5 Symbol Fonts for Graphic & Print Designers

When creating a document or working on a print design there is a often a need to utilize symbol fonts (or benefit to be had in doing so). These are useful for such things as bullet points, simple squares and much more.

Below are five of my favourite ‘Symbol Fonts’ that I find invaluable.

You can download these fonts via the links included below. I have also created a free ‘wall chart’ including these fonts (and their shortcuts) for you to use if you do download them.

Free Font Symbol Wall Chart (PDF)

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Free Green Design Company PSD Layout

Here is a nicely designer PSD web page template. You can use it for your portfolio or company’s website. The PSD canvas size is 1020 x 1020 px and all the layers are grouped properly. They are free to use for commercial and non commercial projects. You can download the zipped file at the end of the post.

This layout was designed by Kawsar Ali from Desizn Tech for Skyje readers.

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Building a Website for Foreign Markets

Every business should know one thing: expanding to foreign countries is a must for any successful company.

Luckily, the internet has made things much easier than, say, twenty years ago. Now you can reach clients across the world, from Beijing to Beirut.

To successfully expand into foreign markets, your website must be localized for the target market. This means more than just translating the text – you must understand the local culture and ensure your website respects local customs.

Designing a website for a foreign market may seem daunting, but is not as hard as it first seems. Here are six steps towards building a cross-cultural website.

Find your market

Market

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The importance of a quality portfolio

Even if a freelancer is required to be communicative and open, he doesn’t necessarily need to bring more negotiating techniques to the table. His strongest selling point is, without any doubt, his portfolio. A portfolio is the gathering of a freelancer’s or web designer’s most successful work. It’s simple: a logo designer will have in his portfolio his best logos and a web designer, his most successful layouts.
A good portfolio is surely the best promoter one can get; nothing is more convincing for a client than a similar successful project that you have already done. So, a good portfolio, built so that it covers all of the potential employer’s needs is a guarantee that you will be called in to do projects for the employer .I am sure that this short intro raises a lot of questions regarding the correct way to create a portfolio; this article will try to answer them.

1. The portfolio must only contain quality items

The most important thing in creating a successful portfolio is making sure you only include your top work in it. This is common knowledge and so any low quality work in your portfolio might have severe unwanted effects on your image and chances to get a job. It’s sad and unfortunate but if you happen to have some bad work in your portfolio it will outshine your good work, the people viewing it will no longer try to appreciate your good work and they will only focus on the bad one.

2. Portfolios must be detailed but not boring

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Drupal 7 made a striking launch: What is there for you?

The wait is over now. Drupal is celebrating version 7 so you do!  Now bloggers have enough reason to rejoice as they can build everything from personal blogs to advanced web applications or enterprise applications. But, do you think the journey from 6.2 to 7 was comfortable for Drupal Developers?  Has it been able to fix up the issues with Drupal 6? Even if the latest version seems successful, can it replace the importance of WordPress?  A series of big questions lies for us to solve in future!

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Design Cocktail 5 – The Coolest Bundle For Creative Minds

design cockatilThe guys from Designious.com outcome themselves this time! They just launched another mind blowing design bundle – Design Cocktail 5 includes an awesome collection of high-quality resources for creative professionals at an unbeatable price!

The value of this fantastic bundle is $729 but you will get it for ONLY $29! You save $700!

All the products included in this graphic resources pack are created in house by Designious.com and Wpwizz.com, so you have the guarantee of getting only fresh and high quality products! (more…)

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The combination of HTML5 & CSS3: Pros and Cons

It is always good to adopt the new advancements in order to remain competitive and utilize the benefits that they bring forth. Offering similar kind of beneficial relationship to designers and developers is the combination of HTML 5 and CSS 3. Both have many new features, which if applied can increase the efficiency level of a website and yield the desirable results.

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creating watercolor illustration effect in Photoshop

Book cover design can be a lot of fun for a graphic designer. Book covers might use photographs, typogrpaphy, original illustration or a combination of these effects. In this tutorial, we’ll look at a neat watercolor effect in photoshop you can use on book covers (or in other types of graphic design). This example book cover was for a real world client – a PHD student who wanted an illustrated cover for his thesis. His paper was discussing strategic solutions for airports and how agents can be communicated with. To graphically show the agents acting I used ribbons flowing around the tarmac.

Seeing it was to do with technology, the clean hard lines seemed appropriate. I created the design below first as a vector. The result was a nice illustration, but flat and unfinished. I took this into Photoshop, downloaded water colour brushes, paper and finished it off.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to do a water colour treatment on an illustration in Photoshop. We’ll just look at the back cover of the example below:

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25 Sleek + Sophisticated Interior Design Sites

This stunning line-up of interior design sites feature all sorts of themes ranging from eco-friendly style, handcrafting and repurposing, chic mid-century interiors, whimsical spaces, furniture, knick-knacks, and optimizing the space of tiny apartments.  Let these stunning interior design sites influence your own interior landscape, and open your mind to new ideas – whether on the web, or in your home.

Interior Design Blogs

Apartment Therapy

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Tips To Avoid Being a Bad PHP Programmer

You may be a professional in the industry of web development but have you ever judged yourself to find out whether you are a bad PHP programmer? While everyone has their own bad habits, there are some practices that are worth examining, reconsidering and correcting to avoid getting marked as a bad PHP programmer.

Know that it never hurts to accept your bad practices and get it rectified in time. Mostly it is observed that programmers get lazy and accumulate multiple shortcut codes that sometime winds up to become a complete disaster.

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6 Tips for Using Social Networks at the Office

Anyone who’s worked in an office for an extended period of time knows how hard it is to stay completely on task all day long. Sometimes giving yourself a mental break by checking social network updates and making a few plans can give you the energy you need to get through the day. Unfortunately, most workplaces frown on social network usage while on the clock, so you may need to get a little bit creative. Read on for some tips on how to work social networking into your office routine.

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Win a SlideCake component – Winners Announced

Contest : Leave us a Comment and subscribe to Win a “SlideCake” component, a Powerful Flash Slider.

SlideCake

Flepstudio.org has just launched SlideCake, a Powerful Flash Slider component made for Flash designers and webmasters. With SlideCake, you can organize any type of web content into a beautiful and user-friendly slider. (more…)

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