22 Awesome jQuery Typography Plugins 2013

In today’s fast moving internet world every website owner is using all the tools that he can to make his website look more visually appealing and more attractive in terms of design. This makes sense because if you think that websites should only provide information then you should not consider starting up a website at all.

Now many different types of technological tools are available out there which can help you design better websites. In this article I have chosen to focus on jQuery plugins.

jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies HTML, document traversing, event handling, animating and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

Below I have compiled 22 awesome jQuery typography plug-ins which you can use to enhance your site. To show one example how these plug-ins can help you, let’s take a look at the first plugin J Rumble. I am sure you know sites that change the link color when you move your hover over the link. This effect is known as “hover effect”. J Rumble takes this technology one step further. By using this plugin, as soon as someone chooses an element of your site, the element will rumble, vibrate, shake or rotate.

There are 21 other plugins that will make your life easier. So scroll down and take a look.

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10 Inspirational Typography Plugins for WordPress

Believe it or not – typography or the way you present your text and media on your website – plays a crucial role in building your brand name. Did you know? There are books comprising thousands of pages that teach you how to use a consistent typographical style on your publications. Such as well as “Style Guides” like The Chicago Manual of Style, The MLA Style Manual, Hart’s Rules or The Oxford Guide to Style, etc. Different organizations use different style guides and apply them on their publications in order to achieve consistency throughout the text. If a person who has been reading The Guardian for several months will be asked to identify the paper amongst a collection of many other papers such that the name of the publication is hidden from view, he will have little or no difficulty in identifying it. This is because The Guardian, just like all other standard newspapers, use a specific set of fonts, a specific indentation, a specific line gap, etc. in its publications. Such things help create an authority and reinforce the brand name.

It is not necessary that you follow the standard guides for your publication. If you want you can create your own set of style rules or mix some of your own personal tastes with any standard style manual. Whatever you decide, to help you in your endeavor I present you with 10 inspirational typography plug-ins for WordPress. Some are free while some others cost a nominal amount.

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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!

Innovative WordPress 3.8!

WordPress 3.8 Parker is here and it’s right on time! This latest release, named after bebop innovator Charles Parker, sports a sleek new dashboard and an overhauled admin panel, the default panel of which is reminiscent of Photoshop and Lightroom interfaces but with additional schemes that add a more colorful twist to it. Aiming for simple, clean, and uncluttered aesthetics and functionality, WordPress 3.8 addresses the needs of the modern website – responsive and friendly to all types of devices.

Major Features Include:

  • A fresh, modern, uncluttered admin design – clean typography, large and comfortable type, responsive interface
  • simpler, smoother, click-to-add widget management with improved drag and drop experience
  • new default responsive magazine theme – 2014
  • 8 new admin color schemes to match your style
  • refined theme management
  • updated extended libraries
  • better RTL support
  • responsive toolbars
  • improved menus experience for mobile users

Not only has this version improved its overall design and functionality but it has also improved in speed with its high-definition vector-based icons that scale to your screen size. Sharper and lighter pixels loading significantly faster.

These new features have been in the works for several months since 3.6 was announced and 3.9 is probably churning even as this release is still hot off the press. More exciting things to expect from WordPress in 2014, but in the meantime, grab your copy of WP 3.8 and enjoy the beautiful new look.

Creative WordPress Themes – November 2013

Are you working on a project and in need of a WordPress theme to match your client’s needs? Here are some of the latest creative and interesting WordPress themes to inspire you:

Attitude: Multimedia Portfolio for Media Artists

Attitude Premium WordPress Theme is a multimedia portfolio and blog theme specifically designed for media artists. This theme comes with 3 main media formats: audio – to share your creative sounds with the world, video – for producers, directors, and video designers to publish and share video, and gallery portfolio formats – for architects, interior & landscape designers, photographers and others who have few or many pictures for each project. Notable features are: fully compatible with high-resolution screens like a laptops with Retina-display, two color schemes – Light and Dark, custom slugs, portfolio migration from other themes, custom styles, motion typo, and demo XML to get started.

