25 of the best SweetCron-powered Lifestreams out there in no particular order.

The other day I was looking around for some nice Illustrator tutorials to satisfy my need for the creative process. I discovered that there’s surprisingly few tutorials covering cartoon character drawing in Illustrator. Despite it’s superior usability when it comes to working with “Illustrations”. I looked around for a while and at the end of my rope I found, in total, 25 really nice ones. I think some one should really start doing some cool Illustrator tutorials covering Cartoons and Characters. Would be such a great concept for a tutorial site. Anyways, here are the 25 I managed to find that is really good and showcases the awesomness of Illustrator.

Finding decent hi-quality vector icons for free via google is kinda hard & annoying. My results mainly lead to sites that wanted to sell you icons. I don’t beleive in paying for things like that, especially when there’s an abundant amount of vector icons that are available for free. So enjoy the list I have compiled of free vector icons. (Almost all of them have been checked to be used for commercial and non-commercial projects but double check while downloading)

In this article we take a closer look at the nature of drop-down navigation menus, analyze situations in which they should or should not be used, discuss various implementations and finally showcase a couple of bad and good examples of such menus. The article also includes various tips and suggestions to help you work with your drop-down menus.

Nothing can be more useful than handy tools you can use “on the fly” in your design process. Whether you’d like diagramming application, create vector images, format or optimize CSS code, generate patterns- you can use dozens of tools to make your life easier. Today we wanted to share with you a comprehensive list of more than 40 online tools that will really make your life easier and on the fly.

Covers. Quite the underappreciated art form. And if no one judged a book by its cover, why does so much creative gruntwork go into designing the truly best ones? After doing a piece on books by famous designers recently, we got inspired to hunt down broader tributes to the art of book and magazine cover design. And here’s what we came up with.

Recently I saw one cool sketchbook for designing web site mockups. The problem was I couldn’t find out how to order one copy. The idea of that sketchbook was to simulate web browser on paper. So I decided to build one.

Arguably this trend was made popular after the release of Apple Leopard OSX and it’s groovy auroral/starry branding. Adding this simple effect to your background or header can make a very plain dark web design come to life.

Here are 20 more handy jQuery plugins that have made websites much sleeker and more interesting.

Typography plays a big role in this type of design. If you have been struggling to find the right font for your clean designs, here are 40 of them that are both clean and beautiful.

There are a large number of Javascript image galleries and sometimes it’s hard to decide which one is better. Here are the list of the best galleries you can use for presentation of your images.

We have hand-picked different background image trends and tutorials you can use to create an amazing background images for your upcoming website design.

In this post, I want to explore the countless tools and resource for designing forms, and I want to show you how you can use these tools to your benefit to create the perfect form that will help to maximize conversions, sales, subscribers or for whatever else you may be using your form.

Just like the use of paper in web design, the use of doodles and hand drawn illustrations give an informal, friendly and accessible value to the website as well as giving a fantastic visual addition to the design. Check out this roundup of 30 stylish examples of doodles in web design for your inspiration.

50 excellent navigation menus — we feature CSS-based design solutions, CSS+JavaScript-based menus and Flash-designs. However, they all have something in common: they are user-friendly yet creative and perfectly fit to the style of their respective websites.

These arty-farty web designers are always telling you how your site should look. Don’t listen to them! Don’t they know the customer is always right? Here are 10 things a ‘good web designer’ would never tell you about choosing the perfect design.

Every designer has a set of controls they rely on to communicate an effective UI. This is my library of essential controls.

For the most part, we never notice the “visual weight” of a site. That’s a good thing. Experienced front-end developers optimize their site to load quickly and display accurately across all modern browsers. In this post, I will detail how to analyze the bottlenecks preventing websites and blogs from loading quickly and how to resolve them.

If you are looking for that perfect icon for your web site, blog, web app or application, you will find them here. Below is a compilation of the best ever Web Design and Development Icon Sets.

There’s a ton of free and Open Source software that you can use for art and design, and much of it rivals paid software. Here is a suggested tool kit. Where possible, we’ve tried to suggest multi-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) apps. Apps are arranged into 15 categories.