perfect on any tablet and mobile device and is easy to edit and maintain.

Photography WordPress Themes Roundup for April 2013

Here are a few of our current picks for awesome photography themes for 2013:

Modelish

Modelish is a unique modern HTML5+LESS fully responsive WordPress theme for presenting artwork or photography. This full-width photography/portfolio styled theme is also versatile enough to be used for any type of business as well. The stylish, yet clean and professional design is optimized with mobile first techniques and retina display support. Add some style and modern flair to your website with its customizable system that makes it easy to adapt to your favorite colors, fonts and style preferences.

Keres Full Screen Photography Theme

Keres is a cool fullscreen responsive WordPress theme built for a photography or portfolio website. It comes with many cool features like multiple slideshows (fullscreen Slideshow, Ken Burns Slideshow), a unique Image Flow Gallery, Skin manager, fullscreen Contact Map, fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo Video. This theme includes customizable elements (color, font, background image) with 50+ advanced shortcodes and a Shortcode Generator support to create the portfolio style you really want.

Photojax Minimalist Ajax Photography Portfolio

Photojax is a clean and minimal, grid styled WordPress photography theme. This sleek and modern theme features two color skins, beautiful galleries using the premium Royal Slider plugin ($20 value), an audio player, and a minimal blog (all you’ll need for a great photography portfolio). Although designed for photographers it can be a great theme for graphic designers, architects, and anyone else with an image based portfolio.

Sniper Premium Photography

Sniper is a sleek and powerful premium responsive + liquid WordPress theme built for photographers, creative agencies or portfolio website. All elements of this theme are liquid which makes it ideal for smartphone and mobile devices. This modern WordPress theme’s dynamic navigation system makes it fun and interesting to explore your website – from dropdown menus to toggled pages, everything is full of surprises.

Smarald

Smarald is an incredibly unique, highly interactive, retina ready, responsive WordPress Portfolio theme, suitable for all sorts of creatives, agencies and even blogs. Whether you want to showcase your work in a beautiful way, share your articles with your readers, or just to have a great interactive website for your agency, this premium theme is the perfect solution for you.

5 Great Resources for Stock Imagery for your WordPress Themes

Choosing the right photos for your WordPress theme demo is key. It’s what catches your visitor’s eye when they arrive at your website and hopefully it is interesting enough to sustain their attention and make them stay. Poorly chosen photos can spell disaster for your excellently coded theme and wastes golden opportunities to close a sale. The multiracial corporate group shot and the guy or girl in corporate attire with a headset are unexciting and kinda cliché.

Here are some excellent sources for stock photos or graphics you can use to enhance your WordPress theme.

Photodune

Photodune is a huge marketplace of royalty-free high quality photography. Photodune is part of the highly creative Envato community of which Themeforest is a part of. File prices range from $1 up.

Licenses:

  • PhotoDune Regular License allows use of the item to create multiple (more than one) end products, which are distributed free to end users by you or by one client. Unlimited copies are permitted for websites, and for other uses there is a limit of 250,000 copies across all products. If you are a freelancer, one license is needed per client.
  • PhotoDune Extended License allows use of the item to create multiple (more than one) end products, which you or one client may sell to end users. Unlimited copies are allowed. If you are a freelancer, one license is needed per client.
  • Other licenses include Tools license, Logo license, T-shirt license (regular or extended), App license, Personal license

500px

500px is a premier worldwide photo sharing platform for aspiring and professional photographers who get to discover new photographs, share their own images, buy featured photos, and also sell the best of their own portfolio to thousands of subscribers. Browse through thousands of images from all types of content neatly categorized by subject. Settings can be adjusted to restrict displaying photographs classified as adult content. Downloads are all HD digital files and can be sold as downloadable hi-res files or canvas prints. Transactions are handled via the website or an iPad app. Download costs start at around $3 for hi-res files and $120+ for canvas prints. You can signup as a member. Membership starts from $0 (free account) to $49.95/year.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock is a stock photography agency and global image marketplace that maintains a library of royalty-free stock photos, vectors, illustrations and footage available by subscription or per item.