Swiss – Premium WordPress Theme

Swiss Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra minimal yet elegantly styled WordPress theme based on the Swiss design principles for layout, colors, and typography. Its European design flavor featuring big, bold typographic elements applies itself well to an agency, blog or portfolio website. This theme comes with 3 different homepage options, 2 blog styles, 3 filterable portfolio presentation options, a team members page, and many other features that will surely make your design company stand out. It also comes with a free Cr3ativ Shortcodes plugin you can use to easily add fully responsive elements such as google maps, alert boxes, columns, buttons (with or without icons) choose colors for buttons, pull quotes and so much more.

Pix – Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme

ePix Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed theme suitable to the demands of creative professionals like photographers, design agencies, creative freelancers, and the like. It is loaded with unique features like: the Fullscreen gallery, Stunning Galleries, advanced live Skin Editor, Visual Page Builder, Gallery Media Manager, Parallax, etc. It also includes other features such as: fully responsive, retina ready, advanced theme options, full WooCommerce design integration and WPML ready, font awesome integration, advanced typography options, Custom CSS field, SEO basics built-in, Wistia Video Hosting Integration, JW Player 6.x Integration with Audio / Video, extensive documentation and detailed screencast video tutorials and top-notch custom support.

Porcelain – Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

Porcelain Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and dynamic, fully responsive, parallax WordPress theme suited for all types of website needs. It comes with some awesome features, such as custom headers and custom background sections and it is the perfect canvas for your creative ideas. The combination of responsive design and parallax animations creates a high impact and impressive home page that looks great on all kinds of devices. Features include: an extensive admin panel, packed with various options so you can easily modify stylings, colors, fonts, layouts, etc., a flexible AJAX gallery with jQuery animations and effects, the gallery also provides an AJAX pagination and category filter for a better items organisation, content slider, Nivo slider, masonry layout support, and so much more.

OneUp – One Page Parallax Retina WordPress Theme

OneUp Premium WordPress Theme is a fully responsive HTML5 Retina enabled One Page WordPress Theme suitable for any kind of creative or business use. Built upon the responsive Twitter Bootstrap framework, the theme is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms. This premium theme utilizes lazy-loading of images and compression of all required scripts, to ensure a fast-loading and awesome looking website. Features include: advanced page builder, layered slide builder, drag ‘n drop galleries, custom thumbnail cropping, WPML compatible, 4 slider engines, and many other great features to create a high visual impact website.

Gothica – A one Page WordPress Theme in Goth Style

Gothica Premium Responsive WordPress Theme is a bold and striking one page theme with a modern gothic flair. This premium theme features innovative AJAX loading of Posts and Portfolio items (can be turned on or off on demand with one click in Page Builder), premium Aqua Page Builder, Revolution Slider, responsive design, unlimited homepage templates, CSS3 features and animations, 5 Post Templates (Standard, video, link, gallery, audio), Team Page, and so much more.

Tao: Retina & Responsive WordPress Portfolio Theme

Tao Premium WordPress theme is unique and incredibly easy to use WordPress portfolio theme that’s quick to setup and easy to customize. This premium handcrafted theme is perfect for showcasing your work with a creative twist. Check out the unique folding effect of the grid boxes. Other features include: fully retina & responsive, semantic and clean HTML5, coded with graceful degradation and SEO in mind, focus on user-experience, usability, and beautiful typography, WordPress 3.0+ ready (featured images, custom post types, custom menus), unbranded theme options, localisation support, widget enabled, diversified portfolio, etc.

WordPress and Web Design Events 2013 – 2014

Keep yourself up to date with the latest trends and technology on WordPress and web design with these upcoming events and conferences. Plan your schedules and book early.

