100 Minimal Hotel Icons | $9.99

You can preview the full pack on www.an1kencreative.com | You can buy it on the site for $9.99. Making it a measly $0.10 per icon. What a deal right?

The Giveaway

We will be giving away 5 sets of the icons to 5 lucky readers. All you have to do is follow the instructions below and you will be entered to win an icon set.

Step 1: Tweet about the giveaway: “I have just entered to win 100 Minimal Hotel Icons on @Creativeofblog – http://bit.ly/10y0mPa #HIG100″ Click here to tweet

Step 2: The tweet entered you into the giveaway with the hashtag, so make sure that it’s part of your tweet and you are entered.

The giveaway will be ending on 23 May 2013 and the winners will be announced on Friday 24 May 2013. Have a great week and remember to share the icon pack if you like it.

There is an extension of everything you might need in your business and these extensions are available widely and that too free of cost, and they are working with all the versions of Magento available right now. Because there are so many in numbers, not all of them are great, however few of the extensions are unbeatable and prove to be helpful to all kinds of businesses. Mentioned below are a few of the most useful Magento extensions which cannot be ignored and must be used to make Magento an even better eCommerce platform for setting up your store.

Magentix-The Magento Recycle Bin

Deleting products by mistake is one of the most annoying and time consuming mistakes which people make while handling their eCommerce stores and this extension does exactly what you want it to do. This extension is a life saver when you do not have the time and patience to reload the product you deleted by mistake as it just puts the deleted product in the recycle bin and all you got to do is to restore it. This free extension keeps all the deleted files in the admin interface and it depends on you if you want to restore it or delete it permanently.

ReCAPTCHA

If there is internet being used, then SPAM has to be around somewhere, and it can be disastrous for any site, leave alone eCommerce sites which are highly affected by it. This free extension helps you fight it by protecting your various forms like ‘Send to Friend’, ‘Contact Us’ ‘Product Review’ etc.

Google Content API for Shopping

If you have an eCommerce website in place then you probably are aware of the importance that SEO and Google search rankings hold in the popularity and success of your business. This extension allows you to migrate your eCommerce store to Google’s new API which means now your product and catalogue information will show up when someone searches for your name or keyword related to your product or service. Considering the advantage it has when it comes to optimization, this free extension is a must have for your Magento account.

Mouse over Zoom

This is another basic, free of cost extension which takes away the very few shortcomings of Magento and replaces them with a better feature. The default zoom of Magento is not liked by a lot of people and this extension allows you to view a zoomed picture of the product in a box on the right side, just by taking the mouse pointer over it.

Exploded Menu

Do you have multiple products to sell with high numbers of categories to be put on in the menu? If yes then this extension is perfect for you. It not only makes your page look better by taking away the boring drop down menus, this extension also makes it simpler for people to select and look through the different categories and products. Another good part about this extension- it is completely free.

Follow Up Email

This is an extension which helps you keep in touch with your customers in the best way possible. This powerful auto-responder extension is an optimal customer relationship tool which helps you reach out to the customer in such a way that you stay on their mind at all times. It helps you keep a track of your customers and sends them emails regarding your site. This $199 extension is highly useful for a better relationship with present and ex customers and can be easily integrated with the Magento Module.

Magento Live Chat

With new age eCommerce sites with picture and high competition, every eCommerce site owner is doing everything they can to make sure that they are able to cater to their customers problems complaints suggestions and feedback in the best way possible, and to do this there can be nothing better than the option of live chat. Live chat enables the user to directly talk to the representative and explain to them their problems and this extension does just that for you. Not only it is free of cost, it is very simple and interactive and aims at increasing customer satisfaction by improving your website. Not only that, this extension is easy to install and doesn’t require any registration forms before installation.

