Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

With the recent post on retro and vintage in modern web design, it’s time to put the theory into practice. We’ve scoured the Web to find some impressive Photoshop tutorials that can help you achieve an “old-fashioned” look-and-feel in your designs. In this post, we go back to the 1900’s all theway to the 1980’s to showcase a variety of [...]

As web technologies progress, websites and web applications are becoming more responsive, providing us with more ways and techniques to interact with the users. Form, more than ever, has been superseded by function. The following websites deal with interface design, user experience, user-centered design, usability, and everything in between – all with the goal of enhancing the user’s interface. Continue [...]

You could write a book on website optimization, in fact people already have. But, here’s 10 really easy steps to getting your sites optimized for speed. Hopefully this will get you started and you’ll want to investigate front end optimization a little further. Continue reading 10 Easy Steps to Great Website Optimization

I thought I would share some links to articles on pricing Web projects and creating contracts, and forms. Before you meet with a client you need to determine how you will charge (by the hour or per project) and have all of your contracts and other forms ready. These projects vary in scope, but should give you some food for [...]

Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks. With batch image [...]

These tools will create a variety of images that you can use as backgrounds for your Web pages. Visit 8 Addictive and Fun Background Generators for Designers

As a web designer or developer building a site, it’s helpful to first scout similar websites (i.e. the competition) to help you make design and development decisions. Knowing what websites work and which ones tank can give you insights and inspiration on what design elements, website features, and website content is effective. To help you in your analysis, here are [...]

This site was built to help web developers quickly select and test website color combinations. The heart of the site is the Combo Tester, which allows web developers to see how different color combinations work together on the screen. If you are looking for Color Combination ideas, check out the Combo Library. The library contains hundreds of color swatches, along [...]

It’s been about 7 months since the original Illustrator Tutorials – Best Of was published, and in that time there have been many more noteworthy tutorials released. With all of that new content , it’s only appropriate to put out a second edition of the best Illustrator tutorials. In this post you’ll find some basic tutorials on getting started with [...]

The grunge movement in design combines rips, tears, decay, smears and scratches to form a dark and gritty result. Here we’ve collected fifty of the best ever Photoshop grunge tutorials for your enjoyment and education. Continue reading 50 Dirty, Filthy Grunge Photoshop Effects