What a great year it has been for design related articles. So many new blogs, new blog writers, great content, great resources, a lot of inspiration, it really has never been a better time to be a designer.

In this round-up we have collected fifteen of the most popular design related articles from 2009. There are great resources for fonts, Photoshop, web design templates, as well as amazing web design and graphic design tutorials.
Lets hope 2010 will be even better!

Logo Design – How NOT To Design A Logo

This was the most popular design related article of 2009, published on Web Designer Depot in January.

It was an article about how underrated logo design in today’s world and how peolple do not understand how important a good logo is and how valuable it is to their business.

They outline the ways in which you should NOT go about getting your logo designed… that is, if you are truly serious about business.
Logo Design – How NOT To Design A Logo

30 high-quality free fonts for great designs

Even though you’ll have to pay for the best fonts, like Helvetica or Univers, the web is full of quality fonts that are perfectly suitable for professional design work. The impressive list of free fonts in this article have been classified to make the page easier to scan.
30 high-quality free fonts for great designs

22 Most Used Free Fonts By Professional Designers

The basic purpose behind this post is to show you popular and professional free font types to save your time searching online. This list is a combined effort of professional web designers and art directors to help speed up your project development time so you can save money and focus on making great applications and art.
22 Most Used Free Fonts By Professional Designers

34 Essential Tutorials To Get Started With Digital Photography

Starting out with digital photography can be quite overwhelming if you have no idea where to start. Luckily, there’s plenty of free quality information available on the web… with the potential of making you a semi-professional photographer in a matter of weeks.

The author of this article has compiled the best photography tips and tutorials found on the web, starting with the basics, all the way to the inner workings of your camera.
34 Essential Tutorials To Get Started With Digital Photography

60 Most Wanted Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes, .PSDs and Resources

This was the most popular Photoshop post of 2009. You’ll find an assortment of top-notch tutorials, brushes, patterns, textures, actions and .PSD downloadable files that others have freely contributed to the design community for making your next photoshop effect. Great post!
60 Most Wanted Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes, .PSDs and Resources

35 Basic Tutorials to Get You Started with Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful and versatile image editing/graphics creation application that is the industry standard in its category. Though Photoshop’s interface is intuitive enough for an absolute beginner to learn basic image editing tasks such as cropping and resizing, to be able to fully master and utilize all of its tools takes a considerable amount of time.

If you’re interested in honing your Photoshop skills to create spectacular compositions, this is for you.
35 Basic Tutorials to Get You Started with Photoshop

12 Common Photoshop Mistakes, Misuses and Abuses

This article is a list of 12 common mistakes, misuses and various ways new users abuse Photoshop. As the author freely admits, he has fell victim to a few of these himself when first starting out, so hopes this article helps educate designers and other individuals that are new to Photoshop.
12 Common Photoshop Mistakes, Misuses and Abuses

The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout

The CSS used for this layout is 100% valid and hack free. To overcome Internet Explorer's broken box model, no horizontal padding or margins are used in conjunction with a width. Instead, this design uses percentage widths and clever relative positioning.
Perfect!
The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout

10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know

Web developers these days are often expected to know and work in multiple languages. As a result, it's tricky to learn everything a language has to offer and easy to find yourself not utilizing the full potential of some more specialized but very useful tags.

Unfortunately we haven't been tapping into the full potential of these more obscure HTML tags as of late. But it's never too late to get back into the game and start writing code that taps into the power of some under-used tags.
10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.
15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

12 Useful Web Tools for Designers

When it comes to design, there’s a plethora of free web-based tools to help you accomplish tasks such as color palette selection, creating unique fonts, editing images, and testing typography. In this article, you’ll find a bunch of handy online utilities for designers.
12 Useful Web Tools for Designers

50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus

In this article there are over 50 excellent navigation menus — there are CSS-based design solutions, CSS+JavaScript-based menus and Flash-designs. However, they all have something in common: they are user-friendly yet creative and perfectly fit to the style of their respective websites.
50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus

14 Most Useful design cheat sheets and coding cheat sheets

Designers and developers simply can not get enough cheat sheets, and bloggers simply can not stop writing about them. This post was the most popular cheat sheet article of 2009. It features cheat sheets to help you with CSS , almost all the Javascript libraries, HTML, Flash and Photoshop.
14 Most Useful design cheat sheets and coding cheat sheets

70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, upload, auto-complete, image cropping, slideshows, tool tips, sliders and tables are being developed that use nifty JavaScript and AJAX scripts.

When using these, developers have to carefully consider many subtle techniques to help users get things done. In this article, there are 70 new and useful JavaScript and AJAX techniques, all of which are of the highest quality and are more or less easy to configure. You will also find some very useful but better known techniques to use on almost any project you work on.
70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

50 of the Best Ever Web Development, Design and Application Icon Sets

If you are looking for that perfect icon for your web site, blog, web app or application, you will find them in this post. It is a compilation of the best web dev icon sets ever, with mini pixel icons, glossy icons and even some useful blogging icons.
50 of the Best Ever Web Development, Design and Application Icon Sets

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

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