Magento WebForms

WebForms are an integral part of any eCommerce website present and a number of forms are needed depending on the needs and the size of different sites. This free extension allows the user or the developer to create custom web forms exclusively for their platform. All you got to do is install it and then create various forms like Contact us, Comment forms, feedback forms, Complaints and suggestions, and other according to customized needs of your business. It also allows you to use the forms which you created as widgets on pages, making the job much simpler.

Magento C3 Invoice Improver

This is another basic extension which caters to the problem which comes up while you are dealing with the invoices. This free extension enhances the format of your invoices and provides you with added features of using different data like Order Data, Invoices Data, Due Data and others. This extension is easy to use and very simple to understand, and helps you in making your job less complicated.

Daily Deals

This simple extension allows you to add zeal to your website, by letting you add daily deals on your Magento eCommerce site and making it more interactive. You can showcase different deals everyday and attract more customers with the help of discounts.

These 10 extensions are wide ranging and cover most aspects of what an eCommerce website could need and thus, are must haves for your online website. They are not only cost friendly but will help in managing your site in a much easier manner, which will ultimately help in increasing sales as well as customer satisfaction.

In this collection you will find a great mixture of PSD and vector ribbons. All are of very high-quality and suitable for today’s type of design. If you find a ribbon design you find appealing, simply click the image, download it and use with joy!

Why Skueomorphism?

UI design is full of skueomorphism, because it can confer a sense of comfort and familiarity that can be very useful to less advanced users. However, we’ve been getting to the point where people are more comfortable with encountering new types of interfaces, and capable of handling something that isn’t immediately recognizable.

Why Minimalism?

The reaction against this trend has been what we call minimalism; and not only does it reject designs that look falsely familiar, it also often does away with such staples as beveling, gradients, and drop shadows, stripping all the small textures and details away from web design and leaving it bare, crisp, and simple.

What it Means to Be A Minimalist

Minimalist design doesn’t mean that you can’t add interest with beautiful stock photos or other illustrational elements. Rdio uses photography to add depth and color, but apart from that, it’s almost completely flat. Buttons and icons on their homepage have no 3D effects whatsoever, and sections have been divided into level planes of blue and grey.

Illustrations can also be used to great effect in minimalist design; in fact, the simplicity of the type and shape treatments lets the bolder elements stand out in a very striking way. Your Neighbors has the same clean, aesthetic as the example above, but it’s even more flat. Yet the lack of depth doesn’t detract from its appeal.

A more extreme example of the flat aesthetic can be seen with Elevn, a design portfolio site that uses only black and white and extremely simple shapes to convey its message. In fact, it’s pared down so much that the navigational elements are a bit mystifying; you can barely decipher the meaning behind the cryptic titles of “notes” or “11.” This aspect of the site is an example of how minimalism can be taken too far, to the point where it becomes difficult to understand.

When it comes to web design, a textural and “realistic” style can be just as compelling as a minimalist look: what matters is the consistency and beauty of the project as a whole. Although skueomorphism has been getting some negative press of late, that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad practice as a whole. Rather, it means that people are starting to tire of its overuse and beginning to look for ways to break out from its constraints. Soon, perhaps, we might tire of minimalism and go baroque, but for now there are some great lessons to be learned in looking at this functional and interesting style.

With thousands of t-shirts being created and sold everyday there are some really beautiful examples of how typography can be used to make impressive designs which are very pleasing to the eye. Typography represents simplicity but words can be very powerful in themselves to send messages to people reading them.

We’ve collected 30 of our favorite typography t shirts from across the world here for you to see.

These beautiful typography t shirts go to show that although words can be very powerful on their own they can be adapted with colour, font and styling in order to make t-shirts which are fashionable and look unique.

The majority of these t-shirts feature simple, quick to read messages in typography which make them stand out and create an impact on people looking at them.

Check out the production case study for the Hyundai Motor group below.

