Dainis Graveris
Role: Owner & Founder of Awesome 1WD
Dainis Graveris is 23 years old blogger and designer, founder of 1stWebDesigner, now more silently managing everything behind the scenes. He usually hangs out in Twitter tweeting design related links and chatting with people. If you have any questions or feedback that's the best place to start! Cheers!
30 Logo Designs Using Gradient 3D Effects – Inspiration:Part 3
This is already the third part in gradient effect series, I hope you’ll enjoy this one as you might like previous articles.
First one was about showcasing resources and premade gradients for Photoshop to get started, on the second part I made a research on how gradient effects are used in web designs and tried to look a little bit behind the scenes. Today you’ll see 30 logo designs using the same gradient effects to get 3D effect using beautiful colors. Actually it’s not so easy to create good looking logo using gradients, it comes from a lot of learning, but also that’s great way to easily create unique logo design, if you know how to use gradients in right way. This is kind of inspirational article to show great examples of gradient use, in the next and last gradient related article I’ll try to find really good Photoshop, Illustrator tutorials teaching you how to use gradients correctly, so stay with us and get inspired this time!
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70 Typographic, Clean And Minimalist Color Scheme Web Designs
Hello there! It’s time for little inspiration and this time I wanted to showcase something different. You may know that very popular designer slogan – “More is Less”, and yes it’s often so true – unexperienced people tend to overcrowd, use too much colors in their designs. I just love these designs – they are very light, clean and usually uses only monochrome color scheme and just one or two bright colors for links or headers.
You may also notice for such designs it’s more about grid, harmonic distribution through whole page and very silent, elegant accents. It’s not about many colorful photos,images or icons, crazy backgrounds or experimentation. Almost all of those designs are very clean, slightly increasing web page loading time, sometimes it’s crucial to have as light designs as possible, for example reddit, digg, stumbleupon social networks also consist of very few images and where is possible just color and CSS is used.
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New And Comprehensive WordPress 2.8 Tutorial and Hack Toolbox
Wordpress just becomes more and more powerful, it’s very hard to keep up with new features. Thankfully there are several very active people behind great blogs, who write very well explained tutorials and premade code snippets to let you learn everything in very easy way. Today I made my exercise to find such sites and articles, which are very new and WordPress 2.8. compatible. There are really long list with new features, you can check them in first link from WordPress Codex, so make sure you can keep up!
In summary you’ll find here 37 helpful tutorials, resources and hacks + 11 helpful WordPress related sites for further reading in long run. Hope you’ll like it!
23 Extremely Helpful WordPress Help Sheets And Resources
Cheat sheets are extremely helpful while your developing your wordpress theme, but definitely don’t remember all the code snippets or tricks. If you have such helpful reference resources, you can easily find what you need in very short time. Even if you’re beginner these help sheets will come handy to understand what the basic template files are, check wordpress site architecture and most important get those code snippets also explained in good way! This list features not only wordpress help sheets, but also SEO optimization articles, online theme generator and coding tips showing where you can look further if you’ve got problems with coding.
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Beautiful Gradient Effects On Web design – Research: Part 2
It’s Monday and beautiful time to get inspired with very good examples and research a little bit what’s happening behind the scenes from graphic designer view.
This time I will showcase and analyze gradient effects used effectively in web-design and logo design creation. It’s very important to create and use subtle and eye-catchy color combinations and transitions to achieve modern and stylish effect. Maybe you haven’t noticed but light and shadow effects are widely used and it doesn’t necessary mean just color, but to bring greater effect, use textures and then put on them light but observable transparent color effects and you’ll see magic happening. Using light you can easily emphasize places and actually lead visitor’s attention from point to point using just color, illustrations, text size.
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36 Color Gradient Sets For Photoshop and Resource Sites: Part 1
Surprisingly I did not find many articles featuring color gradient sites, color generators and lastly beautiful collections of gradients. There are big variety of many color generators, color palettes and things like that, but not many really focus on Photoshop gradients. I don’t know that’s good thing or bad, but I really love gradients, many beautiful websites and logos are created just by using color variations in subtle, very creative way.
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Collective Thanks To 80 Companies Supporting Design Community
I really must refer to Colorburned post here – He did a great job by bringing up so many companies and idea, which helped me to directly find related companies, which could sponsor my website too. It’s been a while and now I wanted to take a deep research about current companies, which use and actually buy those advertisement banner places thereby supporting design community in return helping to build good page rank and actually get very targeted design related clients. I listed here all the companies I’ve found advertising on graphic design, web design, blogging related blogs, showcase sites like mine is. Now after research I must say I was surprised, browsing through all those blogs daily I didn’t checked those sites, but now I found many good softwares, services I would really love to try myself! Not always the best stuff available is for free and really what did I see was very reasonable prices for several really good services.
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StumbleUpon FAQ, Guides, Tools, Addons And Scripts
StumbleUpon is really beautiful website where you can find regularly top content in areas you’re interested in, share interesting content and finally drive very good traffic to your own website. Actually I must say, I’ve built this website completely on social networks and StumbleUpon plays really important role too in this whole process. This time I wanted to explain some basic principles how to use SU better in daily basis and I spent some time to find many useful WordPress plugins, Stumbleupon addons, tools, several big unofficial guides to SU, Greasemonkey scripts to help you automate and make your stumbling time even more enjoyable and customizable.
Before I start, you can view my StumbleUpon profile as well, to see I am not just talking nonsense, I really spend time to build relationship, find more good friends and finally be active myself and help my friends as good as I can! I strongly encourage to look through this article, look for guidelines you are interested in and I am sure you’ll find something you didn’t know too!
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33 Promising Web Development And Social Network Firefox 3.5 Plugins
Since the big success with WordPress related article showcasing promising and new WordPress plugins, I decided to continue with similar list showcasing Firefox plugins. Several of these plugins are still experimental, but I tested them, checked for reviews and references and carefully picked these all extensions together.
I divided this article in three sections – Web development, Social development related plugins and finally just overall handy plugins for better browsing.
Also I must remind you, you will not find already popular and well known extensions here, since the mayor community already are know such plugins like – GreaseMonkey, WebDeveloper or Firebug tools for example. Just scroll through the list, check screenshots and hopefully several of these plugins will be useful for your daily Firefox internet browsing.
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250+ RSS Feeds For Every Graphic, Web Designers And Bloggers To Subscribe To
Hello there, I’ve been around the design and blogging world now for some time and since I am very active and taking serious my work, I always search for new, perspective, promising or just very popular blogs. Of course, there are big discussions about subscribing so many blogs, because it’s better if You can create your own stuff just by reading books, from your own experience or just you’re great and unique thinker. But unfortunately I am not one of those people just yet, so I feel the need to see what other blogs are writing about, analyzing which articles and why become popular and finally I got new ideas by just browsing through these blogs when I am feeling frustrated.
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