Archive for the ‘DesignFloat’ Category
What do you know about Gestalt psychology? This is probably something you’ve never heard of before. And that is why it is essential that we challenge the lack of knowledge and fill this long felt want. Gestalt principles are known to be applied to perception and form-generating capability of our senses. In other words, it is all about visual recognition of unified wholes instead of just a collection of simple units. And as people often tend to draw some far-fetched analogies between different things, we can see these principles sufficiently exploited in the field of web design.
Commonly there are 6 Gestalt laws that show how people tend to organize visual elements. Those are proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, symmetry, and common fate. Today we will start off with introducing you the proximity principle in the context of TemplateMonster’s website designs.
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First up, the Gestalt law of proximity (nearness or physical closeness) states that objects or shapes that are close to each other appear to be more related than things that are far apart. Even if the objects are radically different they are perceived as a visually connected group if they are placed close together.
As website designing is about organizing the content, here the layout and placement of content is everything. The principle of proximity calls for related items to be grouped visually, whereas unrelated elements should have enough whitespace in between to communicate they are different. This helps create a website that is really easy to get around in.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts – David Hothersall: History of Psychology
This means that the collective presence of the bunch of items is more meaningful than their presence as individual unrelated items. Proximity creates related meaning, and the items that are in close proximity to each other imply some sort of communication relationship. This causes us to perceive logical groups rather than separate things and define the importance of one group over the other.
Let us now demonstrate you the expressive power of proximity being accomplished in our website templates. These are the first two examples of content-rich templates that illustrate the proper proximity between objects that are related.
![Proximity Detection in TemplateMonster’s Website Templates [Die Gestalt im Design]](http://blog.tmimgcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Personal-Portfolio-Joomla-2.5-Template.jpg?9d7bd4 "Personal Portfolio Joomla 2.5 Template")
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Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life. – Margot Asquith
We continue our series of posts devoted to various useful and free Photoshop tools. Today we focus on free symbol Photoshop brushes which allow you to easily implement symbols of different type and origins into your designs. Being the most important social archetype, symbol remains one of the most influential inventions ever made by human race. It was at the dawn of the era of verbal communication. Symbol has a huge visual value and often it is perceived much better than text information. That’s why using symbol-based Photoshop brushes is such a popular thing in web design. Below you’ll find tons of arrows, hieroglyphs, runes, stamps, zodiac symbols, warning signs, and electrical symbols and so on. If you are one of those kinds of design persons that care about the small details then you are in the right place. Have fun and don’t forget to give us some social love!
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Fist Brushes
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Grunge Stamps
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Poker Brushes
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This time we will keep our product offering narrow and focused. Because templates that take center stage today are 5 hottest WordPress themes of early 2012 (roughly the first quarter). The ranking is based on analyzes of sales from our website and the overall popularity on the website. These designs all share a common trait – pertaining to various niches they have elaborate designs and rich custom controls that will make your WP-powered site adjustable to many functions. So do you want to know what other customers are buying? There we go now, showing our best-selling WordPress products for you to select from. Also note that we already have some cool WordPress themes with extra functionality in production process, so be sure to check back often to spot the new ones. There will be plenty of other rankings for you to digest in the coming weeks.
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Medical Center WordPress Theme
This is our number 1 winner. The design is tailored for medical center needs, but is easily adaptable to any business or individual who would like to put their company on the web. The highlight of this WordPress template is an accordion style featured content area that displays different branches of the company with a corresponding image and a brief text description. On the right we can spot the widgetized sidebar that contains categories, recent comments, widget for ads and links to other pages. There is also a block for latest posts that go illustrated with titles, excerpts, images and comments count sign. Overall this WordPress theme feels professional that explains the fact it is number one on our top 5 leaders list.