Event: Industry 2014 – An Event for Web Professionals
Date: 22 – 23 April 2014
Venue: Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Topic(s): Managing design in organisations, Metrics, Assumptions and Design, User Experience, CSS, Business, ‘Big Projects’, HTML/JS and Mobile Web and Web Performance

Event: Port80 Handheld Mashup
Date: 27 – 28 Nov 2013
Venue: Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Wales
Topic(s): Big Ideas for Small Devices

Event: Port80 2014
Date: 16 May 2014
Venue: TBA
Topic(s): TBA

Event: 2014 SXS Interactive Festival Week
Date: 6 – 16 March 2013
Venue: Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas
Topic(s): Health, privacy, hacking and design, nonprofits, fashion, space exploration and gaming — and everything in between

Event: The Business of Web Design
Date: 18 July 2014
Venue: Cardiff, Wales
Topic(s): Art of web design freelancing and running your own web design show

Event: Le Web’13 Paris
Date: 9 -12 December 2013
Venue: 50 Avenue du President Wilson 93200 La Plaine Saint Denis
Topic(s): Mobile, hardware, social, etc. and their potential trajectories, Technology

Event: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Date: 24 -27 February 2014
Venue: Haifa, Israel
Topic(s): Annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as the principal international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces

Event: The Next Web Europe 2014
Date: 24 – 25 April 2014
Venue: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Topic(s): Internet and Technology

Event: An Event Apart
Date: 9 – 11 December 2013
Venue: The Palace Hotel, San Francisco CA
Topic(s): Web design, typography, mobile web, CSS

Event: WebVisions NYC
Date: 3 – 4 April 2014
Venue: NYIT Auditorium on Broadway
Topic(s): Explore the Future of the Web

Event: New Media Expo 2014
Date: 4 – 6 January 2014
Venue: Rio All Suite Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada
Topic(s): Blogging, Podcasting, Web TV & Video

One Page WordPress Themes – October 2013

One Page WordPress themes are becoming quite popular lately. Not only do these ultra simplified and straightforward themes look brilliant but they are also faster loading. Some say they also produce higher conversion rates. Here are some of the latest One Page WordPress themes you need to check out:

GoBlack One Page Parallax WordPress Theme

GoBlack Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern single-page portfolio styled theme ideal for the promoting services of creatives, design agencies, or creative freelancers in a professional manner. This 100% fully responsive theme was built in HTML5 and CSS3 using Parallax javascript to create the animated parallax image effects that make it engaging and dynamic. GoBlack features include the revolution slider, unique portfolio scroll animation, smooth tabless design, fentancy black color schemes, and so much more.

Prisma One Page Responsive WordPress Theme

Prisma Premium WordPress Theme was developed with a goal to provide a quick solution to create an impressive modern website with an easily editable layout without sacrificing unique aesthetics. This bold, fully responsive one page theme built with Bootstrap 2.3.2 is easy to customize and includes features such as: filterable portfolio with integrated Fancybox, animated retina-ready splash menu, and also single page layout with stand-alone page setup option among others.

Flavor One Page Parallax WordPress Theme

Flavor Premium WordPress Theme is a warm and classic looking one page premium theme that will surely make your portfolio stand out. The generous space dedicated to presenting images (filterable) is readily accessible and gives visitors a very good idea of the quality of your work. Salient features of this theme include: modular homepage – layout sections + layout shortcodes, smooth tabless design, parallax effect, flexible grid system built with Bootstrap, among many.

Webmakers One Page WordPress Theme

Webmakers Premium WordPress Theme is a single page, clean and minimalist style WordPress theme recommended for creatives, freelancers and agencies. This theme comes with 5 pre-made theme skins, powerful theme options with ability to change typography, unlimited style settings for colors, fonts, and other design elements, a custom plugin based shortcode generator to build theme element easily, a built in ajax contact form, to name a few.

Cingle Responsive One Page WordPress Theme

Cingle Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive multi purpose One Page WordPress theme ideal for a range of web uses. This premium theme will work well for business or corporate portfolios, creative agencies, design professionals, or even freelance professionals who want a more flexible theme to meet their various needs. Cingle features an ultra responsive design (enable/disable), sticky navigation, light and dark styles, parallax, Google Analytics tracking code, unlimited theme customization options, etc. to get your website to where you want it to be.