Web: www.dfy.co.kr
Twitter: @Gosary
Facebook: Gwonsoongyu
Check out the project on Behance here

Vehicle Visual

Each features to serve the message with the point was vehicle image. So that we select the most appropriate image from the photo library and related resources that received. The chosen images were retouched more beautiful, more refined and more luxurious.

Create whole different Life style

As the most significant factors of each vehicle exterior and interior must be shown different concept and lifestyle, we create completely different theme that never seen before.

The Evolution of the Visualizing

The main visual image retouching process consists of three steps.

In this project, we visualized 7 main vehicles and finished 22 kinds of lifestyle.

Interaction

In sub contents, we could transferred more clearly with reviving the style and characteristic features by simple interactive function. We established unique device to emphasized the style of the vehicle once more, which are the most appearance of the vehicle features that headlights, side mirrors, rear light in the visual light on / off button.

Graphic Features

To visualize the vehicle features, we expressed clearly and easily by highly using 3D modeling and sub graphics.

Dynamic Graphics

By showing image of vehicles or magnified parts, we pursue sophisticated and premium quality. Also, we approach by designing a three-dimensional composition escape from the equilibrium configuration. We’ve created a photo realistic environment that can helps to understand the function by designing the traffic lane and vehicles movement.

Language of Visualization

In order to give the core message of highlights in each vehicle page, we newly design the concise and effective icon.

SNS Power

Through using the benefits of social network marketing, users or fans were able to comment via Twitter of Facebook SNS.

Conclude

22 main visual for total of seven vehicles were directed. (Flagship models of Azera, Elantra, i40, Tucson/ix35, Accent, Sonata, Veloster) Hyundai motor showrooms page were carried out about 6 months and as the large-scale projects, it was able to finish all the best from each of his area with multiple partners.

Hope you enjoyed the quality process seen above.
Let us know in the comments.

Thank you.

Adobe is popular for providing design and development software and professional designers always look forward to newly released Adobe applications or updates. The new Adobe Illustrator CS6 is considered as the most advanced and improved Illustrator version as it offers several advancements in terms of performance and tools.

People use vector graphics to create logos, clothing designs, advertisements and graphical documents. The new Adobe illustrator CS6 offers several advance features to support graphic and web designers; we have discussed some prominent features in brief to provide you insight view. The most prominent changes in Illustrator CS6 might not be noticed by ordinary people but for designers they are quite encouraging, these changes include speed, performance and design. The new Illustrator CS6 performs faster than the previous versions, the Adobe Mercury Performance System allow you to access heavy files faster, exporting and file saving have been improved as well. In this version Adobe focus on utilizing the power of 64-bit machines to give you reliable and speedy performance. Beside speed and performance the illustrator CS6 provides you improved and cleaner interface, it provides you with the option to adjust brightness, darkness and can change the interface colors as well.

Beside this performance improvements, Illustrator CS6 now allow you to apply gradients to the strokes, pattern creation and image tracing. The image tracing tool is much more improved than the illustrator CS5, now you can trace images more clearly without affecting the quality of image which is simply brilliant. So Adobe Illustrator CS6 has improved in terms of quality and professional designers must be amazed to have it. These days people are quite frequently adopt vector graphics for many different reasons, the thing is illustrator CS6 allow you to perform effects which are not possible in real time such as you can trace an image with hand and move it but illustrator gives you freedom to do that. Designers working on web, logos, print advertisement will find it extremely effective as professionals.

As Adobe Illustrator CS6 provides you with high quality graphics it’s an equally important thing to keep in mind while designing websites or high quality image websites that you need quality web hosting when setting up your website. High quality graphics requires fast processors and a stable hosting server, so if you are webmaster then make sure you choose a reliable web host that offers support for graphic rich websites. I suggest you to check out top10webhosting reviews about best hosting companies so that you can easily analyze different hosting features and choose according to your requirements.

As you can see this was merely a small overview on the Drawing features of the new Illustrator functions and we are happy to say that we will be having tons of new tutorials on Creativeoverflow very soon which will not only help you up your skills, it will challenge you to create new things and discover new ways of improving your work flows.

