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!
PhotoSquares Portfolio WP Theme Review & Exclusive 25% Discount
PhotoSquares WordPress theme was created to give users most flexible solution for building online portfolio. Flexible is a word that describes best almost everything about the theme, you can totally customize the theme without knowing any programming at all.
In this review I will explain some of the most powerful PhotoSquares theme features, I just want to show what really makes this theme unique – as title explains already this theme will suit the best for portfolio and photographer sites,who put their biggest focus on images, beautiful works they’ve done before. Let images speak and enjoy the benefits!
Read More
Unique 3D Text – Xara 3D + Photoshop Tutorial
So hello again! It’s time for my first tutorial I’ve ever been made. I actually hope You will enjoy this one, and that will encourage me to do some more. We will use Xara 3D to get 3D text effect, then export text to Photoshop and add some style there. If You haven’t got Xara 3D, You can download demo for free ( 15 days trial) and You can read my review about Xara and their pros and cons. And yeah, If You don’t want to download program I will give You *.psd file with text elements, so You can skip Xara part and get straight to Photoshop retouching part.
Creatives Showcase: 38 Deviantart August Inspirational Pieces
During hard organising and designing work, I was getting so busy I didn’t get any time to create some more valuable articles from my side. Since actual development process is going to end, I will warm up today and feature some of the best artworks from Deviantart to get you inspired. If you recall, I always enjoyed to write some personal thoughts, impressions about almost each specific design and I will try my best again to name points, which really make design to stand out.
Read More
Freebie:25 Original And FREE Abstract Smoke Brushes
This brushes pack contains 25 high quality photoshop brushes made with Photoshop CS4. The size of the brushes is aprox. 1200 pixels and the quality is the best you can get:
- sharp edges
- smooth gradients.
This brushes are very useful for making wallpaper backgrounds, like the famous Vista wallpaper, or web headers, even on photo manipulations as fake smoke. Free for personal and commercial use. Enjoy!
Read More
1WD Is Changing: Insights And Email Newsletter Finally!
If you’ve been active reader of 1stwebdesigner, you may have heard I have been planning big redesign for a long time. I think I’ve spent several months analyzing other similar blogs, thinking about features we need to include and just to understand which ones just don’t work.
I consider new redesign will be complete site relaunch, we’ve got a lot of positive feedback about new redesign already, when we tweeted about it and gave a sneak peek insight in new design, you can still see it on my Deviantart profile (not final version though, we are making small improvements all the time).
Read More
73 Blog Designs From Deviantart You’ll Never Forget
For some long time I’ve been gathering great blog designs from deviantart to get inspired and now I will showcase them all in one huge article!! Surprisingly finding great ideas and designs have been much easier in Deviantart than any other web design showcase sites.
I didn’t add any comments this time – compare these designs yourself and try to understand why ones really stand out, well others seem a little bit classical. Notice small things, how designer puts a little bit unique style in its design to make emphasis like folding, comment,date boxes which stand out from layout, icons, background textures and nice shadings.
Read More
DepositPhotos Giveaway: 3 People To Win Accounts
DepositPhotos.com is a great resource for buying and selling Royalty-free photographs and vector illustrations. They slogan is – “Buy It Easy! Sell It Easy” describing how easy it is to do both tasks so you are in the right place if you are searching for premium photographs or trying to sell your work and earn some extra money!
Why am I writing this? Because today we have a giveaway to launch with you and we are giving away:3 accounts in Depositphotos each worth 50$!
Read More
Modern Element Trends In Minimal Webdesign of 2010
As you may heard, I’ve been working on site redesign for a long time already and now I am deeply researching modern elements in minimal webdesign - I decided to share my research with all of you.
I think this modern&minimal trend will rule for some time, time for loud elements and web 2.0 cheap shiny badges has been long gone – time for subtle emphasis, accents, big and stylish fonts, lightly textured backgrounds,grids, lots of negative space, usage of icons.
Read More
18 Wireframing, Mockup And Prototyping Tools To Plan Designs
I will keep repeating how important is to plan your webdesign, sitemaps, draw flowcharts,wireframes before even start to do actual functional and design planning! Since I am deeply researching this topic myself, this time I found the most popular wireframing software available.
Just 3 of tools I found were free, but every tool has free trial or basic plan so you can definitely try and test it yourself for one time projects.
Read More
21 Easy To Customize Premium PHP Contact Forms
One of the most hardest jobs in web development processes definitely is form creation. Coding behind these forms are painless enough, but then you need to think also about Spam filters, usability, interface and functions should work in all cases.
Keeping this in mind, I gathered here 21 various premium Php forms created for all the cases you should ever need – sign-up forms, advanced contact forms powered with Ajax, jQuery, e-mail signup forms, file uploads and much more. All of these forms also come with good user interface and design, so you don’t have to worry about those little things, but just focus on big tasks! How cool is that?
Read More