Plans and Pricing

  • Standard License – 25-a-day Subscriptions allows you to download 25 images everyday including access to all JPEG and Vector sizes (starting at $249 up to $2500+)
  • Standard License – Images on Demand allows you to download images (jpgs and vectors) any time for up to one year (starting at $49/5 downloads to $229/25 downloads)
  • Enhanced Subscriptions allows you to download images (TIFF, jpg, vector) any time for up to one year (starting at $199/2 downloads up to $1699/25 downloads)

Fotolia

Fotolia is a community of artists, graphic designers, creative agencies devoted to offering affordable creative royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations and video footage clips which can be used for any design project or document with no time limits or restrictions on the number of printed copies.

Subscription Plans:

  • Daily – Daily Subscription plans allow members to download from 25 to 250 creative files per day. Download high-res images, vector illustrations and video footage every day from $0.16 per file.
  • Monthly – Monthly Subscription plans allow members to download each month from 5 to 5000 creative files without daily limit. The monthly Subscription plan allows you to download high-res images, vector illustrations and video footage from $0.84 per file. If you don’t use all of your downloads within that month, these unused downloads rolls over to the next month for as long as your subscription is active or renewed.
  • Individual – Individual Subscription option allows one user to download images daily or monthly, according to the Subscription plan purchased.
  • Multi user – Multiple Users Subscription option allows a company to share access to Fotolia’s images, vectors and videos within its company.

Stock.XCHNG

Stock.XCHNG is the world’s leading FREE stock photography site. SXC was launched in February 2001 as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. It is now wholly owned by Getty Images. Images are totally free as long as you stick to the rules in the Image license Agreement. Also, in some cases you may need to notify the artists about using the images and sometimes you need to give credit to them.

WordPress theme demos need not have the same stock photos, images, or vectors. Take your pick from premium or free images to make your demos less predictable and boring. Spice up your demo pages and make them as interesting and as eye-catching as you can with the right image. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

5 Excellent Resources for Free PSD Web Templates


The Internet is such a great resource for learning almost anything. You can practically start a whole new career based on all the free available information that can be downloaded online. Thanks to very generous people who don’t mind sharing their talent and resources for others to learn from. For those who want to try their hand at designing web templates, one of the best ways to learn is to mimic the good ones that are out there. Thankfully, there are excellent resources out there if you know where to look. Here are some of the best that’s out there today and the great thing about it is that these resources are absolutely free. Check them out:

Blaz Robar

Blaz Robar is a graphic designer from Melbourne, Australia and is part of a web design studio, Eleven Media that specialises in creating unique WordPress themes. Below is one of the many PSD templates available on his site Blazrobar.com and you can also find his work on www.thelayoutlab.com.

Luis Zuno

Luis Zuno is a full time web designer & developer spends his time creating themes and templates. Below is a sample of one of the free PSD files on this site were created by him. According to him, you are free to download, and use them in both your commercial and personal projects. Luis Zuno’s work can also be found at ThemeForest.

Martin Fabricius

Martin Fabricius is a young and talented web designer from Vejle Denmark and has won several awards in his homeland. According to him:

My big passion is usability and web and app design. I make web and app design on a freelance basis apart from my job as CTO to Ungarbejde.dk

Below is a sample of the kind of work that is available on his website:

Elemis Freebies

Cemile and Volkan are two graduate students at VCD in Istanbul and work as freelance web designer/developers. Currently they are working on creating user-friendly and clean website templates on Themeforest.
Below is a sample of their work which can be downloaded for free on their website:

Premium Coding

Premium Coding is an interactive multimedia design website that provides tons of resources for web developers, designers, and the web community. Below is a sample of one of the many free resources you can download from their site.

With all the free tutorials, templates, and design resources available out there, you can jump start your web design skills in no time. So bring out your text editor, your editing software and get started. All you need to add to the equation is your time.

