Its that time of the year again were we take a look at and highlight the most useful recently released jQuery plugins. As expected from the jQuery community, the selection we have for you is highly impressive. They never, ever let you down. The 40 plugins we have for you below have been categorized into the following categories: Page Layout Plugins, Menu & Navigation Plugins, Form & Search Plugins, Slider, Gallery & Carousel Plugins, Chart & Graph Plugins, Animation Plugins, Typography Plugins, Image Effect Plugins and, finally, everything else in-between. You might also like: The 50 Most Useful jQuery Plugins from 2011 → 25 jQuery Plugins to help with Responsive Layouts → 50 jQuery Plugins for Form Functionality, Validation, Security and Customization → Read the rest of the article on : Speckyboy Design Magazine

A great example of a blog for a creative studio, where stories and worlds come to life across many forms of visual communication. I love the illustration that fills the header and the strong single column design. This design was featured on the Tuesday 10th of April 2012. It falls under the category of Blog, and has a layout style of One Column. If you’d like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs. … Read the rest of the article on : Design Shack

A distinct and memorable logo for a web design agency. I particularly like the intriguing use of colour and the amorphous shape. It works especially well on a black background. This design was featured on the Tuesday 10th of April 2012. It falls under the category of Logo, and has a layout style of Other. If you’d like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs. … Read the rest of the article on : Design Shack

A simple shopping cart checkout page, that uses clean and clear buttons to guide you through to checkout. I like the clarity of the design, and the intuitive layout. This design was featured on the Tuesday 10th of April 2012. It falls under the category of Web App, and has a layout style of Other. If you’d like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs. … Read the rest of the article on : Design Shack

Web design and development world is really evolving rapidly. We can see this in the great number of new stuff launched in the community (almost) everyday, be it Apps or new Frameworks that help make our day-to-day job as web designers or developers more effective and efficient. One that caught my attention from web design evolvement today is LESS, a programmable stylesheet language that extends the way we write CSS syntax by combining some programming concepts like Variables, Mixins, Functions and Operations. It opens new … Read the rest of the article on : hongkiat.com

The April edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins, blogging platforms, coding resources, productivity and business tools, responsive design resources, and some really great new fonts. Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there. As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration. Read the rest of the article on : Webdesigner Depot

I’ve been seeing a lot of tutorials lately that utilize :target in CSS to perform some fancy feat so I thought I’d take the time to really dig in and discuss how and why this syntax works. Instead of blindly following someone else’s code, you should be able to wield this tool with the knowledge of what’s happening how it affects browser support. Read on to learn all about the basic functionality associated with the :target pseudo class and how you can stretch that ability to perform all kinds of crazy stuff with pure CSS. Along the way we’ll build some great … Read the rest of the article on : Design Shack

Have you joined the pinning craze yet? With all the hype focused on how Pinterest is a social networking site for women and how it is valued at US0 million etc, we mustn’t lose sight of the technology and potential Pinterest has for the academic world. Pinterest is a platform that allows you to showcase your interest and ideals via the simple act of pinning. This pinned collection of yours is easily shared to your network of followers or friends. They, in turn, can continue pinning materials from your board to theirs and spread the info further, all at the speed of a click. The potential behind this information transfer is enormous and now that the technology for it exists, academicians and educators should be quick to jump on the bandwagon and start pinning as well. T … Read the rest of the article on : hongkiat.com

A new freebie! Grafpedia, folks who previously brought us the St Valentines Icon Set is releasing yet another great design freebie exclusively for Hongkiat.com readers. This Rainbow UI Kit comes in Photoshop PSD format; it is comprised of beautiful User Interface elements designers can use in web design, for example: buttons, navigation bar, login interface, file uploading interface and more. Here’s a quick preview. Read the rest of the article on : hongkiat.com

This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy If you would like to receive our daily updates and keep up to date with the latest and greatest articles and resources from the design community, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebookor by subscribing to our RSS feed. Our Weekly Design News has been sponsored by MediaLoot. Check them out for some seriously useful resources like icon fonts, UI kits, vectors and themes. Read the rest of the article on : Speckyboy Design Magazine