“A well designed, clean Email Newsletter/Website is a must for any successful business. Here’s a collection of 30 beautiful inspirational email newsletters for your inspiration.”

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Handy set of pixel patterns by Naomi Atkinson in .pat, .mpx and .pdf formats. Beats drawing them by hand every time (of which I’ve been guilty).

“Today I will show you one of the most powerful Photoshop tool: layer masks. They can result difficult to use for a beginner, but once understood how they work, you won’t need the Eraser tool anymore. Let’s start!”

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What do corporate websites have in common with other people's children? Three things: they have their charm, like finger-paintings on the refrigerator; they can be useful, if infrequently; they are usually admired only by the people who created them.

While designers know that a user's experience on a website has a large impact on the way that customer will interact with them, impressing that concept on the corporate establishment has taken a very long time. Trends in design are making their way into corporate web, albeit slowly; with patience and a little luck, businesses will soon start to consider carefully coded and appropriately functional design as important as their mission statement and recent sustainability reports.

One unfortunate fact is evident above all else: despite having plenty of money at their disposal, many corporations are lost in sterile MS Word-esque designs that are more stagnant than a museum exhibit… though at least museums have dinosaurs and mummies and stuff. Here's hoping we all will get new corporate clients soon.

Below, we present some interesting corporate websites, although the insight they offer may not be immediately apparent. This review is not about aesthetics or visual appeal, but rather about the design solutions the sites exhibit. In fact, corporate websites aren't as visually arresting as you might think, so if the appeal isn't immediately apparent in the previews below, take a moment to visit and interact with each of them.

This site features a very textured design with some aged paper and other rough areas and stains.

As you scroll down you will see some nice faux water color effects and illustrations.

This design was featured on the 25th August 2010 . It falls under the category of Portfolio, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

The poster theme for this site feels really unique and is extremely well done.

The key here is large overstated graphical items that come together in a very non-linear way.

This design was featured on the 25th August 2010 . It falls under the category of Design, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

The Oscars of web nerdery. I’m nominated for a flatteringly high number of categories! Web personality of the year? You know it.

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Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: Polaroid Magento Theme, a professional design skin for the shops powered by the popular open-source ecommerce web application Magento. The theme was designed by eCommerce-Themes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use in private and commerical projects.

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

Bay area designer Tracy Osborn (@limedaring) is our guest on Thursday’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped in front of a live internet audience.

Tracy is the kind of young entrepreneur who bears watching, and an exemplar of the empowering energy of the web. In virtually every other sphere of industry, even can’t-miss notions demand tremendous financial backing to attain the merest chance of success. But on the web, quite often, all you need is a strong idea and the willingness and ability to work.

Tracy’s latest idea is to launch a startup that’s likely to shake up the wedding invitation industry:

In wedding invitations alone, there are two options: spend hundreds of dollars for custom designed invitations (expensive but pretty), or do-it-yourself (cheap but ugly). I want to build a web application catering to … price sensitive couples who have an aversion to Comic Sans.

We’ll discuss the ins and outs of networking when you’re not well known; where ideas and inspiration come from; how to recognize and develop your best ideas and persuade others to believe in them; and more.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of taping, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Frustrated with the quality of free CSS templates online but aren’t quite to the level of building your own? Tired of spending hours trying to customize lame pre-fab designs?

Today we bring you over seven hundred freely downloadable CSS templates that focus on providing you with only a basic layout to build upon. Using these cross-browser layouts you can avoid endless CSS positioning woes and focus on what you’re good at: design.

Like the article? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter to stay up on recent content.

Many of you have been in the design game for years but are only now just beginning to create websites and code them by hand. You’ve got enough Photoshop skills to bust out a beautiful design and enough basic CSS knowledge to make the text look pretty.

However, the biggest problem that many new developers come across can simply be to get their basic layout to work in CSS. Positioning with CSS can be a lot trickier than basic styling, especially when you start to factor in multiple browsers. If you’re not sure about how to solve a problem, hours of tweaking can land you right back where you started, immensely frustrated and desperate for a little help.

