Web Design Blog | Web Design Fan | Resources for Web Designers and Graphic Designers

Today is the last day that you will be able to purchase our Web Design Fan Club content and resources for the launch price of $36/year.

Later this month, we will be releasing: 4 premium icon sets, 2 premium Wordpress themes (preview), brushes, textures, and more advanced jQuery and PHP tutorials. Maybe even a video or two. Grab all of this plus a whole year of awesome stuff for just $36/year today or wait until later and wish you hadn’t missed it for so darn cheap.

htmlspecialchars is an extremely useful PHP function, but proves useful in more languages that just PHP. It is necessary to use these HTML entities whenever you want HTML to display as plain text instead of being parsed.

Today we have a cool treat for everyone. We’ve taken the theme you see here at Web Design Fan and packaged it up for the Web Design Fan Club. Now you too can enjoy our beautiful design, as well as build your own variations of it.

In the package comes the full Wordpress theme as well as 2 PSDs: the home page and a post page. Also included is documentation to help you through the process of installation and modification.

Today, Doug Feder will be guiding you through the steps to integrate jQuery with PHP while using a MySQL database to count clicks on links. This tutorial will help beginning coders see how to get started using MySQL with PHP and see cool jQuery tricks to improve the look and functionality of designs. We also have a live demo and source files for download below so that you can work along with the video.

Planning a website for a client can sometimes be a frustrating exercise. You must be able to take your vision and translate it into something that everyone can understand and interact with. Last week we discussed having a sketch/idea book to perform tasks like this with, but sometimes it just isn’t enough. You need something more interactive, more professional, and less messy.

Luckily, there are dozens of fantastic mockup tools available on the web to help you do just that. Below we will outline 5 of the top choices.

Vector characters can establish a memorable image of your site in the reader’s mind. In this roundup, we have compiled a list of 25 character design tutorials which will show you how to create beautiful and mind-blowing character designs.They contain a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials and will be helpful for beginners to advanced users. Many of the tutorials will take you step by step on the design process from sketching to the coloring processing, shapes processing and contains many cool tricks which might come in handy during your next project.

Today I am bringing you an interview I did with Tomas Laurinavičius, a very talented young designer and one of our top contributors at Web Design Fan. I picked his brain about his design process, some artists he is inspired by, and he dropped some other knowledge along the way.

Click through to see the video interview.

Today we are bringing our Web Design Fan Club members a simple and effective mobile app landing page template. Originally designed by Tomas Laurinavičius, this template is easy to edit and make your own. The package includes the XHTML and CSS files, as well as the original PSD. Take a look at our screenshot below for a look at the template or visit the original tutorial we posted here.

An “idea book” is what I call the notebook that I carry around to flesh out my ideas. Its a simple concept that I think a lot of other designers and entrepreneurs use and it is something that I find invaluable.

I have found you can use an idea book in two distinct ways that can help web designers: (1) for planning actual designs (layouts, icons, vectors) via the aide of the pen and (2) for planning a client project in a business atmosphere. Read more to see how having one can help you.

This is a tutorial for what is the most complicated jQuery program I have written to date. It is a beautiful script with a simple output that has many potential uses. Undoubtedly, it caused me more stress than it should have, as I debated the most efficient method of displaying a cropped image. Should I use background position or image clipping, scaling or thumbnailing? Which of the many options between methods and styles are cross-browser compatible? After days of debate and testing, I found the perfect combination for a code that supports all high-request browsers (including Internet Explorer 6).