There is an old saying: “Give a dog an ill name and he’ll soon be hanged”. Transposing this wisdom to the field of website design, it is possible to say that the success/failure of a particular site is predefined by a number of factors, including a domain name, page layout, and even font, chosen for displaying the text on it. Use some dull font on your website, and it will successfully push your site into the myriad of faceless and monotonous sites in the web.

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.

Have you ever thought about what a huge impact a blog’s design has on its perception by readers? If you’re going to run a blog as a business (or part of your business), branding should be one of your biggest considerations.

 And if you’re going to pull off a successful branding job, design is essential. Having a clean, reader-friendly design that is structured to accomplish your goals is, next to having excellent content, one of the best things you can do to help your blog succeed. Let’s look at 15 secrets that will help your next blog design stand out and be successful.

Good designers know that using the right tools not only increases their efficiency but also improves the quality of their work. Good tools can help reduce repetition and allow you to focus on what matters – the design.

Today we’re going to see 50 of the best tools for web designers – these have all received high acclaim in the design community, and for good reason.

It’s more than clear that a lot of blogs like to display web design inspiration and have some type of list showing the 50 best blog designs, or the 30 best blue web designs. These lists are really helpful font of inspiration specially if it fits the project you working on at the moment. Instead of going into a css gallery to search for inspiration, why not open a list with a certain amount of web designs based on a theme selected by the blogger?

Here you will see a list of these listing post, this post will serve as your start up page for inspirations where you can go many ways and find tons of great web design within it’s listings.

Today we are going to take a look inside and behind the scenes of the web design company Southern Media. This Argentinian web design company is specialized in creating user interfaces and web designs with strong focus on usability and information architecture.

Here you will learn a bit about the history of their company, take a closer look at the great portfolio they have and get inside the studio to meet the workers and the workspace.

Every designer seeks inspiration, whether it’s in other peoples design work, some nice photography or even just getting out of the studio and walking around. One of the most popular ways of learning more about the design industry is to pick up a book or magazine written by industry experts filled with opinions, reviews and articles on all things design. I’m not going to cover books that just teach a language from start to finish (if I was, I’d be raving about Beginning CSS Web Development by Simon Collison) but rather books that look to help readers build on skills and expand as designers and developers.

When first looking to learn web design the amount of terms you’re faced with can be daunting which is why it’s important to focus your learning on specific languages and techniques.

If you’ve been learning web design or development recently, or even if you’re a veteran of the web sector, you’re sure to have heard people mentioning HTML 5 here and there. So what is HTML 5? Well, this article is supposed to act as a what’s what of HTML 5, giving you an overview of just what HTML 5 is trying to achieve and where you can find more information on some specifics of the language.