This image is 2700 x 1793 px, and 300ppi(optimized for print).

40+ Beautiful Hand Drawn Websites @ CSS Built. Handdrawn sites are pretty big right now. They’re not exactly going to be the face of every major corporation on the web, but for design types and other creatives, handdrawn effects are really fun.

50 Beautiful Hand-Drawn Web Design Sites by HongKiat

30 Outstanding Character Illustrations in Modern Web Design by Noupe

50 Best Female Web Designers Around the World at Indeziner. I don’t know about you, but it’s really nice to see that women designers do exist. Gotta represent, ya know?

45 Beautiful and Creative WordPress Designs @ Six Revisions. This post is almost a year old, but it’s still got some goodies, including a screenshot of Matt Mullenweg’s old blog design, which I just adore.

300+ Vintage Style Textures and Photoshop Brushes at Design Reviver. There are some great Photoshop brushes and free hi-res texture images in this one.

Pretty in Pink: 15 Inspirational Pink Websites @ Web Design FM

25 Incredibly Artistic Websites is the first part of a roundup series Vandalay has put out featuring just plain great web design.

Showcase of Elegant and Original Blog Designs by the guys over at Smashing Magazine

Mark Boulton’s Five Simple Steps Series is a great resource for learning the basics of graphic design, typography, color management, and more.

16 Inspiring Typography Based Blog Designs by Design Reviver. Great inspiration.

18 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials by Design Shard. There are some pretty cool text effects in this one.

Some of the fonts are free, some are paid, but they’re worth your while!

Calligraphy and Wedding Fonts

Calligraphy comes from the Greek κάλλος kallos, meaning beauty, and γραφή graphẽ, meaning writing: literally, “beautiful writing.” What we recognize as calligraphy is historically considered to be Western calligraphy, which emerged around 600 BC in Rome. Various other forms of calligraphy, such as Slavic, East Asian, Indian, Persian, Nepalese, Tibetan, Islamic, and Maya, also exist.

The art of calligraphy is a dying breed; only a handful of calligraphers still exist in most cities. My mom is a professional calligrapher and taught me long ago how to hold a calligraphy pen. Typically, each calligrapher learns the popular/historical fonts, and they also create their own signature font, which they use regularly. Calligraphy is often found on diplomas, wedding announcements, graduations, awards, and as its own masterpiece in matted prints.

As calligraphy is often expensive, people have turned to digital replicas of the real thing. While I’m still a huge proponent of utilizing and employing local artisans, there are times when you need a digital calligraphic font for websites and other computerized art. So here are some of my favorite calligraphic fonts and other fonts that are perfect to use for weddings and other special occasions. But don’t take my word for it! Read on to find some great cool fonts.

Whitechapel BB Regular by Blambot

Carpenter

Lee Ann from Typadelic

Intima Script by Lián Types

Champion Script by Parachute

Beurre by Wilton Foundry

Arabesque by Scholtz Fonts

http://arsgrafik.s3.amazonaws.com

Simona by Autographis

Martina by TureBlue

Caramel Family by TypeSETit

Lisa Bella by Wiescher Design

Ability by Scholtz Fonts

Natalya Font by insigne

Nars by Eduardo Recife of Misprinted Type (if you don’t know already, he’s my hero)

Publius by Scriptorium

Lisa Fiore by Wiescher Design

Aphrodite by TypeSenses

Elisara by Autographis

Amazone by Bitstream

SG Bernhard Schoenschrift Pack from Elsner + Flake

Benevento by Scriptorium

Affable Complete Pack by Scholtz Fonts

Nelly Script by Tart Workshop

Ellida Complete Pack by Wiescher Design

Portfolio by Wilton Foundry

Monster Days, again, by the genius Eduardo Recife

Adagio Pro by profonts

That’s the deal with this series; I’m laying it all out there. The good the bad and the ugly—this week it’s the ugly. Let’s jump right in and take a look.

As an introductory note, it’s interesting to notice that the trends in our metrics this week are almost exactly reversed from the week prior. All of the “Snapshot” stats on Friday reveal growth, while the weekly visitor stats across the board are down.

Blog Stats as of 07.17.09

PageRank

In last week’s review, I provided an in-depth look at PageRank and its relevance to blogging. If you want more information about PageRank, read last week’s Weekly Blog Stats Review.

The front page PageRank of Ars Grafik remains PR3. Our top PageRanked page continues to be a PR4. For more on this mystery, read the first Weekly Blog Stats Review.

