The Flexible Box Model is part of the CSS3 Specification that doesn’t really get a lot of attention. While everyone’s off checking out how to use selectors, the flexible box model is crying in the corner asking why no one pays him any attention, and rightfully so! The flexible box model has the potential to change the way we design our websites.

After much work I present to you Cleanr. A free wordpress theme from Webtint for you and all your friends to use. It’s clean, minimalistic, cross browser compatible, and loads of other stuff. You should definitely download it (at the bottom of this post)

Valentine’s Day is here once again. Love is in the air and how better to celebrate this wonderful (loving) day than with a bunch of beautiful wallpapers to paint your desktop with pretty pictures for showing your love? These wallpapers are good enough to be used all year round, not just on Valentine’s Day. You can also check out more Valentine’s Day Wallpapers here.

Recently, while following the hype that the iPad produced, Steve Jobs made a comment which stood out for me over the iPad and the fact that it didn’t support Adobe Flash. He said that Adobe were “lazy” and lack of Flash wouldn’t be a problem for the iPad since everyone will be moving onto HTML5, but is HTML5 really going to replace Flash?

Shorthand CSS When you’re designing a website, you’ll often find yourself adding class after class to your CSS Stylesheet. Eventually your CSS file becomes incredibly bloated and loading it takes forever and a day. Shortening down your CSS file, quite obviously, is the perfect way to make your web pages load faster, and the best way to go about making your CSS file smaller is to use shorthand CSS. Shorthand CSS is simply a way of writing CSS in a must more palatable form; a way to make your CSS tidier.

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. (via Wikipedia)

When it comes to web design, usability, in essence, is how easy your users can get around your site. It all comes down to you making your users think about what they have to do as little as possible. When the user has to think about something as basic as getting around a site, it can become tedious and can turn your user off your site.

As a designer, typography is very important to me. It’s how I convey messages and how I catch the attention of the people I’m trying to give the information to. Typography is an art form in itself, with type artists forming beautiful characters to create famous fonts that are used across the world. Below I’ve created a list of fonts that everyone should own, as well as free fonts that you’ll also find interesting.

Using the right font for your full color brochure printing projects allows the reader to quickly understand the message you are trying to convey.

I watched Avatar the other day and I’ll admit, my first reaction wasn’t “Gosh, this’ll make an awesome article”. However while thinking about the movie one day I somehow managed to relate it to web design, and I thought it’d be a fun way to explain something I was already thinking of writing. There might be a few spoilers in here, so if you haven’t seen the movie you mightn’t want to read this (or you might, I don’t know).

In Avatar the main protagonist, Jake is brought to the mysterious world of Pandora, where he faces a lot of challenges that force him to make quick decisions on what to do. A lot of the stuff Jake goes through can be related back to web design, and below I’ll explain how.

Twitter is arguably the website that defined 2009: it’s quick, easy to use, and popular. Not only that but it allows you to get your name out there, contact people, and even make new friends. It’s especially exploded inside the design community, where it’s quite hard to name a design website that doesn’t use it in some way or another.

For websites that use twitter therefore, it’s important that they can tell their users about it, so that their users will be able to keep up with the site even when it isn’t updated for a while, giving them a sense of continuity. For this reason, twitter icons to allow your users to follow you are important. So below I’ve brought together over 150 attractive twitter icons for use with your website.

Red is one of the most powerful colors in the spectrum and for that reason it is usually used badly in websites, as it can easily overpower everything else. When used correctly though, red can be a great color to use in web design, and can add a strong touch to it. It can be used to highlight something, or even to make the website stand out more, helping to drag the user in. Below are over 30 red websites that make great use of the color red.