Lucas Cobb Design

We’re all creative, there’s no doubt about that. Nobody is born without creative tendencies and abilities; it’s just that some people are better at putting their ideas on paper and relaying them to other people. A lot of it is to do with confidence. If you’re confident that your ideas are great, other people will think so too!

Freelancers in the creative industries frequently find that staying in a creative mindset, day in day out, can be a real challenge, especially if they’re tired or working on multiple projects simultaneously. For all these people, we’ve compiled 15 tips for improving creativity and staying creative for longer.

Continue reading on Acris Design

It is nearly a month since the beginning of the new year and WordPress developers created some great premium wordpress themes for us.The search for WordPress themes is never ending and developers know that.

Now,why to choose a premium wordpress theme?If you want an eye-catching wordpress layout or something unique or perfectly coded to render with all browsers or something of SEO magic to be noticed on the internet,than you should choose a premium WordPress theme.Also,you`ll get full support to set the theme up.

Month of January offers us 20 beautiful and creative premium wordpress themes from the biggest places,like Elegant Themes and Theme Forest.Take a look and choose your favorite theme!

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Lighting effects are often used in modern web design to give a site an interesting and different look and feel. There is something about strong lights and colours – used right the combination will catch our attention and affect our emotions in certain ways. Skilled designers know this and use it. Light effects are typically used on dark designs as they may the effects stronger – just like we are saving the best fireworks until darkness falls.

This article is a showcase of more than 40 sites using creative and inspiring lighting effects. Hope you like it and feel inspired and tempted to use some of the ideas for your own designs. Please drop a comment if you know any websites that you think should have made it on the list.

Continue reading on TripWire Magazing

Heather Hermann, aka Calliope at DA, is a 21 years old Costume/Character Illustrative Designer and Conceptual Artist, Actress/Model and Professional Dancer that currently lives in Las Vegas, NV. Heather attended the Las Vegas Academy and graduated with a diploma in AP Visual Arts and Photography. She also has been a dancer for fifteen years, professionally for nine. Was a principle dancer in the Kravenko Ballet Company and a student in the Royal Academy of London Ballet, which for me is pretty impressive, since I also have a small dance background.

View her illustration on Abduzeedo

As graphic designers we are asked day in and day out to be creative, be original, and be knowledgeable. Our ideas can go anywhere from impressing a few fellow classmates to greatly increasing the revenue of a local/national establishment. Yet, how do we develop into a successful designer in the first place? Additionally, how do we stay on top of our game and continue to be inventive and reputable?

“The foundation of a successful designer is measured by his/her creative drive.”

It is that drive that provides us with the inspiration and motivation to work towards something influential. However, discovering what drives us is likely as unique as our own design preference. Luckily, we live in a time today where designs from around the world are available within a few clicks of your mouse. So how can we increase and build our creative drive?

Continue reading on Design Informer

Last week I went into the details of creating a Facebook page for you brand and now I’m going to go into the apps you can use to customize the look and feel of your brands page to stand out from the crowd. There are quite a few useful apps that utilize RSS, tweets, feeds, etc… but these are the ones I use and they take care of most everything my brand needs to get a positive message across. I hope you find these links useful and leave comments below on other apps that might come in handy.

Blog RSS Feed Reader
If you already have a blog, good news: there are tons of blog and RSS apps out there, but I’ve done the leg work and I found this one offered more functionality, better customization (you can pick an image to make your Facebook mini-blog look more like your actual blog) and a greater sense of control. It can be a bit buggy, but it’s worth persisting for the level of customization, and therefore attention grabbing potential.

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I decided to build a business page for my new design blog on Facebook today and realized it is simply “difficult”. After about an hour of customizing this and that I finally got the hang of it and decided there should be a simple guide published for others trying to create a Facebook business page. Well here is my attempt at this and I hope you enjoy the read and that it helps you in your Facebook endeavors.

The social networking site Facebook is used by more than 150,000,000 million people to share personal information with friends online. With those kinds of numbers, you knew it would be belong until businesses saw the potential. If you’re looking to tap the marketing potential of Facebook, you can create free Facebook Business pages—leveraging Facebook business options can provide a new channel for you to interact with your customers At the same time these pages, called Public Profiles, can also help you acquire new customers as your Facebook fans spread the word about your business to their friends.

In this Facebook how-to guide we will walk through the steps to create your own Facebook Public Profile (also called a Fan page).

Getting Started: Get your Business on Facebook
To get started, you need to visit the Facebook Advertising page. Here you will find tabs to access the following business options:

• Advertising: Businesses use this tab to create advertisements that will run on Facebook pages.
• Pages: Businesses use Pages to create a presence on Facebook that will let others join your page as a fan.
• Connect: Facebook connect lets users seamlessly connect their Facebook account and information to your site.
• Facebook Share: Design a button for your site to make joining your Facebook Public profile easy for your customers.

How to Publish a Facebook Business Page
The best way to start is with creating a Page for your business. Those who have created a personal Facebook profile will find the process pretty simple, but the step-by-step form pages will also make creating a Business Page painless for those new to Facebook.

You will need to have basic business information ready before creating the page —decide on a page name and find any images you want to upload. Remember that your company logo is best for the profile picture. When you create the page you will need to include a description of your Web site, product, brand or company.

With this information handy, simply choose one of three categories for your business: Local Business (and the industry), Brand or Product, or choose if this will be a Page for a public band, artist or other public figure. Once you select a category you are required to enter the business name. When you submit this information you will then see a Business Page that shares some resemblance to personal profile pages on Facebook.

