It is undeniable that one of the most important element in a successful graphic design has something to do with the font type you use to spread the message and sometimes, when you need to find the right fonts you don’t have it on your local system. Here is where AllMyFonts comes to help you. With more than 128,000 free fonts in TTF format, AllMyFonts.com is one of the biggest fonts resource you can find on the net.

AllMyFonts service started few months ago as a personal project to organize those 128,000 fonts, then the site gone online but in a few days our shared hosting service deactivated it due to the high load. The site then has been removed and after few months of code optimization and caching it’s online again on a big server that guarantees an efficient and fluid service.

AllMyFonts bring you an excellent preview system where you can type any text for a given font to see how it looks. Downloads are completely free without registration of any kind. We also offer a search engine to browse all the fonts.

Note two important things. One is that AllMyFonts is on heavy work at this time, we are classifying in categories all those fonts and the other thing is that AllMyFonts is part of our site’s network. Despite these two details, I think that it perfectly fits to have a post here because its free nature and its graphic related service.

We hope that you enjoy and have fun using this big and great resource considering the very big work that we put on the site’s engine code and the hardware resources needed for this site to work properly.

When you ask what is memorable about a site, few people mention the footer. Since viewers don’t regard the footer with much importance, neither do designers – “end of site, out of mind,” so to speak – but this kind of thinking is old-fashioned. Your website’s footer can be both eye catching and functional, and with a little work it can become an essential part of the design.

Why Include a Footer at All?

Traditionally, the footer is the place to put copyright information, your email address and sometimes your mailing address. Contact information is typically also included in a contact section of a website, though, and you could probably work the copyright into a different spot if necessary. Short of giving your pages a distinct end, why should you really even include a footer?

Footers have several advantages over any other section of the site:

• Like the navigation bar, they repeat on every page of the site;
• Unlike the navigation bar, they are not required to contain only navigation links; and
• They’re at the bottom of the page, where users naturally end up after scrolling down to read each page

How to Make a Footer Useful

In a nutshell, your footer should contain only things that you want the user to be able to access instantly, no matter what page of your site they are viewing. This isn’t the place for witty text (trust me, even the best joke in the world gets dull after you read it 10 times) or heaps of pictures (remember, they have to reload each time the user visits a different page, even though they look exactly the same!)

Things commonly found in website footers:

• Contact information (email address, mailing address);
• Simple contact form;
• Link to the site map;
• Copyright information;
• Links to other sites the user may enjoy; and
• A link back to the top of the page

In essence, give the user something to do or somewhere to go in the footer, and you can hardly go wrong.

Clean Design Is Key

Clean, high-contrast text with large headlines makes your footer easy to scan, which is perfect for the viewer who has just finished reading the current page and needs to know where to go next. Another tried-and-true technique is to divide the footer into several columns to provide more white space. White space makes the text easier to read at a glance, and looks nice and clean, too.

Put the “Fun” in “Function”

Now that your footer is easy to read and provides useful information and links, you’re free to get flashy with the design. Another advantage of footer design is that it’s actually encouraged to make the footer mismatched from the rest of the site.

Ways to make your footer more eye catching:

• Easy-to-read fonts;
• Colors contrasting with the rest of the site layout; and
• Content more interesting than a copyright notice

In Conclusion

Great information with bad presentation or a gorgeous design with useless content are equally ineffective. Aim to catch viewer’s attention, then give them something worth paying attention to, and you’ve succeeded at designing a useful footer.

Whether you write a corporate blog, an entertainment blog, or a mommy blog, you want to know who is reading and what they think of your blog so that you can give your readers the information they want. Sure, you can rely on comments, but that will only capture a fraction of your readers, and only the ones motivated enough to comment on your ideas. What about all of the others? How can you capture their feedback and motivations for visiting your site?

Well, Google analytics has always been a mainstay of web traffic monitoring, but it can be confusing and may give you more information than you need. If you’re looking for alternatives to Google Analytics, here are some other ways you can gather information about your site’s visitors.

1. StatCounter

This is a great little website page view tracking tool. It’s free and it is easy to use. All you have to do is embed a small piece of code on your website. With StatCounter, your website can be tracked in ways that will tell you the overall traffic to your blog along with a break down of information for unique visitors, returning visitors, and more.