Technorati Rank

As of Friday, Ars Grafik’s Technorati rank was 628,275, up from 635,062 the week prior. This is some improvement, but in realty, it shows fluctuations in the Technorati community membership more than a growth in actual authority. What do I mean by this? This week, we’ll take a look at how Technorati rank is evaluated and what its relevance is to your blog.

Technorati bills itself as a blog search engine and comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere. In essence, it functions as a blog tracking service where readers can search for content, but also where bloggers can watch the performance of their blogs against the rest of the blogosphere.

As bloggers, there are two statistics we can follow from Technorati.

Authority

Technorati Authority is based on the number of incoming links to your blog from other blogs within the last 180 days. In essence, this creates a system much like Google’s PageRank, where linking between sites is used to gauge a site’s relevance.

There is a catch within the Technorati ranking algorithm that makes it very different than PageRank. Techinorati only counts links between blogs that are are registered to its service. It may be that you have thousands of high-caliber blogs referencing your posts and linking to your blog, but if only a few of those are registered with Technorati, you will be limited to lesser Authority.

As of Friday, Ars Grafik had a Technorati Authority of five. This means that there are five blogs linking to this site who have also registered with Technorati.

Rank

The Technorati numerical rank of your blog is a number derived from your Authority. Technorati uses your Authority to rank your blog against all of the blogs registered with their service. The blog with the greatest Authority is given a rank of 1, while blogs with fewer incoming links will rank farther down the list.

In the case of Ars Grafik, this Friday we had a Technorati rank of 628,275.

I opened this section with a statement that our rise in Technorati rank had more to do with fluctuations in Technorati’s membership then with our actual Authority. I can make this statement because our Authority on Technorati has been five for the last month and a half. Since our authority hasn’t changed, it must be that the Authority of others has, and hence the improvement in our rank.

No matter what, we have lots of competition to overcome!

Alexa

Each week we have experienced a slight improvement in Alexa rank. Since Alexa generates its rank using the prior three month’s traffic stats, this is a trend we expect will continue. Friday’s Alexa rank was 133,398, up from 143,937.

Incoming Links

We’ve experienced another jump in incoming links on both Yahoo Site Explorer and on Google Webmaster Tools. On Site Explorer, Ars Grafik is registering 12,369, up from 11,866. Google Webmaster Tools shows less growth, but growth nonetheless with 13,753, up from 13,747.

While these incoming link numbers are fun, it’s important to remember that both of these services register multiple links from single domains. That’s a topic for another day.

RSS & Twitter

RSS subscribers increased by four to 34. Still plenty of growth potential here.

This week our twitter account has 368 followers, up from 329.

Weekly Stats: 07.11.2009 – 07.17.2009

Page Views

This is the first week in several months without growth in page views and related statistics. This week we logged 3,192 page views at Ars Grafik. This is a substantial drop from the week prior, when we had 3,896 page views.

Very likely there will be many ups and downs in the lifespan of this blog. It’s still difficult to see our numbers drop this precipitously after such strong growth for three months.

Last week, I addressed our low Average Time on Site as caused by unusually high StumbleUpon numbers. This serge in visits caused last week’s numbers to rise well above our typical growth trajectory. Since this week we did not see unusual StumbleUpon hits, our numbers appear off.

We will be watching over the next few weeks to see if this theory pans out.

Visits

Visits decreased also this week, bringing the total to 2,127 from 2,564 the week before.

Page Views Per Visit

Pages views per visit has been our most stable metric with almost no fluctuation over the weeks. This week we logged an average of 1.50 pages viewed per visit, just off the 1.52 from the week prior.

Average Time on Site

Last week, I discussed in detail our unusually low average time on site numbers. I pointed to an unusual strike of low quality StumbleUpon traffic. Last week, visitors averaged 59 sec. on Ars Grafik. For more on this read last week’s Weekly Blog Stats Review.

This week, things returned to normal with visitors averaging 1min. 10sec. on Ars Grafik. This nearly matched the 1 min. 8 sec. that we registered three weeks ago.

In Closing

Since Ars Grafik is such a young blog, we are still honing in on exactly what kind of service we wish to provide. Over the last three months we have produced tutorials, design inspiration, round ups, free downloads, and a variety of opinion posts. One of our goals over the next week is to decide what it is that we most enjoy producing and brand the site with this in mind. Stay tuned for these changes, and my droll commentary as they’re in the works.

