Designers Mantra: October 2014

Friday, October 17, 2014

Premium Chrome Aluminum Hard Case for Apple Iphone 4

Logos are the representatives of companies; they have a vital role to
play in developing a company’s impression. The identity and
individuality becomes notable through a logo design
so companies are always prudent enough to pick up an apt logo which
goes with the quality, strength and standard of the company/brand.

The font of a logo is equally important as the logo itself. The font
should not be long enough to give a messy implication, it has to be
readable and not a jingle of puzzle. Generally there are three sorts of
fonts that are used in logos i.e. Serif fonts, Sans Serif and Script
fonts.

The Serif fonts are not very often used as they sometime become
shrink in the process of printing, the look of such fonts get tattered
in their sleek edges thus they are not recommended mostly.

The Sans Serif fonts are widely used and are most recommended, we can
see them in the logos of Pepsi, Sony & Apple etc. These fonts have
the same width from every angle, even if they are condensed shorter they
don’t get crippled or scattered. That’s why I have included Sans Serif
fonts in my following collection of logo fonts.

Script fonts are used occasionally, like we see it in Coca-cola logo
design, which is the pioneer of using script font. Script fonts are the
curly fonts, they somehow or the other have the same glitches found in
the process of printing like Serif fonts, they too get shabby when
undergo printing procedure, mostly the problem is originated in the
textile printing. So, only use bold script fonts for logo design.

I hope you will like the collection put together for you, many of
these free fonts have been used by me in making various logo designs,
these are one of the best beautiful free fonts of 2014.

1. Gasper | Free Slab Serif font for logo design 2014

2. Diavlo | Best Free Stylish logo font

3. Harabara | Best free san serif logo font

4. Fontin | Recommended free logo design font

5. Barkentina | Elegant Free Font for Logo design

6. Fontin | Sans Bold free font for logo

7. Fontastique | Beautiful Free Font for Logo Design

8. Musket | Free logo font 2104

9. Prosto | Free professional font for logo design

10 Abraham Lincoln | Free Serif font for logo design

11. Aero Matics san serif font for logo

12. Maven Pro Free Thin Font for logo

13. Sansation | Free font for logo design & headings

14. Constance Rounded font for logo design

15. Modern font for logo design free

Source

Mobile Phone and Cases

Henna White Flora Case for Iphone 5

Acefast-INC-Plastic-Case-Cover-for-Iphone-5-5s-5c-Henna-White-Floral-Paisley-Flower-Mandala-For-iPhone-5-5S-0

Thursday, October 16, 2014

The Only Guide You Need - WordPress SEO - Designers Mantra

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Creating Maintainable WordPress Meta Boxes - The Front-End - Designers Mantra

Building a Website With Progressive Enhancement

When building a website, you have a few ways to approach doing so.

You can start by creating the most advanced version of the site with
all of the scripts, styles, and so on, and then have it render in older
browsers via graceful degradation, you may opt to ignore older browsers,
or you can start with a basic page and add scripts and styles such that
it becomes more functional via progressive enhancement.

In this series, we’re going to take a look at the latter.

Now that we’ve covered the theory of progressive enhancement, we can
create a simple page to illustrate the approach. The site we will be
creating will be just a simple information site: a few links, some text,
images, and a contact form.

We will use the widely adopted F layout (if you don’t know what it is
take a look at this great article on Web Design Tuts+: Understanding
the F-Layout in Web Design).

Step 1: Basic HTML

Start by creating the index.html file with this HTML code:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Example Website</title>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

Step 2: Heading and Menu

Now let’s create a heading for our website. To comply with the rules, we will just use the <h1> tag for it:

<h1>Our Sample Heading</h1>

After that, we can create the menu. Usually, you would
use the <ul> tag for it, but since the page has to look decent
without CSS, we will use the <nav> tag and place anchors in it:

<nav>

<a href=”index.html”>Home</a>

<a href=”about.html”>About</a>

<a href=”offer.html”>Offer</a>

<a href=”contact.html”>Contact</a>

</nav>

Note that even if you don’t use indentation in your code (and you
should to make it more readable), you have to do it here, because
without CSS, the spaces between the links are the only thing that will
separate them when viewing the page. Of course, you will not notice it
since the browser has a default CSS for them.

Here is how our page should look:

Step 3: Example Content and Footer

To get some sample text, you can go to
http://www.lipsum.com/ and generate a few paragraphs. Remember the
rules: we will not put the content in any special container <div>.
It has to be semantic, so we will use the HTML5 <main> element.
Put the text in the <p> tags just below the menu.

<main>

<p> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… </p>

<p> Nam aliquet tempor turpis… </p>

</main>

Now add the footer using the <footer> tag:

<footer>Copyright © 2014 SomeNonExistent Company. All rights reserved.</footer>

The page should now look like this:

You can create the About and Offer pages in the same way—they will
not have anything special in them (you can add their names as <h2>
tags just above the content).

Step 4: The Contact Form

The last thing to do in HTML is the contact page. Copy the contents
of your index.html to contact.html and remove the contents of the
<main> element.