Hope you’ll enjoy the new features of Adobe Illustrator CS6. Till next time.

If you don’t have the proper skills in HTML and web developing, it would be much easier to use ready-made solutions such as free web builders or themes for a CMS like WordPress.

In this post, I’ve rounded up some great personal WP themes for you.

Winning business in today’s market is increasingly challenging – client budgets have taken a hit with no obvious return to past glories imminent. Competition is fierce among agencies while price has become a much more sensitive issue. It’s not easy out there for agencies or potential clients – so rather than fight over a hard sell that will keep you up all night sweating, take the pressure off both of you and forget the website.

Next time you get an enquiry with an unrealistic budget to create a brand new site, think of the following ten reasons not to pitch – and instead win a focused lead-generation campaign with greater margins and less risk.

Lower development costs

Rather than getting caught up in the buzz of a fresh design project for your team to get stuck in to, take a step back and evaluate why the client has approached you. Are they looking for an all-singing, all dancing new site, or is it their real priority and end goal to increase enquiries and revenue? Many web build projects come with unrealistic budgets, but a single-page lead-generation campaign requires significantly fewer hours to implement. The development costs are far less, meaning you can pitch a solution within the client’s price expectations.

Lower promotion costs

Discussing how a website will be marketed and the associated costs can be a delicate subject, but it is one that needs to be tackled at the start of the project, so bite the bullet and be sure both parties have clear expectations. This will also help give you an edge over competing agencies because promoting a single offering or product on one page requires far less budget than promoting multiple pages – a pleasant (and potentially contract-securing) surprise for the client during the pitch stages.

More gain, minus the pain

A lower cost reduces risk for a client: you have turned their mammoth challenge of promoting a new website into a smaller more achievable goal; one which will deliver instant results.

Deliver results ASAP

New websites take time to convert and require more ongoing optimisation and improvements. A single page is an easier nut to crack and, from my own experiences, generates instant results with far less long term optimisation of ads, creative and copy.

Targeted approach

When you stop and think, it makes a lot of sense to focus your efforts on one page and concentrate on delivering fast, impressive results – making it far easier to generate a lower than agreed cost-per-sale. This increased revenue within a short time period will have the new client eating out of your hands.

Think small, win big

New website projects can so easily go the wrong way and leave you out of pocket. A single-page lead-generation campaign means less invoicing, but the room for error is greatly reduced, resulting in a much higher margin. So boost your own marketing, generate more enquiries and discover how a more focussed approach will make life easier (and more profitable!) for you – and increase sales for your clients.

Time frames

Clients always have unrealistic go-live dates which can pile on the stress and reduce capacity to fulfil other project commitments. With a lead-generation campaign instead of a major web build, you can probably slot the project around other work and still meet the deadline – something that competing agencies pitching a new website probably won’t be able to achieve.

Dare to be different

Stand out from the crowd and get your proposal noticed. While your competitors present full website documents 20+ pages long, your focused offering will hit all the right emotional triggers and be a breath of fresh air. It is likely that a marketing manager may have their eyes on a new website, but an MD or FD will relate to a more focused way of spending the budget. When was the last time you heard a company director saying ‘no’ to increased profits, fast results and shorter turnaround times?

Build trust

Recommending a client to do something different is always a bold move, especially at the start of a relationship. But your up-front honesty should be well received and will help lay the foundations for a good relationship. And once your campaign is delivering results for a lower cost-per-sale, the door for new business will open just a little bit wider.

When to redesign

…Of course there will be times when a redesign is unavoidable – if the existing website is really bad and obviously underperforming, focus on reducing their requirements to within budget. Or instead suggest a series of lead generation campaigns. Don’t forget the client wants enquiries and sales – deliver and they won’t mind how you do it.

Featured image: Business partners discussion on Shutterstock