We may, by trade, call ourselves web designers and/or developers, but let’s face it: many of us also have to wear the hat of writer from time to time too. Whether it’s a matter of producing content for our own blogs or perhaps being enlisted by a client to pen some of the copy for their site, I would guess that a sizable number of readers find themselves in the author’s chair from time to time.

But writing in and of itself is not always easy, and sometimes blogging can be even harder. Often, the biggest hurdle of all is just coming up with an interesting and compelling topic to write about.

In this article, I would like to look at a number of different techniques that you can use to help take that first step and come up with a topic that readers will hopefully latch onto, and perhaps even talk about on social media, thereby driving more traffic to your site! Also, while a lot of the examples that I will be pointing to come from the design community, I don’t think that these techniques are necessarily restricted to writing about design. They can be applied to almost any niche at all!

Write the Impossible

One great way to come up with a truly creative post is to look at your niche and then write something impossible that still sheds light on your subject! Sound confusing? It’s really quite simple (though perhaps not easy to execute). It involves looking at your topic from the perspective of something that cannot actually exist, but which will still provide an interesting perspective on your topic.

Want an interesting example? How about discussing how a number of the most popular blogs in the web design niche would smell. Yes, that’s right, smell. Just over a year ago, the site ThreeStyles actually published a blog post in which the author took 10 of the most popular design blogs (including DesignM.ag, based on its design at that time) and actually tried to imagine how each of them would smell.

In this post we have collected 28 fresh and useful jQuery tutorials. If you like jQuery tutorials you might also want to check out some of our previous posts below. Enjoy!

20 Useful jQuery Slider Tutorials

25 jQuery Tutorials for Improved Navigation Menus

Easy Display Switch with CSS and jQuery

Create an Image Rotator with Description (CSS/jQuery)

How to Create a jQuery Confirm Dialog Replacement

In this post we have collected 30 awesome text effect tutorials. You may also want to check out our previous posts on this topic.

Create a Cool Text Effect in Photoshop With a Single Texture

Inspirational Text Effects

Design Inspiration: Showcase of Beautiful Typography and Text Effects

Create Super Glossy 3D Typography in Illustrator and Photoshop

Every day I receive emails from people asking whether we offer tutorials on Photoshop. We actually will have some news in the coming months about this very thing. In the meantime, here are some products that are very cost effective but will help you learn Photoshop so you can start making money on design work. If you prefer to learn the old fashioned way, check out what Amazon has available on the subject.

Photoshop Tutorials Pro

I’m not entirely sure why it is that, when we talk about clients, so often it seems to be with a certain negative connotation. Clients from Hell is, of course, probably the single greatest example of this particular trend, collecting hundreds of anonymously submitted stories about the things that a wide variety of different types of clients have done or said over the years. It’s an insanely popular site, and I’ll bet that a good number of readers have visited the site or are subscribed. Some of you might have even been out there today.

While I personally still take the time to read most of what gets posted on the site, there has been some discussion as to why it may not exactly be the most healthy of places for us to frequent. One video I watched even suggested that in some cases it might actually be the company or freelancer who is the problem, and not the client! These are interesting and important lines of thought. I do believe that too much of Clients from Hell, or other related negativity, can certainly be a bad thing.

So, in an effort to shine some positivity onto the general perception of the designer-client relationship, in this article, I would like to talk about how awesome clients can help you grow as a designer, and actually become better at your craft!

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In Part 1 of his two-part series, we looked at the concept of inspiration, and how it is something more than just a commodity to be found and consumed from any one of the numerous design galleries out there on the web. I also suggested that, in many cases, what people are actually talking about when they point to “inspiration” is reference material, which they can subsequently use to direct and inform the progressive evolution of a design.

The crux of the article, however, was the suggestion that there is more to the world than just a collection of galleries, and designers should also consider getting out into the real world and partaking of all the potential solutions that it has to offer. We looked at colour, typography, patterns, textures and even just the randomness of thought.

In this second article, we’ll be looking at a number of practical things that you can do to help capture and record and even build upon ideas and reference materials that you come across in the real world.

Camera

Certainly one of the best tools for capturing ideas and reference materials would have to be a camera. Back in the summer of 2010, there as an article published over on Visual Swirl entitled “5 Reasons Every Designer Should Carry a Great Camera”, which offered some insightful tips in this area. The article suggested that a camera is a great way to capture “inspiration” (or reference material), and for capturing textures or images for colour schemes, all of which are directly related to the present discussion.

Let’s face it, creating online surveys can be a real pain, especially if you want those surveys to be hosted on your own server and integrated directly into the existing framework of your own website. You would either have to build the functionality from the ground up or use an existing product and either hack it into your site or build a new skin to create the illusion of the surveys being seamlessly integrated with your overall design.

There had to be a better way. At least, that was the thinking of Matt Ward, designer, developer, DesignM.ag contributor and creator of a new product called Survd.

“I’ve had to create surveys in the past myself,” says Ward about the creation of the application, “and it’s always been a process that I felt took much longer than it should have. I also haven’t been all that impressed with the interfaces of some of the survey products that I’ve tried. So, I set out to create a better solution. That solution is Survd.

“Basically, the intention was to create a product that was as close to being plug-and-play as possible. I envisioned a self-hosted solution that could be uploaded, installed quickly, and which allow users to start setting up their surveys pretty much immediately. That was the vision, and I think that the initial release does a pretty good job at reflecting that.”

That it does. Once you’ve purchased your license, Survd does install quickly and easily. It’s just a matter of filling in some basic information and you’re all set.

Icon design tutorials are a favorite of the DesignM.ag crowd. Check out this great collection of icon design tutorials using Illustrator.

How to Enhance a Vector Image with Photoshop

As designers, I’ve found that we spend a lot of time and energy talking about and discussing something that we commonly refer to as inspiration. We see it all over the design community. There are countless different galleries showcasing some of the best work being produced, and list posts that fulfill a similar function, though usually with some commonality that thematically binds all of the designs together.

In another article, entitled “The Myth of Inspiration,” I have discussed some of the problems that I think arise out of this understanding of inspiration, which tends to commodify the entire concept, turning it into a product that can be acquired (usually for free) from whatever site happens to have accumulated the best collection of representative works.