Design Shard, More Than Just A Web Design Blog

Whether you’re a noobie with Photoshop or a web design veteran, Design Shard has something to offer you.

Design Shard is a web blog that provides resources for web designers. On the blog you can find program tutorials, design tips and tricks, inspiration, exposure, and links to other valuable resources. There is a veritable wealth of information on this blog to help grow your artistic abilities and expand your online web pages and businesses.

Instructive posts teach users how to blend form and style to create dazzling websites. Video tutorials guide visitors through both simple and complex techniques in programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator. These tutorials aid in web design and structure, giving you the skill and capability to build it all on your own.

Design Shard shares artist collections and other tantalizing designs through the blog, bringing inspiration to you in the form of a showcase. Through the artwork posted and various external links available on the site, designers in need of encouragement can find that spark of creativity they are looking for.

The blog also offers advice on how to increase traffic to your website and build a better business through improved web design. Through the blog you will learn how to save money with better design, how to gain exposure, and how to maintain users by guiding them effortlessly through your website with elegant design as their handrails.

Best of all for designers is that Design Shard offers exposure to anyone willing and talented enough to participate. You can become a guest author on the blog, offering your own stories and advice to the community. Every guest author is given permission to promote their own websites and design work. Design Shard also has a Flickr group where community members can sign up to showcase their own artwork. The idea behind this is to give everyone a shot at displaying their own work while building a resource for others to become inspired by. This is probably my favorite aspect of the site.

The community is thousands strong and growing as more discover this gem. This is a great website for anyone that has a passion for web design or creativity in general. The content created by the website and its guest authors is interesting and informative. It would be great if new blog posts were more frequent (there are only one or two new posts every week), but most everything else about Design Shard is wonderful.

It would be a shame for anyone interested in the web design industry or creative field to miss out on Design Shard. The abundance of tools and resources is impressive, but the enthusiastic community and inspiring works are priceless.

Turn Your Mac Touchpad into a Drawing Tablet with the Pogo Sketch

The new Pogo Sketch stylus may turn out to be a low-cost alternative to a professional drawing tablet.

The Pogo Sketch, from Ten One Design, is a new pencil-style stylus for use with all “capacitive touch screens,” as the product’s site explains.

What this means, for those that have no idea what “capacitive” is (e.g., me,) is that it is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and all Macbooks with multitouch trackpads, such as the Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air. This means you can use the soft-tipped Sketch instead of your fingers on the trackpads of these products.

But what is truly interesting about the Sketch is that, according to Ten One Design’s site, the Sketch can be used on a Macbook’s trackpad like a pencil, making it a low-cost alternative to a drawing tablet. This means that users of the Sketch may be able to go about drawing and writing naturally in illustration programs without the need for a costly tablet.

It’s hard to say how well the Sketch performs without using it; a trackpad seems kind of small to simulate the act of drawing, no matter how natural the Sketch feels. But if it does in fact perform as well or close to as well as a full-fledged writing tablet, then the Sketch could make quite an impact on the digital drawing market, discarding with the need to get a bulky and expensive tablet.

Ten One Design also has a couple other selling points for the Sketch. They point out that the Sketch, which simulates a fingertip, can be used with gloves so users don’t have to worry about their hands getting cold when using their iPhone in the winter, and also ensures that users don’t get their iPod Touch all smudgy with their greasy fingers.

But really, these seem like trivialities compared to the possibility of being able to use Adobe Illustrator to draw naturally at a fraction of the cost of buying a Wacom tablet.

The Pogo Sketch costs $14.95 and is available here.

Extensis Adds Adobe Illustrator and InDesign Support for Universal Type Server

Universal Type Server, Extensis’s font management software, has been updated with plug-in based support for Adobe InDesign CS4 and Illustrator CS4, plus compatibility with the 64 bit version of Windows Vista.

The update, which is free for owners of Universal Type Server, allows users to make use of the program’s centralized font management features within Adobe products. Universal Type Server allows fonts to be held on a central server and distributed to design teams efficiently and consistently, and through a collaboration with Adobe the program’s functionality has been deepened, ensuring ease of use and cross-platform effectiveness.

Features include corruption checks to flag bad fonts, font pinpointing and auto-activation, ensuring designers need not wade through an enormous list of fonts, an attractive and simple user interface, real time or on-demand font synchronization, to ensure the entire design team has access to the right fonts at all times, and web-based remote administration.

Rifling through fonts by myself can be frustrating and difficult, so I can only imagine what a chore it is to collaborate a whole design team’s font usage. This program seems ideally suited for just that, giving administrators a great deal of control over font databases while keeping font acquisition simple and quick for designers.

Universal Type Server starts at $1,395 for the lite version, which includes 10 installs, and is available for Windows and Mac. Free trials are also available at Extensis’s site.