Let’s be honest. Being a web developer or a web designer doesn’t exactly give you an edge with the pretty girls (or guys) at your local pickup bar. If you were a part-time firefighter or investment banker, maybe. Nevertheless, the feud continues between web designers and web developers over which profession is the true calling. Like the yin and yang, these two are in constant battle to prove their dominance over the other, even when they work closely together.

Here is an infographic of the differences between web designers and web developers.

Click to enlarge.

Infographic by: Shane Snow. Shane Snow is an entrepreneur, writer, and recent Columbia MS/Digital Media graduate. Visit his personal site and follow him on Twitter @shanesnow.

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About the Author

Wix is a free website builder tool for quick and easy creation of quality Flash websites. Follow them via Twitter as @wix, and subscribe to their blog where they post useful articles for website owners.

Sourced from: Six Revisions

Abstract backgrounds are very common in web design and for other purposes like poster and wallpaper design. Photoshop provides plenty of potential for designing amazing abstract backgrounds, and in this post we’ll showcase 25 tutorials that show how it can be done.

Create Abstract Colorful Balls Illustrations in Photoshop CS5

How to Create Abstract Colorful Background with Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

Blend Tool Backgrounds (video)

Create Electrifying Light Effects Around an Image

Chroma Wallpapers

Quickly Build an Abstract Background of Colored Bars

Digital Star Effect

Stripy Abstract Wallpaper in Photoshop

Creating a Mac-Type Background in Photoshop

Abstract Lighting Effects

How to Create an Abstract Colorful Rainbow Background

Lines Tutorial

Creating Colorful Disco Lines Effect

Aurora Borealis – North-South Polar Lights

Design Eye-Catching Laser Particle Abstract Effect in Photoshop

Hexagon Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

Really Cool Eclipse Effect in Photoshop

Create a Carbon Mesh Background in Photoshop

Design a Vista Styled Wallpaper

Windows Vista Aurora Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Creating an Abstract Background for Poster

Create a Futuristic Abstract Wallpaper

Creating a Stunning Digital Smoke Effect

How to Create Vibrant Lighting Effects from Scratch

How to Create Brilliant Light Streaks in Photoshop

For more Photoshop tutorials please see:

• 60 Photoshop Tutorials for Photo Touch Ups
• 40 Tutorials for Creating Wallpaper in Photoshop
• 35 Tutorials for Creating Website Layouts in Photoshop
• 35 Photoshop Tutorials for Designing Your Own Posters
• Photoshop Tutorial Hall of Fame

Sourced from: Vandelay Design Blog

Portable music players may let you enjoy music on the go, but the disorderly headphones cable suspending all over the body just messes up the tidiness. Providing a solution, Elecom has developed wireless headphones, named the “Actrail,” for the iPod Shuffle to offer clutter-free music to the listeners anywhere, anytime. Integrating a 3.5mm jack on the side to keep the Shuffle in place, the Bluetooth headphones replace the regular over-the-head band with the dorky wrap-around-the-back-of-your-skull design to attract the trendy users. Measuring 112mm in depth, 150 in height and 57 width, the wireless headset weighs 46g only and supports 30mW input and 20Hz ~ 20kHz playback frequency zone. Priced at ¥4,200 (about $50) a pair, the Actrail is available in Japan with pink and white color options.

Continue reading…

Transparency is one of those things that can really add depth and make a website design pop – when it’s done right of course!

We’ve collected 40 websites that make great use of transparency. Some of them are using transparent PNGs and others are using the CSS opacity property. Enjoy!