Simple Easy Parallax Retina WordPress Theme

Simple Premium WordPress Theme is an impressive, modern and yet very easy to use flat design WordPress theme with both single page and multiple page layout options. This fully responsive theme inspired by cool metro colors and built with Bootstrap includes features such as: mobile optimized parallax feature, animated contents, retina display optimization, touch optimized responsive layout, filterable expanding portfolio, and fully tested it on iPhone 5, iPad 4, S3 android and Windows Phone.

Visia Responsive One Page Retina WordPress Theme

Visia Premium WordPress Theme is a beautiful, minimalist, fully responsive retina ready single page WordPress theme that will surely impress your visitors. This premium theme includes a separate blog section and is suitable for any kind of creative or business use. Visia is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms and uses a lazy-loading support for images, assets and compression of all required scripts for lightning fast loading time. It also features a built in custom thumbnail cropping tool to help you control images you need to highlight for your posts.

Omni One Page/Multi Page Parallax Flat WordPress Theme

Omni Premium WordPress Theme is a high quality, flat and full responsive WordPress theme for creative businesses or photographers. This Bootstrap built modern theme gives you 5 amazing header options to choose from (portfolio, revolution slider, video, parallax, layer slider).You can add unlimited pages and separators to each page and customize them according to your own preferences.You also have a choice between the One Page and the MultiPage version which can be easily switched in the Admin panel.

eCommerce WordPress Themes for the Shopping Season

It’s almost that time of the year where people are just willing to spend, spend, spend. What better time than now to set up your own eCommerce site or simply update your existing one and get your visitors into the shopping season groove – all within the comforts of their own homes. Check out these cool eCommerce WordPress themes to help usher in that holiday cheer.

Barberry Responsive WooCommerce Theme

Barberry Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, fully responsive, retina ready Woocommerce theme built on Twitter Bootstrap. This slick eCommerce theme features dynamic animations that will set your eStore apart from the competition. This premium WPML ready theme is also equipped with MegaMenu, Revolution Slider, Sticky Header, Catalog Mode option, CloudZoom, a powerful Store Management and Reports feature, a filterable Portfolio, preset Shop page templates, Shopping Cart, and so many other features to help you start your store right away.

Roe | Dok WooCommerce WordPress Theme

RoeDok Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra modern WordPress fashion template especially designed for fashion stores carrying clothing, accessories, shoes, jewelry and other fashion related items. Its modern design style is clean, streamlined, and organized as to highlight each product without looking cluttered. This responsive theme has powerful built-in features such as: Mega Menu for categorizing huge amount of products with multi-column (add up to 6 columns), several sliders (Flex Slider, Revolution Slider, Nivo Slider), custom widgets, ad space for promotion and featuring important announcements, boxed and wide layout styles, predefined page layouts, a drop down shopping cart, and many other awesome features.

Retail Therapy – Multipurpose eCommerce Theme

Retail Therapy Premium WordPress Theme is a bold and elegant ecommerce WordPress theme that features the Hero Widget aimed at being able to list items on sale, categories, featured products and recent products or collections. You can also feature specific categories in a three block layout and add a call to action button in your footer. The
typography is beautiful and easy on the eye. It comes packed with 12 page templates including: a portfolio template which can show your portfolio in a two, three or four column view, a services template including service icons to visually describe your services, a shop template to display your products beautifully, a team page template and share their social links, and a features template for a product or service company

Cosmetico Responsive eCommerce WordPress Theme

Cosmetico Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and beautiful ecommerce theme that looks sleek, professional, and very high end. This retina ready responsive multi purpose theme includes features like: Page Builder with 34 web elements, animated floating menu option, Slider Revolution, CloudZoom, WooCommerce, full or boxed layout options, 300+ vector icons, portfolio variations (full screen, ajax, pretty photo), custom widgets, grid gallery with black and white effect, and many other features that will surely make your online store look amazing.