WordPress Design For A Global Market

Design is subjective. There are generally accepted design principles that govern the design community and serve as guides to evaluating “correct” design. However, not all of them are totally applicable to specific clients especially when Western taste buds meet Eastern culture. But when and where shall the ‘twain ever meet if beauty and design aesthetics are wrapped deeply in mores and culture?

This is the cross cultural challenge that web designers need to face in order to remain competitive in today’s global market place.

West, Meet East

Before the West was, the East was. Two of the world’s oldest civilizations, China and India, are also two of the fastest and most robust economies today. According to Census.gov, as of 2014, China and India ranked as the top two countries with the highest population in the world. China ranked first with 1.3B (population) with an approximate 42.3% Internet penetration, followed by India with 1.2B (population) with an approximate 81% Internet penetration. Approximately 1 billion internet users from these 2 (right to left, top-to-bottom reading) countries alone. And if theme developers do the math, even if at 1% of a billion internet users, that’s still a lot of WordPress themes right there. Too many to ignore.

Global Market Local User Design

We’ve talked about defining your target market and directing your business to reaching your specific demographic. Once you have that down pat, it’s probably time to think of expansion and consider widening your net a little further. To go a little more granular and target the local user.

With WordPress powering over 21% of the Internet and being one of the most user friendly and reliable CMS systems existing today, aside from the fact that it is free, more and more Internet users are looking to it as their platform of choice.

With that, the popularity of WordPress has crossed over into multi language markets despite having been around for only a decade and catering mainly to users of modern languages which are generally left to right in direction. Hence, the increase in demand for WordPress themes with RTL or WPML features or WP plugins that provide this functionality.

The diversity of WordPress users from all across the globe is becoming an important factor in developing themes that are relevant culturally and technically suited to these users local needs. As responsive once was a premium feature that has now become a standard feature in all WordPress themes, so shall the multi language and RTL feature become.

The Design Approach

The WordPress theme development marketplace has grown considerably with designers coming up with better and more user friendly designs that match the general needs of WordPress users. There is a huge pool of WordPress themes available for, generally, almost every type of website need out there. But there is still room to grow for more cross-cultural friendly options.

Below are some design elements that designers need to consider when creating themes that are responsive to culturally diverse user groups. (Notes culled from W3.org and Sitepoint.com)

  • Language
    – Languages don’t have a direction. Scripts have a writing direction, and so languages written in a particular script, will be written with the direction of that script. Languages can be written in more than one script.
  • Typography – fonts and characters
    – Typography can look “busier” to Western eyes than to Asian readers because many Asian scripts don’t have separate upper and lower cases. Some languages have scripts that are not alphabetic at all, but which express an idea rather than a sound. Occasionally, it’s necessary for an author to provide readers with pronunciation help for especially rare or awkward characters, usually with an alternative script in small writing above the ambiguous character.
  • Content presentation
  • Styling
  • Usability
  • Navigation
  • Mirror layout
  • Scripts (Left to Right, Right to Left, Top to Bottom)
    – Text direction is another thing that should not be confused with language. In some scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, displayed text is read predominantly from right to left, although within that flow, numbers and text from other scripts are displayed from left to right. Knowing the directionality of text, based on the script(s) to be used, is important to web designers and authors, because right-to-left text can be more complicated (for beginners) to work with and the organization and directionality of the page layout are affected. Therefore, knowing the writing direction can be relevant to estimating the work involved to create web pages in a new language.
  • Images and animations
  • Forms
    – Designing forms for an Asian market can have pitfalls for Western developers. For example, it’s common to require both given name and family name and give an error if both are not completed. Many Asian languages write names with family names first and given names afterwards while some have only one name. Also, do not limit the amount of characters in Address fields.
  • Mobile
  • Propriety
  • Color palettes
    – While choosing your colors for your design, keep in mind that certain colors have different connotations across cultures. For example, red is lucky for Chinese people. On the other hand, Thai people will be offended if you print their name in red — it’s the color that monks employ to write names on coffins, so to write someone’s name in red is to “wish them dead”.
  • Symbols and metaphors

For web designers, W3.org International’s tagline sums it up quite well: “Making the World Wide Web Worldwide.” Let’s!