You see, I’ve amassed enough brushes that they won’t all fit on my screen when I open the library to switch out a set. I have to use dual monitors just to see them all (which totally cramps my style, by the way, because I’m the kind of gal who likes to work at coffeeshops. And they really don’t like you setting up camp with your dual screens, even if you bring smores).

The other issue I’ve had with my brushes is that I can’t find the ones I need when I need them because they’re named something awful like “MM_spring_buloxi” or whatever file name the author decided to use. I needed some organization. So I finally bit the bullet, turned on the iPod, and decided to do some spring cleaning. I started in the brushes folder under Adobe Photoshop Presets:

From there, I tried to simply rename the file. In Vista (I know… if I weren’t poor I’d buy a Mac. Apple gods, will you send me a free one please?????) , this presents a problem because whenever you’re in the C: drive, the operating system is set up in such a way as to assume that you are an idiot who will screw up anything and everything you touch, so it gives you a pop-up dialog box whenever you attempt to change something. It basically says, “We assume you have the intellectual capacity of a first grader, so we’re not going to let you make this change on your own. Only administrators can do this. If you are an administrator, make sure you are aware of what you’re doing before the changes are applied. Should we apply changes?” And it does this for every single action you take while in the C: drive. Since I had hundreds of brushes to manipulate, this was going to be a problem.

In my humble opinion, the nanny controls are the most frustrating thing about Vista. But I figured out how to turn them off!

In your control panel, go to “User Accounts” and select “Turn User Account Controls On or Off.” Uncheck the box and hit ok, restart your computer, and the annoying Vista nanny is gone for good.

At this point, I opened up a blank document in Photoshop and tried out all the brushes to see what they were and if I wanted to keep them. I had a lot of duplicates, and some of the brushes were just crap. I put the brush presets folder side-by-side with Photoshop and renamed the brushes as I went according to their subject matter:

Mind you, this took most of the day. But it was well worth it. I now know where everything is and scaled down the size of the folder to make room for more.

If you are involved in graphic or web design work, you know the importance of high-res texture images. Caleb Kimbrough of Lost and Taken has created a platform where designers can browse through free high quality texture images thoughtfully created by himself and other design oriented folk.

Lost and Taken

First off, this blog is beautiful! Caleb’s design for Lost and Taken integrates a wide array of texture-based elements, including a dark patterned background and a very cool paper stained effect within the logo. If you need any convincing that complex textures are a boon to great design, just peruse this site.

In addition to Caleb’s great use of textures, it’s worth pointing out that this blog has exceptional usability. The navigation is large and clear, with oversized drop-down menus continuing this theme.

There are a lot of texture sites out there, but most are republishing the work of others with no personal touch. Caleb breaks this mold by taking time to describe his creative process, and by giving credit when credit is due.

Blog posts are primarily authored by Caleb, with occasional guest writers, but all are laden with free texture images. All of the images are high-resolution and ready for use. Here are three I picked out of the last few posts: (visit Lost and Taken to download originals)

Zen Textures

Zen Textures functions as the companion texture showcase to the Lost and Taken blog. It provides a simple, efficient way to browse through a variety of texture image categories. Categories include hundreds of free texture downloads. Try browsing through the grunge tagged images for example, or those tagged plants. Others categories remain thinly populated, but this is understandable knowing the time and care that Caleb places on the creation of each image.

Pattern Wall

Pattern Wall is a site that Caleb just launched with Oscar Godson. They’ve spent a lot of time on the back end design, as you can see from the great user interface.

To download patterns, hover and click on one you like. A pop-up will feature the pattern and give you the option of downloading it.

In Closing

There are about two dozen blogs that I visit on a regular basis for resources and inspiration. Lost and Taken has a place in that list. I will continue to recommend this site to others both as a resource for images and as an example of their tasteful use.

It’s not all good with AdSense. A common and reasonable complaint about AdSense is the $100 minimum payout amount. For many bloggers with small niche blogs, this minimum payout is unreachable. Additionally, AdSense is notorious for banning publishers over unintended infractions. Incredibly, this often takes place just before the first payout is made.

Many bloggers don’t realize that many AdSense alternatives are available to those banned from the AdSense program, or to those who simply make the choice not to deal with Google’s overbearing rules. Here is a list of good AdSense alternatives to choose from.

