position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

Justin Seely of Photoshop Quicktips shows us how to utilize Photoshop’s LAB color mode to quickly add contrast and saturation to flat photographs. It’s a quick fix and you return to your regular color mode right after using it. Check out the rest of Photoshop Quicktips for some other great tutorial podcasts.

About time someone came up with this. If you are working with Flash and need to test your products in various Flash versions, the new Flash Switcher extension offers a very easy way to do that. Just select the version you need from the icon in the status bar, and the extension will quickly auto-install the appropriate Flash version and reload the page. Tried it out, works like a charm for me. (mac version here.)

Computer Arts magazine is offering a tutorial on book cover design. Design duo Kai and Sunny recreate their impressive vector design of the hardcover edition of the Booker Prize shortlisted Cloud Atlas. This hands-on tutorial touches on basic and advanced Adobe Illustrator techniques, tracing your scanned line work, selecting Pantone colors, combining tones for effect, and a neat sun effect. Not the most in-depth of tutorials (more like an overview) but good approaches and advice nonetheless.

A few days ago I mentioned an article collecting some very high quality fonts that are all free for use. The original author, Vitaly Friedman, has updated the list on Smashing Magazine and presents 19 new free quality fonts, all appropriate for professional work.

Smashing Magazine has an extensive round-up of cheat sheets worth bookmarking.

Whether you’ve forgotten the name of a function or the property of a cascading style sheet - handy cheat sheets deliver the information you are looking for - immediately. Most cheat sheets are available as .pdf or .png-files, so you can print them and use them every day for whatever projects you’re currently working on.

Clicky.

Vitaly Friedman has compiled a list of some of the best license-free fonts around. As they are license-free, they are completely free for private and commercial use. These are not your standard free fonts, they are works of quality that can be used in a serious professional environment. Oldie but goodie.

Update 2006-10-31: More new fonts here.

Some while ago, pixelized wallpaper background patterns on websites were all the rage. They’re not as popular anymore, but I still love ‘em! The Inspiration Gallery has a large set of wallpaper patterns, pretty good in quality. My personal favorite is the Damask category, with its classic, highly detailed floral texture designs. Nice and kitschy! ;)

The creators of the excellent WordPress software have released the first public version of bbPress, a new forum software that focuses on bringing the same simplicity into the realm of forums as WordPress has done in the realm of blogs. Some of the features:

• Fast and Light: nothing you don’t need.
• Built in spam protection by Akismet.
• Really simple interface: we want people using our software to forget that they’re using it.
• Complete integration with WordPress.
• Both the look and the functionality are highly customizable.
• RSS feeds for everything.

Plus, it’s focussed on being completely standards-complaint. Sounds good. position: absolute is happily running on WordPress, so I have high hopes in this.

Need to make some graphs for a presentation? Instead of going the (ugly) Excel way, how about giving Illustrator a try? Bartelme has created a nice tutorial on making visually appealing graphs in Adobe Illustrator. What’s nice about these is they remain editable; just give in new stats and slightly adjust, so you can use them over and over again. I’ve tried it myself, as you can see on the left. ;) View Part 1 and Part 2.

There are so many color palette generators out there right now, I thought I’d round some of them up for you for a quick overview. I was going to rate them, but really, go with what works best for you. If you know some other good ones, feel free to post them!
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