I was recently working on a personal project where I wanted to implement some cool “checkmark” icons like you see at left to spice up my unordered lists. I could’ve done it quite easily with the list-style-image property, but I was trying to keep my images and http requests to a minimum, so I wanted to figure out another way to do it (plus, the challenge sounded kind of fun).

I had just seen Nicolas Gallagher’s awesome pure css social media icons, though, and I thought, “If he can do that, than I could certainly create a simple check icon with just css3″. I did figure it out with some experimenting and testing, and today I’m going to show you how to achieve the same effect.

I’m glad to announce that today we have a special freebie release for Webitect’s faithful readers and subscribers – a fresh 8 piece social media icon set!

This set has a clean modern feel, comes in four different sizes perfect for blogging (64, 48, 32, 22), and best of all has a completely free unrestrictive license, meaning that you can modify them, use them in personal or commercial projects, and even include them in commercial products (like themes or templates).

The PHP language includes lots of helpful functions for easily filtering, cleaning and manipulating content, all of which are excellent tools in the hands of a skilled developer. A solid knowledge of these filtering tools will help you achieve enhanced security and functionality in your projects.

Today, I’m going to give you a crash course on PHP’s basic filtering functions so that by the end of the tutorial you’ll be able to easily escape data, strip tags, remove words and more.

There are plenty of great, useful jQuery plugins out there. It’s great to have those kinds of plugins and know where to find them, and the community has done an excellent job of giving those plugins the attention they deserve.

There’s a whole other class of plugins, however – brilliant masterpieces that make your jaw drop as you go, “Whoa!! How did they do that?!” You don’t find them every day, but they’re definitely out there. Today we’re going to dig through the development community and unearth 6 of those amazing under-publicized animation plugins that are guaranteed to impress every developer-at-heart. Let’s get started!

The WordPress theme market is a huge opportunity for designers and developers, especially since sites like ThemeForest have made it so easy to produce premium themes and make money from them. If you do it right, you can easily make a substantial income solely from WordPress theme design.

Of course, in order to do it right you have to know the tools and tricks that enable professionals to create work that is worthy of that title. Let’s check out some of the most vital, helpful and game-changing hacks, tools and frameworks to help you achieve that professionalism in your themes.

It’s been a while since we had a good development tutorial, so let’s reawaken the tradition again and have some coding fun today! I’m going to show you how to use jQuery and PHP to build a content editing system that will allow you or your client to easily edit .html pages visually.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, read on. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

CSS3 is developing fast, and the most exciting part is seeing all of the intriguing and attractive effects that are being invented to solve real design problems. With the combined creativity of the design community, CSS3 has quickly traveled through the zone of interesting speculation and into the territory of time/resource saving practical everyday use.

Today, we’re going to look at 7 impressive, concrete, real-life effects and techniques that you can implement in your next design. This isn’t going to be the usual overview of features – these are all specific techniques that will help your design work to be more advanced and effective. Let’s dig in!

An impressive portfolio is something that every designer aims for, and for good reason – the quality of a designer’s portfolio is often the determining factor in the success or failure of their career.

In this special 3-in-1 post, we’re going to sift through it all, look at the very best resources, and give you a definitive collection of everything you will ever need to know about portfolios.