On a side note, Facebook completed implementing changes to the Facebook business pages that will make the page look exactly user profiles.

In step 2, you’ll want to upload your business logo, provide information about your business, contact information, hour of operation (if you have a retail or local office), and a general description that describes your business. As you add more details about your business you can view the changes live on the page you are creating. This is all you need to publish a basic Business Page on Facebook.

Customize Applications and Business Details
On your Facebook Business Page you will see applications that you can include on the page you have just created. When viewing your Business Page, there is an Edit Page link on the top right. Here you can customize all options from a single admin screen.

In the previous step we took care of the profile picture, basic and detailed information boxes. Now, you will need to customize the applications that you want to use. Each Application has a small edit option by the title, letting you remove any of the available applications or customize the application to your liking.

Here are the basic Facebook Applications for Business pages:

• Discussion Boards: Enable your fans to get their ideas out into the open. Discussion boards let you know exactly what your fans and customers think and want.
• Events: Organize gatherings or let people know about your upcoming business events.
• Information: Manage settings for the Information application.
• Notes: Share your business news or engage your fans through written entries.
• Photos: Upload photos to your page and allow your fans to share photos on your page also.
• Reviews: Fans and customers can leave honest opinions about your business.
• Video: A high-quality video platform for pages on Facebook.
• Wall: The Wall is an open forum for your fans or friends to leave comments, thoughts, and ideas about you on your Page or Profile.

The last option you will need to use is the Settings area. This is where you edit country restrictions, place age restrictions and change the published status of your business page. When you are happy with the way your Business page looks, you click the Publish this page link.

Tracking and Gathering Business Page Fans
Within 48 hours of publishing your page, you’ll be able to access ‘Insights’, which is Facebook collected data about how your business page is being used. Here you can track pageviews, number of fans, removed fans, wall posts, discussion topics, reviews, photo views, and more.

After you have successfully created a Business Page you can link to it from your own Web site, e-mail campaigns, or encourage your own personal Facebook friends to become a fan of your page. Remember, when a personal friend becomes a new fan, that message is displayed as a notification to all of your friend’s friends. Similar to word-of-mouth marketing, this is a great way to bring Facebook users to your new Business page.

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

Download the newest version of Jquery for use with these plugins here.

MOPSLIDER 2.5

Mop Slider is a revolving image gallery plugin with functionality for auto-rotation or user-rotation.

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Vegetables, what can I say? They are good for you. You should eat vegetables everyday. Etc…

But have you ever stopped to look at the beauty in vegetables? There are vibrant colors and rich textures on the surface in every variety you can think of. Reds, greens, blues, smooth, rough and rigid. The sky is the limit when it comes to what nature can produce and with science new breeds of fruits and vegetables are being engineered every day.

So the next time you sit down to dinner look down at those peas and carrots and let them spark some creativity. Trust me it will be fun and it will taste good too.

Photo By Darwin Bell

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Usability is key for your readership. Here are some tips to keep you on track with keeping your blog in order. Let me know which ones you liked in the comments section. Thanks!

Tip 1 – Ask for comments.

It is key to ask for comments in your posts. How often do readers just scan through your post and bounce? If you remind them to comment they just might. It makes sense.

Tip 2 – Respond to comments.

How often have you commented on a blog post expecting a response and been denied that? Your readers expect a response in a timely manner and do get offended when they don’t get one. Make it your first priority to get back to your readers or they will leave your blog in the dust.

Tip 3 – Make it easy to subscribe

If someone likes reading your blog, chances are they are going to want to subscribe to it. Making it as easy as possible to accomplish this is key. I suggest placing your rss icon in the upper right corner of your blog as this is a very common place to find the subscribe section. Remember, most people on the net are like sheep, they look in the same place on every site for what they are used to and the upper right corner is the standard place for the rss icon this day in age.

Tip 4 – Keep on topic

When you start your blog I’m sure you will have a topic you are interested in mind. Make sure you stick to that topic as this is what your readers are interested in. Writing about what you are passionate about will also lead to great posts because you have really know what it is you are talking about.

Tip 5 – Use images in your posts.

People are visual beings and images speak to them. Your readers will find interest in what you write, but can grab hold of the topics of your posts better with visual aids. I’d suggest one or two images per post, but more might be in order depending on your topics.

Tip 6 – Link, link, link.

If you know you have written about a topic before, link to it in your present post as it’s something your readers will be interested in and will directly correlate to what you are writing about. This tactic keeps your readers interested in your blog and its good for the search engines too.

Tip 7 – Related posts go a long way.

This is the same concept as linking in your post, except these usually are found at the end of your article. There are several plugins that do this for you “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” is a great one and the one I use on this blog. Scroll to the end of this post to see it in action.

Tip 8 – Contact us

Make sure you have a contact us page on your blog whether you use a contact form or just leave your contact information for your readers to find easily. This allows your readers to contact you privately with any matters they would like to discuss, like advertising or personal comments they have for you that they don’t want displayed publicly in your comments.

Tip 9 – Make popular posts easy to find

A popular post section is a must on any blog. Make it easy to find for your readers. I place mine in the footer, but most place this top post list in the sidebar. This lets your readership know what others find interesting on your blog and they just might find it interesting as well.

Tip 10 – Sitemap for the search engines

There are tons of plugins that will auto-create a site map for you. A site map is the navigational structure of your site and helps the search engines index each page you create. The plugin I use is the “Google XML Site map Generator“

I hope these tips help you in creating and running your blog. If you have more usability tips be sure you leave them in the comments.