Now add the heading for the form (into the <main> tag):

<h2>Contact Us</h2>

After that, we can add a <form> element with appropriate fields
for the user to fill (since the server side of things stays pretty much
the same I will not cover it here, so if you want to test your form you
will have to write the back-end yourself):

<form method=”POST”>

<p>

<label for=”name”>Your name:</label>

<input id=”name” name=”name”>

</p>

<p>

<label for=”email”>Your email:</label>

<input id=”email” name=”email”>

</p>

<p>

<label for=”message”>Your message:</label>

<textarea id=”message”></textarea>

</p>

<button type=”submit” value=”Send”>Send</button>

<button type=”reset” value=”Reset”>Reset</button>

</form>

The <p> tags do not break the semanticity rule because the
label and input combo is actually a paragraph. The contact page should
look like this:

The CSS

Now that our page is working, we can start to make it
look a bit better. Create a file and name it style.css. Now add this
line to the <head> section of your document:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css”>

Step 5: Base Styles

The first thing to do would be to change the fonts and overall shape of the page:

* { font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; }

body { width: 900px; margin: auto; }

Two lines of CSS and you can see that the page looks a bit better as it’s no longer using the default fonts.

Step 6: The Header

Now let’s add some looks to the header: space it a bit, change the font size, and add the background:

h1 {

padding: 100px 10px 20px;

margin: 0;

background: #dfdfdf;

font-weight: normal;

font-size: 3em;

}

Notice how we changed the font size — we used em instead of any other
unit. This is because of the last of the rules explained in the first
part of this series: Users can change the base size of the font and if
we had, for example, used px, their settings would not be respected by
our stylesheet.

Step 7: The Menu

After fixing the header’s appearance, we can get on with
the menu. We will also change the font size of the anchors, remove their
underline, and add a background when they are hovered over or when they
have an active class:

nav { background: #aed8ff }

nav a { text-decoration: none; font-size: 1.3em; color: #333; padding: 15px 25px; display: inline-block; }

nav a:hover, nav a.active { background: #dfdfdf; color: #666; }

Now add the active class to the appropriate anchors in your files so they are appear “pressed” when the page is loaded:

<a href=”index.html” class=”active”>Home</a>

Here is how it should look like now:

Step 8: The Content

Here, we will aim just improve the readability by
increasing the line height (don’t forget about users’ settings—we can
change the size of purely visual elements like headers and buttons, but
users set their default font size for a reason). We’ll also change the
font and add some padding:

p {

font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif;

line-height: 1.6;

text-align: justify;

padding: 10px;

}

Here is the result. Notice how the readability improved with such a small change:

Step 9: The Footer

This will also be just a small cosmetic change: background, padding, and centered text:

footer { padding: 10px; background: #dfdfdf; text-align: center; }

Here is how the footer looks like now:

Advertisement

Step 10: The Form

The last thing to do is to fix the appearance of the contact form.
First, let’s remove the padding and margin of the <p> elements:

form p { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

Now let’s set the width of the <input> elements and
<textarea> to be the same. We also set display: block on them to
line them up nicely:

form input, form textarea { width: 300px; display: block; }

Finally we change the <button>s to take up half of the form’s width:

form button { margin: 10px 0; padding: 5px; width: 148px; }

This is the final result:

Conclusion

In the next article, we will use some JavaScript (specifically, jQuery) to add some interactive elements to our website.

For those of you who are more advanced developers, you may find that
this tutorial didn’t teach anything you didn’t know about HTML or CSS.
Since we’re working this strategy from the perspective of a beginner,
that is to be expected.

Alternative, look at it this way: We created a design that is based
on its content and not based on a pre-existing design. Of course, it’s
simple and straightforward, but it helps to demonstrate the point
without including a large amount of CSS and other assets on the page.

If you remove the stylesheet from the document, you should see the
point that we’re trying to demonstrate: The page’s layout stays the same
and you can still use the page without issue.

Before the next article, please leave your questions, comments, and feedback in the form below.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Submit Sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing

After you create an XML sitemap
and upload it, you should submit it to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, All
three search engines require you to create an account and authenticate
ownership of your site. If you add or remove pages from your site in the
future, you can generate a new sitemap, replace the existing version,
and use the “resubmit” option within each account.

Google Webmaster Tools screenshot

Google

Log in to Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/).

On the Webmaster Tools home page, click on the “Add a site” button
and enter your URL. Follow the instructions on the page to verify your
site.

Once your site has been verfied, click on “Site configuration” in the
left menu to display more options and select “Sitemaps”. Click on the
“Submit a Sitemap” button and fill in the sitemap location with
“sitemap.xml”.

Yahoo Site Explorer screenshot

Yahoo

In the Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/), enter your site in the yellow “My Sites” box on the right. Sign in at the login screen.

Your site name will appear with a yellow dot on the right indicating
“New” status. Click on the dot to begin the authentication process.

After authentication, click on the site name and select “Feeds” from
the left menu and fill in the sitemap location with “sitemap.xml”.

Bing Webmaster Center screenshot

Bing (MSN)

Log in to the Webmaster Center (http://www.bing.com/webmaster).

Enter in your web address and sitemap location. Follow the instructions on the page to authenticate your site.

Top 20 Most Stylish WordPress Templates – Fashion World

66 Beautiful Free Calendar PSD Designs

When it comes to Image editing or photo enhancement, Adobe Photoshop
is usually the primary option to consider. However, the software package
itself is a quite hard to learn — and extremely hard to master. And of
course, Not all design lovers are web designers.

You can find numerous amount of free design stuff online. Finding
free PSD website template also not very difficult but it’s very hard to
find the design elements which reflects fusion between creativity and
design trends.

In this compilation below, you’ll find some of the best Free downloadable Calendar PSDs
which might handy for your design projects. This is not the traditional
long list with all the available PSD templates on the internet but it’s
an refined collection of best handpicked PSD templates.