2. Clicky

If you want information that goes a little deeper, Clicky is another free service that gives you traffic data for your site. Clicky can also break down the data by individual page views so that you can see which stories on your blog are getting the most traffic. Once you know which stories are the most popular, you can attempt to create similar content in the future, bringing back more readers.

3. KISSinsights

Another way to approach analytics is to offer your site visitors a survey, but not those long, boring ones. Rather, KISSinsights offers online survey software that can target only certain kinds of readers, with parameters that you can customize, with quick one and two question surveys that will help you get direct feedback about your site.

4. Facebook Like Button

Like the KISSinsights survey software, this is an alternative to traditional traffic counters. With a Like button, you will know how many people are interested in your site enough to share it with their Facebook friends. This can serve as an ongoing popularity counter. When you see your Likes growing on specific days, you’ll know that those are the days when more people visited your site and shared it on Facebook.

5. TweetMeme

Like the Facebook Like button, you can put this little widget on your blog’s front page or on individual stories. The built-in counter on this plugin will tell you how many times your blog or a certain blog post has been shared on Twitter.

Getting analytics on your blog isn’t all about site visits – although that is a major part. It’s also about understanding what works for your readers and what doesn’t. When you can get feedback from direct questions and understand how many people shared your blog on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll get a better understanding of what your readers like and don’t like. Then you’ll be able to adjust your blog to better suit your reader’s needs.

What about a website that offers tons of graphic related resources? ShareCG is one of them, with thousands of resources in categories like tutorials, 3d models, materials, textures, animations, software, plugins, photography, poser stuff among others. All these resources for absolutely free and uploaded by their authors.

You must register to be able to download, but it’s worth the extra time registering if you can put your hands on so many wonderful resources.

First… what is HDR Photography? In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wide dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

Anyone with a “bracketing” capable camera can capture an HDR photo. Usually we shot the same photo with different shutter speed configurations, then via software we merge all the images. Doing this we can get interesting effects, add realism or just exaggerate  some settings to obtain a surrealistic shot.

DPReview.com has a very nice and technical article called The Art of HDR Photography Part 1 written by the photographer Uwe Steinmueller. If you want to know about Dynamic Range for HDR photos, then this article will be interesting for you.

I think that this technique is very interesting and you must shot using bracketing mode when you can, the result is stunning!

Ballistic Publishing is proud to announce EXPOSÉ 9, the ninth edition of the premier annual artbook celebrating the creative talents of digital artists worldwide. EXPOSÉ is the digital art industry’s premier annual publication, featuring the finest digital artwork the world has ever seen.

Ballistic Publishing is now calling on artists to submit digital images for consideration in EXPOSÉ 9. Images can be created in any 3D or digital illustration application. Photoshop and digitally manipulated photography is also welcome. We are interested in digitally-created fine art, whether it be 2D or 3D, for commercial use, or personal satisfaction.

There is no cost or limit to enter work for inclusion in EXPOSÉ 9. As with all Ballistic Publishing showcase publications, artists with work published in EXPOSÉ 9 will receive a complementary copy of the book and will enjoy worldwide exposure in the premier collection of digitally-created artwork to ever be published.

You’ll have until February 28, 2011 to submit your digital artwork. Good Luck to submitters!

…”EXPOSÉ series of book are the industry’s first annual art book celebrating the creative talents of digital artists worldwide. It grew to be a global success receiving critical acclaim from all quarters of the digital art industry. Selected by a panel of industry leaders these books showcases the finest digital artwork in the known universe…”

free-PSD is a website that offers awesome templates in PSD format for absolutely free with the only condition to put a link back to their site, pretty fair considering the high quality of the templates offered.

No registration required to download any file. The PSD files are of very high quality in a professional grade and they are even sliced so you can save as separated images to build and customize your own variation of any template.

The templates can be found at free-PSD.com and they are well organized in “colors” categories. Just be sure to browse their template archive in the “free pdf templates” menu at the top right sidebar.

Just few examples of what they offer:

Over the next 24-48 hours we will be migrating our site to a more powerful server to support the massive growth of smashingshare.com over the past few months.

During this time, there might be connections issues however this will only last for a very short period while the transfer is taking place.

Thank you and we truly appreciate you visiting smashingshare.com. Contact us anytime with your feedback!

Management