The Internet’s so fast moving it’s difficult to keep up with the latest design trends and web technologies. Every so often at ITM Design, we come across some excellent web design and development blogs that are constantly updated with excellent content to keep you on top of the moving trends. Below you will find some of our favourite web design and development blogs we like to visit on a regular basis.
Why we like it: Great design with useful tutorials covering the latest web technologies.
Web Designer Wall is one of our favourite looking websites on the Internet. The design demonstrates the latest trends on the Internet; using layered, torn pieces of paper to make up different areas of the site, all sitting on top of a hand drawn abstract background with some areas being slightly grungy. The colours are rich and appealing without drawing the eye from the content.
It offers tutorials for web design and development, as well as news about the web and inspiration for designers. The site has a great online presence and the tutorials - which cover the latest web technologies - are always written extremely well with an extensive amount of n for each topic.
There’s many useful posts offering great resources for design inspiration and the owner of the website has an excellent flair for design, the graphics and tutorials on how to recreate them are plenty enough inspiration to make you want to open up Photoshop and start experimenting with the new ideas and techniques on offer.
Following on from our previous post: “How to make Animations and Animated Graphics in Adobe Fireworks“, we’ve now got the basic knowledge of making an animation in Adobe Fireworks. We can animate a graphic, moving it a small amount, each frame, across a series of frames to make the final result appear as if our graphic is actually in full motion.
Our tutorial today is going to cover the rest of Adobe Fireworks’ useful tools and commands for making animation even easier and more impressive looking! We’re going to use symbols and tweening, a method of animation that became popular in Adobe Flash. We’ll also take a look at onion skinning and distributing to frames, all techniques that are useful for animation in Fireworks.
Here’s what we want to achieve (click to see a bigger view):
Our stickman is going to move from A - B across 12 frames, and the waves will do the same but at a slower speed. Unlike our last Fireworks Animated Stickman tutorial, we’re only going to need to animate 2 frames (A - B) and Fireworks will do the tweening - which is short for inbetweening (doing everything in between frames A and B).
Read on to find out how simple it is to animate our surfing stickman…
If you’ve signed up to a website in the last few years then almost certainly, you’ve come across a PHP Capthca Script.
A PHP Captcha script is a way of determening whether the form on a website is actually filled in by a human rather than a computer program. As many websites offer better and better features, there’s more potential for those features to be exploited and as such, programs are used to attempt to automatically fill in registration and comment forms on a website to access them. Captcha’s have become the most popular method to prevent these automatic programs from completing a form submission. A Capthca is a simple challenge-response test, usually requiring the person to repeat a text string that appears in an image, in a field on the form. Images are used to present the challenge because it is difficult for an automatic program to read from the image.
An example of a Captcha validation form. Click to view our demonstration.
In our free PHP Captcha Script, we’ll provide you with the code and images to make implementing a Captcha form on your website as easy as could be! We’ll discuss how it works and how you can customise it to suit your website as well as make effective Captcha images. Read on for our complete guide…
