Design studios, ad agencies and printing companies and, of course, web developers often make the decision to outsource their clients’ graphic design work.  The most common way to do this is to use freelance designers or third party design studios.  Often times, after making this decision, the actual outsourcing doesn’t go so well.  Typically, this difficulty can be linked back to one of two common problems (outlined below in more detail) with using freelance designers: availability and limited style.  These problematic experiences can end up making outsourcing more expensive and time-consuming than it’s worth.

Enter DesignCrowd.com’s graphic design outsourcing service.  This site attempts to solve the above problems by giving web designers/agencies the ability to use a big pool of designers (10,000+) collectively as their virtual team.  It is an innovative solution that appears to go a long way to fixing the challenges of design outsourcing.

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I am back from a Holiday to Kerala. They call it the “God’s Own Country” which is true in every sense!

Here are some pictures of the experience :-

While coding HTML pages, I have always wondered if there was a better, quicker and easier way to write lengthy and repetitive code that is present in almost every web page. I asked myself time and again, if there were people who thought on the same lines to make the code more crisp and abbreviated.

To my amusement, I recently came across an innovation by Sergey Chikuyonok called the “ZEN CODING“. Zen Coding provides a really fresh angle to write markup code for HTML & CSS. It was really interesting to read how Sergey gave a new definition to the old coding style and has created a landmark for software companies to follow.

To understand the basics, Zen Coding can be defined as a plugin to quicken coding. In layman terms, it can also be understood as a zip file that can be expanded or unzipped on demand. It is made up of two main components – one is the abbreviation expander and the other is the context-independent HTML-pair tag matcher.

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A very Happy New Year to all my readers!

For the new year, I am glad to announce the release of a new WordPress theme called “Impress”. This is a minimalistic, red-colored theme with automatic thumbnails, advertising space and a clean layout.

Thumbnails are used from the default ones that WordPress generates when you upload an image with the post. The theme uses jQuery for animated menu and sidebar. Impress has been tested with Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari without any problems.
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I recently stumbled across a comic strip website called Thedoghousediaries.com. I really liked the stuff they had on there. Here are the good ones that I found. Enjoy and leave a comment!