AdSense Alternatives

Chitika

Chitika is a great AdSense Alternative that provides something a little different. Instead of scanning through the content of the post or page where you are displaying the ad, Chitika uses the search query used to find your page as guidance for what to display. Here is a sample ad displayed after I reached the page with a Google search for WordPress:
As you can see, Chitika has highlighted my query, WordPress, and displayed two appropriate product advertisements.

As with AdSense, Chitika provides many ways to customize your ad block including background color, text color, border color and link color. In addition to the text ad, Chitika positions an image to the side. There is a reason that Google banned images positioned next to ads: they essentially trick visitors into clicking without thinking. With Chitika, this is more revenue into your pockets.

Chitika offers payout with a minimum of $10.00, which means that even niche bloggers will begin seeing income right away. It offers both check and PayPal payouts.

Join Chitika

BidVertiser

BidVertiser’s ad program for publishers works a lot like Googe AdSense, with a few twists. Generally, it makes for a good AdSense Alternative. Let’s look at the differences that set BidVertiser apart.

The biggest difference between BidVertiser and AdSense is the way BidVertiser decides what ads to display. Instead of searching through the content of your site for keywords, BidVertiser lets advertisers place bids for space on your site. Each bid is the most the advertiser is willing to pay per click, and you are then paid a portion of that amount. BidVertiser guarantees to always display the top valued bidders on your site.

There is a great number of mixed reviews on the web over BidVertiser’s programs. A common complaint is the visual similarity between BidVertiser ads and AdSense ads:

We have found the payout to be lower than with AdSense, but not by much. The service is certainly worth signing up for and using in some instances. Some bloggers swear by BidVertiser, so give it a try.

If you choose to receive payment by Paypal, the minimum payout is $10.00. If you decide to go with payment by check, you will have to wait until the minimum payout reaches $50.00.

Join BidVertiser

AdBrite

AdBrite for publishers is the last AdSense alternative I am covering today. It’s a service I have used very infrequently but have had some positive results with. The service works much like with BidVertiser: your site is listed and categorized by subject matter, then advertisers bid on ad space. You have the option to set a minimum price for your ad spots, so decide on a comfortable level before you sign up.

AdBrite offers traditional text ads (which I’ve never used with them), banner ads (which I have found useful), and Active Interstitials, a form of a pop-up ad that is delivered after a set number of page views. I’ve not tried this pop-up ad, but it might have real value for the right site.

One of the best things about AdBrite is its low minimum payout. At only $5.00, you will begin receiving income almost immediately.

Join AdBrite

I wish I could announce that all of our blog tracking metrics are showing marked improvements since last week, but in truth, it’s a mixed bag. As of Friday, most of our snapshot stats are showing slight improvements. The weekly traffic statistics show growth in page views and visits but a noticeable drop in the average time spent on the site. Since the goal of this series is to offer real stats without sugar coating or falsifying, I am going to lay it all out there. Let’s take a look.

Blog Stats as of 07.10.09

PageRank

PageRank is the most stable statistic I am including in the Weekly Blog Stats Review.

In the past, Google made PageRank updates public on a 3-month cycle. This may be changing; the last PageRank update came much sooner then expected. I don’t recall the exact timeline, but it was closer to 5 weeks than to 3 months. If this new frequency is maintained, we may see another update in close to a month. That being the case, there has been no change in our site’s PageRank since last week.

The front page of Ars Grafik continues to register a PR3. Our early pages continue to register PR4. For more on this mystery, read last week’s Weekly Blog Stats Review.

This week I’m going to provide a quick overview of PageRank as a blog tracking metric:

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a number between 0 and 10 which reflects the rank applied to a webpage using Google’s PageRank algorithm. This number depicts the importance Google applies to the the page in comparison to every other page on the Internet.

At the heart of this algorithm is the concept that each link directed at a page from another site is, in essence, a vote of confidence. If we link to a site from the front page of ,Ars Grafik we are passing on a portion of our PR3 to that site.

The passage of PageRank can be roughly figured by dividing the PageRank by the number of outbound links from the page. It’s important to remember that internal linking also passes PageRank.

Here is an simple (albeit oversimplified) graphic example of PageRank at work:

In the graphic above, you see that our top level site has PR6. It is linking to three sites. Each of those outbound links passes a portion of the available PageRank equal to PR6 ÷ # of links. In this case, we divide PR6 by three outbound links to arrive at the passage of PR3 to each linked-to site.