Go Life Church ↓

Blurb Creative ↓

Russ Kirby’s Portfolio ↓

Behance ↓

The Greenhouse ↓

Brad Colbow ↓

Tony Chester ↓

Antonio Floro Flores ↓

Evodence ↓

Music Addict Designer ↓

Go 4 Events ↓

About Andrew Vickers ↓

Design Attik ↓

4mula Design ↓

Bressane ↓

Aurelien Reaut ↓

Mint ↓

GoMedia ↓

Housing Works ↓

Lift UX ↓

Sam Brown ↓

Bulls And Arrows ↓

Envato ↓

Guillaume Verdon ↓

Fix Outlook ↓

Line25 ↓

Digiglass ↓

Respiro Media ↓

Imaginaria Creative ↓

Matt Zeilinger ↓

WWF ↓

WebMedia Design ↓

DemeadBlu ↓

Bertu’s Gym ↓

Koko Digital ↓

Inspiration in a Box ↓

Christine Galvin ↓

Untorock ↓

Avalonstar ↓

24 Ways ↓

Your Turn To Talk

I hope you liked this post! Please take a minute to chime in and tell us what you think. Any sites we missed? Make sure you drop a link in the comment section :)

Sourced from: SpyreStudios

Throughout history, great artists always found new ways to show their creativity to express themselves and create new trends and techniques to remark their work apart from the rest of the crowd. The Definition of design is more critical in modern terms as now design is a way of communication; and, more specifically, Web design is a well define platform for content. There is no “Good” and “Bad” in design. It always define as a “Different”.

Sourced from: instantShift

…is a discouraging and hazardous occupation.

Like a majority of the earth’s population, I am a big fan of the machinations of Mr. Arthur C. Clarke and his writings. He is considered one of the greatest science fiction writers of the 20th century and he also had a penchant for predicting the future with some high level of competency. While many of his predictions seem outlandish his thoughts on telecommunication were remarkably prescient.

Case in point, this Horizon video from 1964 where Mr. C. delivers some mad-Nostradamus-style-predictions on the world of today.

The teaser poster for season 4 of the AMC Originals series ‘MadMen’ was released last week. The poster is at once familiar, simple and says a tremendous amount about what’s to come:

Don Draper is starting over and has all the tools he needs; his suit, his phone, and his cigarettes. In addition, he has established his footing and is looking towards the future.

For those who haven’t seen season 1-3, we aren’t going to spoil anything. What we do highly recommend is placing the first three seasons on your Netflix, by picking them up at Amazon.com or by getting a ’season pass’ on iTunes. Because of the time period and superlative writing, this series will be worth watching again and again. We here at Bauer Graphics can’t recommend it highly enough.

The executive producer of MadMen, Matthew Weiner, recently told Entertainment Weekly that the new season is “…about stripping away the things these people think define them. Once they’re taken away, they just may have to look at who they really are.”

The new season begins Sunday, July 25 on AMC.

E3 2010 is upon us and with it comes a bevy of new game trailers and videos to upload, watch and share. For the better part of three days, I have been working to find ways to better embed and clean up some of the videogame offerings on YouTube.

That was when I stumbled across this article on MakeUseOf.com that had several hints all in one place. Here are some of the tricks that can save you loads of time and make your video embeds more professional.

View high quality videos
Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

Embed Higher Quality Videos
While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed high quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

Link to the interesting part of a video
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

Hide the search box
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

Embed only a part of Video
Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

Autoplay an embedded video
Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

Loop an embedded video
Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

Disable Related Videos
Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

For more hints on how to get the most from YouTube, head on over to MakeUseOf.com for the complete list.

With Apple going all coo-coo bananas lately, it’s nice to see that another one of our favorite “do no evil” companies are producing some super slick stuff.

Now that the beta is available for Mac, many of the artists here have opted to install Google’s browser, Chrome. Those who have used it are claiming that the speeds are “ridiculously fast.” While there are still some anomalies and glitches in the beta release, the response has been generally favorable.

The challenge for Google’s marketing team will now be how to make this browser from ‘generally favorable’ to ‘holy sh** I HAVE to try this out’ status. The following video is a really good start:

Can you imagine working for a company rich enough to pay you to do such ridiculous stuff in the name of science, speed and progress?

Now, keep in mind that they use the term “rending” and not “loading.” We are guessing that the pages aren’t actually loading from the internet but being pulled from a cached version of the page. If you tested Firefox, Safari and even *gasp* Explorer under the same conditions, I don’t think you could tell a difference with most browsers if they’re already loaded in memory.

Damn you marketing! You almost got me again!