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Basketball Fun Club WordPress Theme
Here is a WordPress theme oriented on basketball websites. The design integrates a fullscreen background image slideshow that illustrates basketball image series. There is also a teaser text beneath that calls to join this sport club. The upper right corner is fully made for the sport club logo, so being rendered in rather contrasting color it will help fully differentiate your brand or company identity. At the bottom of the template visitors will especially like that double transparency layer that adds depth to the design. What also spices up this template is a multi-level dropdown menu that is very subtle but vibrant upon being hovered. Check the color change and submenu beautifully appearing when hovering.
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Monday is a good occasion to start the new project. If you don’t know where to start from, visit our weekly series of freebies and find your inspiration here. Today we are happy to announce the launch of Free Full JavaScript Animated Template for Interior Design Website – the powerful solution with dynamics of Flash-like animation.
This item looks like the Flash theme, but there is no Flash in it. The spectacular dynamics of this theme is attained due to the JavaScript-based elements that make the theme very light-weight. Don’t worry, it will not take you the additional knowledge and some specific software to edit this template. Its visually attractive layout with 3 changeable backgrounds will certainly draw the attention of the visitors to your project. The built-in gallery is the ideal place to present all your products in the effective way. To see the presented theme in action, visit the free template demo page.
Free Full JavaScript Template for Interior Design Website:
As usual, you can get this free website template in two ways: with PSD source files included and without them. Follow the link below and download HTML source files. To download this theme with PSD source files, visit the Free Full JavaScript Template for Interior Design Website download page at TemplateMonster and type an email address that you want the free template package to be delivered to (don’t forget to uncheck the newsletter subscription checkbox in case you’re already subscribed, otherwise you may not be able to download the zip file). Feel free to use this template for your business, but you cannot resell it as a template.
Download Free Full JavaScript Template for Interior Design Website with PSD files (82,4MB)
Download Free Full JavaScript Template for Interior Design Website without PSD (1,21MB)
IMPORTANT NOTICE: TemplateMonster does not provide support services on free templates – including this one. We only provide support for the products that are being purchased from TemplateMonster. Our free templates are produced according to the latest web standards and we’ve been trying to make the process of working with them as easy as possible, so for people with minimum web development experience it should be easy to work with them. However, if you don’t have any experience, we recommend you to refer to the tutorials or community forums on how to work with platforms that each respective template is made with, or to hire someone to do the job for you.
Featured Interior & Furniture Templates
Sometimes it seems that in website creation jQuery is involved in pretty much everything. This much-hyped JavaScript framework has turned out to be a very powerful tool for web designers. Now everything gets more interesting. As today we made a short list of some pretty nifty and really fresh jQuery & CSS3 gallery and slideshow tutorials that would help you out in creating similar galleries and sliders. We do believe that these tutorials will help you solve the issue of showing photos and images on your website. So if you don’t know where to start from, improve your slider creation skills with the power features of jQuery.
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Fullscreen Slideshow with HTML5 Audio and jQuery
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Image Wall with jQuery
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“Every designers’ dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration. “ – Aaron Russel
Have you been drafted to Dribbble yet? If yes, then you know what it is like to be a member of one of the most respected and influential communities of designers in the whole interweb. Dribbble is a social network for designers, or “Twitter for designers” as they call themselves. Within this website you can observe works of other designers, share yours, receive constructive criticism, like other works, leave comments and so on.
Basically, Dribbble demonstrates us all the benefits of the invite system. Being a closed social network this website currently counts nearly 90 000 registered users (called spectators) and around 15 000 active users (players). Numbers aren’t really impressive considering the emerging trend of creating gigantic communities with millions of users. The Dribbble’s case perfectly demonstrates how the quality can beat the quantity. It was easy to grow larger community (project was launched in 2009) but they didn’t do that and now reap the fruits of their wisdom.
Fresh freebie is ready and waiting for you! Our creative team of designers now brings this Free Website Template with jQuery Cycle Slider for Business Site that is professionally coded with your business needs in mind. It will ideally work for any kind of your online business websites that you want to be effective and interesting for the viewers.