The simple downloadable layouts below will provide you with a rock solid foundation on which to build your sites and provide great examples for learning how to create your own.

If you run a quick Google search for free CSS templates, you’ll find a million. However, most of these aren’t ideal for real web developers setting out to create unique sites. What you typically get is something like this:

Templates like this really force you in an ugly pre-established design that you either have to follow or spend hours pulling apart to try and customize. In the end it would’ve been easier just to code it yourself from scratch!

I think it’s much more useful to download a few super basic CSS layouts that are as simple as possible. This allows you to quickly prototype the layout for a page without wasting half your day sorting through code you don’t need. The typical layout in this category looks more like this:

Here we don’t have any text or images to toss out, it’s just a bare skeleton ready for you to fill. Take a look at the great resources below to find all the basic layout templates you’ll ever need!

“Primary is a simple CSS Framework, designed for Developers and Designers in order to make using CSS as easy as possible.”

An interesting collection of four basic layouts performed through a number of different methods.

A collection of four fixed and four fluid layouts aimed at teaching you the basics of CSS positioning.

A solid collection of super basic templates many of which have accompanying tutorials so you can learn how it’s done.

Definitely one of the best resources on the list. This site contains 56 basic layouts, each with four versions: 100% Fluid, 974px, 950px and 750px.

These CSS layouts are broken up into four categories: two columns, three columns, fixed layouts, liquid layouts and CSS frames.

A small but useful collection of XHTML 1.0 and CSS2 layouts.

Only three templates here but they’re solid and popular layouts that you’ll definitely want to check out if you need something basic.

“No CSS hacks. SEO friendly. No Images. No JavaScript. Cross-browser & iPhone compatible.” These layouts also come with plenty of documentation to get you started.

A whopping 252 CSS layouts that are sure to get you started on the right path. Quick to download and easy to customize!

Code Sucks has an impressive collection of free downloadable layouts featuring 53 fixed width versions and 42 faux column versions. Faux column layouts use a background image to make it look like the left and right columns are equal in height and independent of each other.

Tearing apart the layouts above should teach you tons about CSS positioning in a much more practical manner than reading three books on CSS. Be sure to not just implement these templates but to really kick the tires and tweak the numbers to see how they work.

Leave a comment below and let us know if you found this post useful. Also be sure to share any other great resources that you use for basic CSS layouts!

“Ornamental text can be created in several ways. Today we will demonstrate how to combine several stock images to create some nice gold ornamental typography. Let’s get started!”

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“A variety of strategies exist to improve our interface designs and today we’ll talk about 2 of them.”

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“As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?”

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Have you ever tried to debug a site where a beginner web designer has loaded the page with scripts? There’s a couple copies of jQuery in various versions, maybe a little Prototype or MooTools thrown in. We can laugh a bit, but many of us went through that stage where we just didn’t really understand things well enough to know there was any problem with that. And is there? Aside from the bandwidth concerns, most libraries have steps you can take to ensure they play well with other libraries if need be. So what’s the scoop? Do you ever use multiple libraries? Poll is in the sidebar.

Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they'll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be.

While any product can look great in a photo (sometimes deceptively so), keep in mind that your images should match your website’s overall aesthetic and your company’s image. Let’s start with a few great examples of how online retailers have incorporated high-quality product photos onto their websites. In this article, we will focus on images of actual items, rather than models, events or landscapes.

This is an extremely attractive site when you view it in its entirety.

The architecture theme is masterfully done and I love the use of bright colors mixed with an otherwise dully gray theme.

This design was featured on the 24th August 2010 . It falls under the category of Design, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A really nice photo-centric design with beautiful graphics and an awesome color palette.

I really like the double column layout and strokes in the actual blog area, it is a fairly typical layout but looks particularly attractive here.

This design was featured on the 24th August 2010 . It falls under the category of Blog, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.