February was a busy month, we have been watching great news, articles, tutorials, scripts, tips and lot of inspiration for web designers popping up everyday so we thought it would be a great idea to wrap all those resources in one package where you can check to fuel your creativity.

CSS Tips

1)Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding- 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding

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2)Creating a Body-Border- Creating a CSS border viewable at all times even with vertical text that extends beyond the bottom of the page.

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3)10 best CSS hacks- Here is the list of 10 hand picked CSS hacks and tricks which can help you in your CSS code and also save some time. You may also want to check our own version of CSS Hacks that can be a time saver.

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4)Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples- As always, an excellent overview of some trends with beautiful examples from Smashing Magazine: ’speaking-block’ navigation, mac-style, icons, vertical tabs, hand-written and some gems in the experimental section.

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5)7 Tips for Great Print Style Sheets- A few tips for creating a print style sheet that will ensure your website is user-friendly, regardless of the medium it ends up in.

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6)CSS Web 2.0 Glossy Text- You don’t need to be a Photoshop pro to create Web 2.0 glossy text that seems very trendy today.

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7)How to Create Beautiful and Elegant HTML Lists Using CSS- This article will explain and show you how to style lists inside blog posts, articles or other basic HTML documents.

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8 )Inspiration Overload- 100 CSS Galleries You Need to Check Out

9)How to recreate Silverback’s Parallax- Parallax scrolling is a psuedo-3D effect often used in side scrolling games to create depth. In this article Clearleft lead designer Paul Annett explains how he used the effect to great success on their newly launched Silverback site.

Contests & Competition

10)Smashing Header Graphics Contest- Smashing Magazines held a contest for webdesigners to share their skills with fellows designers and creating a free repository of downloadable header graphics. This contest inspired us to create 70+ Visually Impressing Header Graphics, which is a small showcase of more than 70 outstanding header graphics with excellent use of visual elements and interface design.

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11)What is Graphic Design Poster Competition- Veerle held a very hot competition for graphic designers to sharpen their pencils to come up with something creative or witty that visualises the question ‘What is Graphic Design?’. It’s unbelievable how many people have responded to this contest with amazing graphic design posters, the winners were announced here.

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Wordpress News and Hacks

12)The Lorelle Story - An Interview with Lorelle VanFossen, the one telling us what’s going on in the WordPress world each week over at The Blog Herald, and she’s also the author of the most excellent blog Lorelle on WordPress.

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13)48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress - WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms (if not the most), is capable of being more than just a blog platform. Here you can find 48 unique and great ways to use wordpress.

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14)Wordpress Security Tips and Hacks - A round-up of tips on improving your WordPress blog security with sensible tips, techniques, and WordPress Plugins.

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Freelance Advices and Tips

15)Pay Me Please - A Freelance Web Designer’s Guide to Billing and Pricing.

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16)3 Uncomfortable Ways To Make More Money As A Freelancer - If you want to make more than you’re making right now, you can take these three “uncomfortable” strategies to heart - and to the bank.

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17)10 Phrases Every Freelancer Should Kick-Out of Their Vocabulary- The title speaks for itself.

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18)Freelancers: Manage your projects- Essential tools and web apps for any freelancer who wants to stay organised, keep the client up to date and keep records of milestones, deadlines and project files…

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Inspiration

19)25 Beautifully Dark Website Designs - An awesome collection of great designs that feature dark colors by Vandelaydesign.

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20)Pattern inspiration- This post can be an inspiration for creating patterns in Illustrator or to re-decorate your house. Like with everything the true power lies in how you execute it.

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21)Grid and Column Designs- If you are looking for inspiration for grid and column design, here is a nice collection of 32 column-based websites.

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22)Insanely Creative Portfolios From Around the Web- Some interesting portfolios for inspiration.

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Tutorials

23)Extensible CSS Interface I: The Foundation- Cameronmoll Briefly discusses the importance of producing visually rich interfaces with semantic, accessible, and portable markup underneath.

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24)Beautiful CSS Form- This tutorial explains how to design a beautiful form (Facebook inspired) using a clean CSS design with only and
tags to simulate an HTML structure.

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25)How to Put Smokin’ Bullet Holes and a Wanted Sign into a Piece of Wood- make an awesome wood emboss effect, put bullet holes into the wood and finally smoke ‘em up to a gnarly Wyatt-Earp-just-walked-past look.

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Ajax and Javascript

26)Create soft edges on images- A demonstration to create soft edge for content images using lightweight and unobtrusive JavaScript and CSS interventions. With it you can create "cloudy" soft edges or one-side opacity gradients without any image editing software.

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27)jQZoom- Allows you to realize a small magnifier window close to the image or images on your web page easily.

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28)Massive AJAX Country/Area Drop-down List- A database driven AJAX selection tool which re-generates the list of areas based on the country the user selects.

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29)FancyZoom 1.1- Smooth Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages

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New Launches

30)XHTML Challenge- XHTML Challenge is a freshly launched project by Valentin Agachi, which enables you to create challenges between two websites. The script will analyze the sites’ XHTML markups and return a report for the visitors to vote.

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31)CssLeak V2 Launched- V2 of CssLeak has launched with some new features with a new template, a news system which will soon become public, the possibility to leave a comment on a design and to download the color palette file for Photoshop (in .aco).

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32)CSSMates- A new forum for CSS related topics and discussions.

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33)PureEdit- PureEdit is a newly launched CMS that dramatically simplifies the back-end development of your website while giving you full control of the front-end design and programming.

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