This accumulation of incoming links and the corresponding passage of PageRank is the way you grow the PR of a blog. It is for this reason that we pay a great deal of attention to the number of incoming links that are registered to Ars Grafik. We will look at incoming link stats later in this post.

Luckily for bloggers, the blogosphere is the perfect arena to create a community where you freely link to others and they link back to you. As the visibility of your blog grows and as other bloggers begin referencing your posts, your PageRank will rise.

At this point, it is important to note that Google’s PageRank equation has evolved over the years. Matt Cutts (an active member of the blog community and the head of Google’s Webspam Team) has stressed this point on many occasions. The examples in this post are only meant to introduce the concept, not depict the current working model.

How to Grow PageRank

Don’t despair if your blog is registering a PR0. It takes time to accumulate enough incoming links to rise to a PR1 and much longer to register PR2/PR3 or beyond.

One great way to inspire others to link to your blog is to offer something free that other bloggers will direct their readers to. For us, graphic design media like texture images, brush packs, or patterns are always big hits with the blogging crowd. Don’t limit you imagination. If you have a skill and can post something of value for free, you will find there are others on the web who will link to your site.

Another possibility is to hold a contest where commentors or e-newsletter subscribers have a chance to win something fun. Many bloggers will direct their readers to your contest page, garnering links to your site. This kind of contest can go viral in a flash, so be ready for traffic!

Last but not least. In fact–most important of all. Publish great content! If you publish interesting content that offers something unique to readers, you will be linked to. Sites like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch are position 1 and 2 on Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs because they publish content that readers love and other bloggers link to. You get the picture.

Technorati Rank

As of Friday, Ars Grafik’s Technorati rank was 635,062. This is a incremental improvement since last week, but an improvement nonetheless. Another week, I will dig into the nitty gritty of Techorati rank. But for the time being, I will point out that Technorati’s ranking system is also based on incoming links but, unlike Google, it only counts links from other blogs—in fact, it counts only other blogs that are registered with Technorati.

Because Ars Grafik has a reasonable number of incoming links but few registering on Technorati, it leads me to believe that most of our linking sites are younger blogs whose authors have not signed up with Technorati. This makes sense because many of our incoming links are from blogs that are using our free WordPress themes.

Alexa

As with the Technorati rank, Ars Grafik showed a small improvement in Alexa rank, moving from 163,273 to 143,937.

Incoming Links

In the incoming links department, we have a small positive change reflected in Yahoo Site Explorer. Last week we registered 11,713, with growth this week to 11,866.

Google Webmaster Tools continued to show 13,747 incoming links.

RSS & Twitter

RSS subscribers remained steady at 30. Only growth potential here.

This week our twitter account, Shea Media has 329 followers. An increase of nine from the week before.

Weekly Stats: 07.04 – 07.10 2009

Page Views

Last week, we had 3,806 page views at Ars Grafik. This week we saw that number rise slightly to 3,896. I would point out that the week started on an off note, with only 282 page views on Saturday, the 4th of July. Having such small numbers out of the gate meant the six following days logged substantially increased numbers to make up the difference.

Visits

Visits increased slightly this week, bringing the total to 2,564 from 2,414 the week before. Again, I note that Saturday’s numbers were abnormally low at only 157 visits. With numbers this low, any increase over the week feels like a substantial success.

Page Views Per Visit

Pages views per visit remained nearly static at 1.52 pages per visit.

Average Time on Site

It’s when looking at the average time spent on site that things took a notable turn for the worse. Last week, we found visitors averaging 59 seconds on Ars Grafik. This is a substantial drop from the prior week’s 1 min. 8 sec. There are two ways I am looking at this change.

The first is as a mandate to write attention grabbing, useful content that inspires readers to read full articles. Since the average pages per visit remained the same, I am left making the conclusion our readers found this weeks material less enthralling then the prior weeks.

The second notable difference between last weeks traffic and the week prior is a spike last week in StumbleUpon visits. We have found that StumbleUpon, while a wonderful web tool and a great deal of fun, provides the lowest quality traffic of any referrer. The majority of these visitors remain on the site for just moments before moving on. This has a strongly negative effect on the average time on site metric.

In Closing

Last week, I began a blog networking campaign that included writing a short blog review called Blog Spotlight: Digging Into WordPress. The value of this type of networking is in creating a working relationship with other bloggers who share your blog’s topic. In this case, I enjoyed introducing myself to Jeff Starr, coauthor of Digging into WordPress and author of Perishable Press.