Shirtbox Flat WooCommerce Multi Purpose Theme

ShirtBox Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive multi purpose WooCommerce theme with a unique square look applying the latest flat-design style trend. It is perfect either for an ecommerce site, an online boutique, or creative business website. Outstanding features include Revolution Slider, FlexSlider, and Camera Slider, Live Chat, WooCommerce Catalog mode and compatible with WooCommerce extensions (zoom magnifier, ajax search, wishlist), advanced top menu type, and many other features to help you get your eCommerce site up and running.

Bistro Store eCommerce WordPress Theme

The Bistro Store Premium WordPress theme is a clean, stylish, custom-designed, modern eCommerce WordPress theme built using the latest technologies in HTML5, CSS3 and Bootstrap 2.3.2. This flexible premium theme comes with custom page templates, unlimited sidebar and color customization combinations, is fully responsive (compatible all mobile devices like: tablet, mobile phone, laptops etc.), with an advanced theme option panel, built-in Revolution Slider, custom product sliders, custom single product and portfolio pages, is social media and search engine optimized, has a special offers module (daily deals), 10+ custom widgets, special footer modules, and even a social media friendly newsletter module.

Flat Design WordPress Themes You Can Flaunt

Design trends come & go. Some rise to the top like a shooting star and stay there with the rest of the stars while others burst like comets and fade into the night sky. One so called design “trend” that has actually been around for the longest time has been getting much attention only recently. In fact, even Apple has finally embraced it and has incorporated it in their latest iteration of the iOs. Say hello to the flat design. And it has found its way in many of the newest WordPress themes being released. Here are some examples of WordPress themes that have gone “flat”. Check these out.

Nova Flat & Clean Responsive Theme

If you are looking for a WordPress theme that can be used for multipurpose applications and for diverse types of websites, check out Nova Premium WordPress Theme, a clean, flat design multipurpose premium theme that will surely amaze you. It’s got a sample content importer, 14 homepage options, 9 premium sliders, unlimited header options, a page builder, fluid layout, a skin manager, and a short code editor just to name a few. The flat graphics are integrated nicely and they add to the overall professional look of the theme.

Showy Bold and Flat Portfolio

Impress your clients with this ultra minimalist, boldly simple, flat design WordPress portfolio theme, Showy. Design agencies, creative professionals, and freelance artists will love the simple, uncluttered look of this premium theme that will surely put their creative work in the spotlight. Less is more, indeed. And if it’s a portfolio showcase you want, you have everything you actually really need in this excellent theme.

Flat Responsive Portfolio Theme

If your’re looking for a fresh new way to present your portfolio in step with the latest flat design trend, Flat Premium WordPress Theme is worth a peek. The horizontal scrolling action gives visitors the feeling that they are going through a glossy high end design magazine. You get a choice of 2 homepage options, flat design interactive social media buttons, AJAX pagination for quicker load time, collapsible side menu, tons of other features, plus it is retina ready (great for images) with an optional retina logo upload field feature.

Revusion Flat Corporate Theme

Revusion Premium WordPress Theme is a flat responsive, modern and very professional looking corporate theme packed with features for today’s modern business. Revusion integrates Pixeden flat icons into its design as inspired by the current flat design UI trend. This premium theme gives you several different layout options via its page templates. You can choose to add a testimonial page, a team page, a services page, an FAQ page, a gallery page, aside from the usual blog, portfolio, and contact pages to ensure you can pick exactly what you want to add to your site. This retina display ready theme also comes with the Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin.

Sistina Flat Multipurpose Shop Theme

Sistina Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern WooCommerce theme, designed with a fresh flat style and with a great responsive and retina-ready design. The cool flat graphic elements, modern typography, and streamlined layout give this theme that modern flair that will appeal to today’s modern shopper. This WordPress theme includes several premium features like the Wishlist and the Compare Products features, the Product Enquiry form (for catalog use sans the shopping cart), the Ajax layered filter, and also a Popup plugin to show offers and news.