When building a web app it’s important to keep in mind how much of it’s success is built on having a thoughtfully designed, well laid out and instantly usable user interface. A bad UI can ruin an otherwise fantastic app, and can cause more people to abandon it. Of course, the opposite is true too – great UIs can encourage use, and can mean more sales and more people talking about and sharing your app.

Fractal (getfractal.com) is a new and very interesting online tool that enables designers to easily and painlessly create beautiful email designs.

Today we’ll be offering three lucky readers the chance to try it out with a free 3-month subscription!

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).

Today we are giving out a few flash templates from Warm Forest, enter for your chance to win a handcrafted, super-costomizable Flash template made for designers, agencies and photographers.

Warm Forest sites are designed with a strong focus on typography, grids and usability and use the latest Flash technology including back button support and deeplinking. You can easily customize all aspects of your site – from adding your own logo to changing all the colors – without knowing any ActionScript or even owning Flash. The ActionScript source code is included so designers with an interest in Flash can learn how a professional, best practices following Flash site is put together

Javascript has a lot of overlooked potential as an object-oriented language, but it deserves a closer look. Today, we’ll be looking at literals, prototyping to extend existing objects, and last creating our own Javascript class. Get ready for some client-side, object-oriented fun!

Even though Javascript is object-oriented, a lot of people don’t take full advantage of the powerful solutions objects can give you. And it’s easy to see why – it can be daunting at first to hear all these terms like prototyping and closures and literals. In fact, though, with a good explanation it’s not that hard, and since objects are the very building blocks of JS, it’s important for any web coder to have a grasp of how they work. Let’s start in the best place – the beginning!

In joy of the very day Webitect was born, we are giving away a free blue icon set — great for bloggers, designers, or webmasters of any sort.

A special thanks to one of our bloggers, Nick Parsons, for providing this free icon set to our readers.

These icons are 48×48 in PNG format. Click on the image preview to download the zip file.

Grunge is one of the most difficult looks to achieve, as it is a very unpredictable design style. That’s why tutorials for grunge web design are needed — designers can study techniques and best practices when creating this type of web design style to achieve the best look possible.

Here are ten web design tutorials — some for just design, others with coding included — so you as a designer can improve by learning new techniques and best practices.

Every week there are a lot of sources of inspiration and showcases showing only the best. In reverse, here is a showcase of those showcases — here is a showcase of this week’s best sources for design inspiration.