From Source: 1st Web Designer

In early days blogs were supposed to be simply online diaries and way how to write your thoughts without any business purpose. I will start to write personal blog in my own language as well and that’s because I wanted to find out how many simple and minimalistic themes are available for Wordpress. Certainly I got again more than expected, but I tried to narrow article and be picky, but I still got 43 interesting and simplistic themes.

Enjoy typography, white color, grid, white spaces and remember – very often simply good typography and great use of white space is a lot better than theme overloaded with effects, colors, images and too much CSS styling!

Listropolis’ Take:

Tons of good themes here, and most are perfect for building an amazing site. Use these themes as the structure for your Wordpress blog, then add elements for color. Simple and free!

See the List

Related Reading:

WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide

Understanding by Design: Professional Development Workbook

Breakthrough! (Free Chapter for a Limited Time): The World's First Physician: Hippocrates and the Discovery of Medicine

From Source: Smashing Magazine

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.

In this selection we’re glad to present you Madawaska ExtraLight, Apparatus SIL, League Gothic, Contra and many other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time.

Listropolis’ Take:

Anytime Smashing Magazine makes it a list, you just know it’s outstanding, and this font list doesn’t disappoint. I’m a font junkie, but I have never seen most of the fonts on the list. If you’re a designer, or do anything with fonts, you’ll want to bookmark this post. Our favorite is Contra (probably more for the name than anything else).

See the List

Related Reading:

Playful Type: Ephemeral Lettering and Illustrative Fonts

Head First Design Patterns

Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition

From Source: VisionWidget

One of the most important aspects of identity is a logo. A logo can say everything a viewer needs to know about a company or a personal website. However, logo design is not an easy task. Even the simplest of logos often take a lot of time and thought and may cost thousands of dollars.

In today’s world just about everyone has a website and everyone needs some sort of identity to make a presence on the web, You don’t want to spend a lot of money on a logo but you are certain you need something to set you apart. This is the idea behind Shaboopie logos.

So we hope our free logos create an identity for your online presence or at least inspire you to pursue your own designs. Below is the few examples of our logosdesign PSD file format for free download.

Listropolis’ Take:

A very nice set of generic company logos with free, downloadable PSD files. I only see 15 listed, but the post claims there are 80+. Let me know if you find the rest.

See the List

Related Reading:

Designing Logos: The Process of Creating Symbols That Endure

Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition

Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's All Things Considered

From Source: Hongkiat.com

Having another designer’s PSD file is as good as owning a chef’s recipe book. The only difference is – we designers are willing share and sometimes we even distribute them ourselves so others can download and learn from our techniques. Photoshop .PSD file reveals the techniques used on a specific design, it also tells us the style of the creator and most of the time there is something new we can learn from it. In today’s post, we want to bring to your attention some of the that you can download. We suggest you consult the author before using them for commercial purposes. Full list after jump.

Listropolis’ Take:

There are tons of places to get PSD files, but this is one of the best lists I’ve ever seen. If you’re looking for files to learn new techniques, make this your first stop.

See the List

Related Reading:

The Drawing Inspiration: Visual Artists At Work

Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

From SpeckyBoy:

This article is a list of the best and most creative Social Bookmark Icon Sets for your web sites or blogs. If I have missed any, leave send me the link via the comments.

Listropolis’ Take:

Not much to say. It’s a great list of beautiful social icons from some of the best designers.

See the List

Related Reading:

Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's All Things Considered

North Light Collection 2: The works, viewpoints, and techniques of the contemporary artists as featured in the pages of North light magazine

Logo Design Workbook: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Logos

From Instant Shift:

This list is a combined effort of professional web designers and art directors to speeding up your project development time so you can save money and focus on making great applications. All the screenshots again made in usual way so there is no confusion in checking the actual preview and corresponding font types.

The basic purpose behind this post is to show popular and professional free font types to save your time searching online. This time direct download link available for all the font. You can also find some related free references at the end of the post. Just make sure to read the license agreements carefully as they can change from time to time.

Listropolis’ Take

As far as I’m concerned, you can never have too many great fonts, and these are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The post has plenty of screenshots showing the fonts, so there’s not a lot of jumping to other pages for examples.

See the List

Related Reading:

The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist

Dexter by Design: A Novel (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

From Smashing Magazine:

2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated to WordPress were created. Of course, tons of new hacks were discovered, which helped lots of bloggers enhance their blogs.

In this article, we’ll show you 10 new useful killer WordPress hacks to unleash the power of your favorite blogging engine. Each hack has an accompanying explanation, so you’ll not only unleash the power of WordPress but also understand how it works.

Listropolis’ Take:

An amazing list! Usually, the “hack” lists are old hacks that can now be accomplished easily, and that almost everyone already knows about, but this is Smashing Magazine, so you know it’s good stuff. The list has some surprisingly great ideas, and all are very simple to do. If you have a wordpress site, take a minute and read/bookmark this site as a reference.

See the List

Related Reading:

Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries

Beginning WordPress 3 (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

Non-Designer's Design Book, The (3rd Edition)

Stiftsruine Lippstadt #2

Very First HDR

Mt. Tolmie stairs, HDR and color rotated

sunset at werder

live beside the church

heaven knows what I want

friendly tractor

somewhere in oderberg

castle rheinsberg

kloster Lehnin #2

by the water

Amtsgericht Wedding

evening scenery at werder

stairway to the water

main castle babelsberg

Related Reading:

Fated to Be Free

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From Noupe:

Icons is everywhere on the web. In most modern designs it is used to not only complete our design but also to attract the user’s eye. Designers use Icons to create breath-taking designs and decorate their desktop as well. Today we’re going to take a look at 50 most beautiful icon sets we’ve found over the year 2008.

My Take
Who doesn’t love Icons? This is easily the best list of icons I’ve seen. I especially like the hand-drawn doodles, and the social sticker icons. If you need to update the icons on your site, this is a great place to start.

Related Reading:

Head First Design Patterns

Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition

The Design of Everyday Things