It’s these kinds of relationships that strengthens your position in the blogging community. Always be on the lookout for ways to network and grow your blogging friend group. This will continue to be a top priority here at Ars Grafik. We plan to introduce ourselves to at least one additional blogger this week.

But hey, Blogger is a cool platform also, and we love to see bloggers everywhere find cool stuff for their blog. With that in mind, I’m directing attention to WP Blogger Themes, where a remade for Blogger version of the Slate theme is being offered. The transformation is being credited to wordpresstoblogger.com.

My thoughts on this:

I love that someone took the time and effort to make the Slate theme available to a new audience. The spirit of freely giving to the blogging community is what makes developing free themes a lot of fun. I applaud tmwwtw (the cryptically named theme tech at wordpresstoblogger.com) for taking what’s available and moving it forward.

Blogger users have been woefully restricted in their blog styling options, so it’s great to see them get a good assortment of themes to choose from. Let’s be honest: traditionally, Blogger templates were lacking in pizazz.

Since there have been thousands of innovative themes produced for WordPress over the last few years, just think of the potential this may have. (Need confirmation? Take a look at the PageRank at wordpresstoblogger.com.) It would be great to see as much diversity of offering to the Blogger community as there is for WordPress.

If tmwwtw and others are willing to make these conversions, then more power to them!

On the other hand, I do wish that WP Blogger Themes, or wordpresstoblogger.com, would choose not to include a paid sponsor link in the footer. It’s not the end of the world, but it does dirty up a good thing.

I will leave it at that.

I love being part of this industry because, as designers and developers, we are literally molding and directing the shape of the internet and what it will look like in the future. With 23.8% of the total world’s population ( or nearly 1.6 billion people) now online, your ability to communicate and reach a global audience is forever increasing. And in this world of incessant stimulation, your website or blog must look sharp and function flawlessly if you are going to keep people coming back.

I’m a collector, and I tend to overdo things. My list of bookmarked sites runs somewhere in the thousands, and they’ll need a reorganization soon. But for now, from the collection, here are my top, best websites for designers to gain education and inspiration. The list is by no means comprehensive, so I’ll post some follow up articles to continue adding to the collection. And if I’ve missed a great design site, which I inevitably will, please post it in the comments section.

Without more ado, here is:

The Beginner’s Guide to the Best Places on the Web for Designers

Smashing Magazine is a sometimes strange compendium of graphic and web design/development articles. It started in 2006 and has more than 4 million visitors a month.

All I can say is… wow.

I wanna be them.

I visit PSDtuts regularly to get inspiration and see what’s going on in the community. I especially like their artist interviews.

The Envato network is the parent of PSDtuts. From here, you can visit their Vectortuts site as well as blogs devoted to Flash, audio, and illustration.

I Love Typography has a great collection of awesome fonts and typography-related news.

Freelance Switch is another great industry blog for freelancers and others making their own way as graphic and web designers and developers.

Logo Design Love is a great place to start when working on a new logo design project.

Elliot Jay Stocks just got a redesign! I love his work. He’s got some good tutorials too. And anyone who designs for Massive Attack just has to be the coolest person ever.

Not to be confused with the singer, Mark Boulton has a super simple, well laid out site that deals with primarily web design. His grid system is gorgeous and well implemented.

Colour Lovers. A great place to get inspiration and experiment with color palettes before starting on a project.

Go Media Zine. I’ve become hooked. They’re not your average geeks. They’re dark, grungy, retro, cool.

Hongkiat is an up-and-coming blog that’s packed full of great design and development stuff.

Layers Magazine. Your one-stop-shop for all things Adobe. And they’ve got lots of videos too!

Just Creative Design is maintained by Jacob Crass, a young graphic designer. It has informative articles, including ones like Why Logo Design Does Not Cost $5.00.

AIGA is your resource for everything industry related.

Outlaw Design Blog is just plain fun. It’s gotten a face lift recently (not that it ever looked bad) and it looks great. Although if it were me, I would utilize the space above the fold a bit more.

Web Page Design for Designers isn’t the prettiest site you’ll see, and it’s not updated all too regularly, but it does have some interesting and informative articles.

Dev Lounge is geared toward developers, but it’s also got its share of articles on icon sets, twitter, and more.

I’ve had Design Reviver bookmarked for a post on typography that they put out a while back. I like that the site has a magazine layout, and it contains good articles on both web design and development.