Using its PSD sources, you can customize it as you like without extra efforts (due to the well-done coding). Such strong points of this theme as thought-out execution and clean and clear style make it a powerful solution for your business project. Its layout features the content part subdivided into three parts and 4 featured content blogs where you can place the most important information about your business. If you want to present the main idea of your company as the effective slogan, jQuery Cycle Slider from the header of this theme is a good choice to display it in the best way. Check out free template live demo to see this theme in action.
Free Website Template with jQuery Cycle Slider for Business Site:
Feel free to get this free website template in two ways: with PSD source files included and without them. Follow the link below and download HTML source files. To download this theme with PSD source files, visit the Free Website Template with jQuery Cycle Slider for Business Site download page at TemplateMonster and type an email address that you want the free template package to be delivered to (don’t forget to uncheck the newsletter subscription checkbox in case you’re already subscribed, otherwise you may not be able to download the zip file). Feel free to use this template for your business, but you cannot resell it as a template.
Download Free Website Template with jQuery Cycle Slider for Business Site with PSD files (5,94MB)
Download Free Website Template with jQuery Cycle Slider for Business Site without PSD (232KB)
IMPORTANT NOTICE: TemplateMonster does not provide support services on free templates – including this one. We only provide support for the products that are being purchased from TemplateMonster. Our free templates are produced according to the latest web standards and we’ve been trying to make the process of working with them as easy as possible, so for people with minimum web development experience it should be easy to work with them. However, if you don’t have any experience, we recommend you to refer to the tutorials or community forums on how to work with platforms that each respective template is made with, or to hire someone to do the job for you.
Looking for the new kind of carousel scripts that will displays items in a continuous loop, we gathered some nice little jQuery goodies for you all. These plugins are capable of creating carousel-like slideshows where you can pan through the images using arrow indicators or simply view the showcase in auto-play. As opposed to displaying the images only, here you will also find several plugins that do cater for non-image content such as videos or text blocks. Plus in some cases you will have the ability to choose from horizontal or vertical order, a range of element positions, transition effects, slide timer length, and the like. If to recap, such kind of space-saving arrangement is definitely great for making your site uncluttered albeit shock-full of different content. So have these jQuery carousel plugins handy.
If you feel you’re not that tech-savvy to add the carousel yourself, we can suggest you template solutions with jQuery elements already inside them.
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Circular Content Carousel with jQuery
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Elastislide – a Responsive jQuery Carousel Plugin
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Despite the general awesomeness of WordPress plugins there is a common situation when plugins are an unnecessary headache for the web masters. The point is any plugin brings a series of updates that can crash your WordPress website functionality in some cases. So if you have some basic PHP skills (we mean really really basic – like being able to copy and paste the pieces of code) or web development experience you might be interested in making some little changes to your WordPress website with your own hands. With this in mind we have prepared for you some short and interesting WordPress hacks that would improve your WP-based without involving any third-party software. There are many simple functions that actually don’t need being plugin-powered. These are pagination, contact forms, social media buttons etc. Anyways, just know that this post isn’t meant to criticize the existence and usage of WordPress plugins – it’s just an alternate point of view so you could have choice. This post is meant for those seeking souls that are looking for simple and interesting solutions to improve their WordPress themes functionality.
How to build a WordPress Post Pagination without plugin
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Display Your Popular Posts In WordPress Without A Plugin
The highlights of this entry are stretched Flash CMS templates that unlike other Flash websites have the ability to be scrolled within the browser window (similar to how non-Flash websites are done). These templates have adopted certain type of functionality to house the content making it possible to specify the height of every page within them. The thing that makes all the magic is a control panel. Though every single stretched Flash CMS template uses HTML scroll bar by default, you can enable and configure Flash scroll bar using the control panel and set the needed height for each of the template’s pages. This gives you space for a mass amount of information online. Plus you make viewing different content easier and faster as users can simply scroll the page up and down. So you can rapidly develop websites that scale elegantly and look great at any size. All you will need for that is a stretchable Flash CMS template.
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Travel Agency Stretched Flash CMS Template
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Dance Studio Stretched Flash CMS Template
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Real Estate Stretched Flash CMS Template
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