Superb Hosting » Web Development

40 Ballin’ Free Icon Sets!

ahogarth — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:50:59 +0000

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Psychopaths, that’s who; I don’t trust a person who doesn’t swipe and thoroughly relish a free pen, t-shirt, button, hat etc. You can be sure that a man or woman who walks by a free samples tray in the grocery store, or waves a hand at a free lanyard at the Home Depot is probably going back home to have schizophrenic conversations with his alternate personality or preparing to execute systematic torture on a slurry of screeching teenagers. Do not trust that person. In fact, though I assume no responsibility for any trouble you might get in, you should probably tackle and make a citizen’s arrest on any individual who happens to smile politely instead of grabbing up that free enviro-grocery bag being distributed outside of the local Sears.

Once again, I will vehemently deny everything I’ve said if you happen to get into any trouble for this. I will turn over on you like a fat lady at the beach. What does that mean? I don’t know. Who are you anyway?

Check out this awesome collection of free icons from sixrevisions.com.

Also, if you are into free things like icons, tutorials and other freebies, check out the design and development articles in the SuperbHosting.net support wiki!

Retro and Vintage Photoshop Tutorials

ahogarth — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:49:21 +0000

Ahh Retro…what a bizarre concept. It’s incredible to imagine that simply because something was fabricated in an era before our own, regardless of what it is, that it could suddenly acquire a brand new level of kitsch value.

With little to no discretion, vintage has sort of taken over. Those tight Levi’s and old school Nikes are no longer the uniform of the bleak hipster ‘sub’cultures. Recreations of vintage t-shirts are sprawled across popular clothing chains like American Eagle or Hollister and the even that plain, brandless hoodie from American Apparel has become an advertisement of its own. Old pop cans are ‘vintage chic’; toys, cookbooks, plates. It doesn’t matter what the item is, as long as it’s old it can be blessed with the funky, avant-garde image that is close to impossible to emulate. Although it sounds oddly oxymoronic to say, vintage is in, so it is probably useful to learn a few vintage tricks of the trade for Photoshop; see how close you can get to the real thing.

Smashing Magazine has a slew of Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials for your creative pleasure. Smashing Magazine also has an excellent article about the merits of using vintage styles in web design.

Ajax techniques and tutorials

Jason Barnes — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:56:54 +0000

Sometime around 2005 and the release of Google Maps, Ajax became the next great thing in programming and was nearly synomous with O’Reilly’s now overused term Web 2.0. Ajax, which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, allowed developers to improve a user’s experience with Internet applications by making it possible to request data from a server and load that new data onto the page without ever needing to refresh the actual page. Using the Google Maps reference again, this allows you to zoom in on countries and cities, new images are displayed, and not once does the page new to be reloaded or refreshed.

Six Revisions, a weblog for the standards-compliant web designer and developer released an article with 25 Excellent Ajax Techniques and Examples. You can create calendars and rating systems, learn how to develop an upload script or a login form – all using Ajax. The examples/demos are probably at an Intermediate level, and take advantage of some popular frameworks like Prototype JS and mootools, and are a great way to spice up your website or web application.