Photoshop Layer Styles are pre-configured commands that will take basic text and quickly create typographical works of art for you.
With just a single click of a button, you can apply unique layer styles to any text in Photoshop, and not only do they speed up the design process, applying these effects is just a simple case of clicking a single button, so you don’t have to be a Photoshop professional to use them.
There are many Photoshop text effect tutorials freely available, but the quickest method for creating beautiful text effects is to download one of the free Photoshop Layer Styles below.
Thanks to this pack of Photoshop layer styles, you can instantly transform any text into an 80’s style text. The pack contains 18 different styles and is available as a part of your Envato Elements subscription.
Use this layer style to give any text a video game-style appearance. The article will walk you through the exact steps necessary to reproduce this effect, and you can even download the Photoshop file to follow along.
With this layer styles pack, you’ll be able to go back in time and make any text appear vintage. The pack contains 18 layer styles and is available as a part of your Envato Elements subscription.
Give your text a more playful appearance resembling video game titles with this layer styles pack. The pack is available as a part of your Envato Elements subscription.
With this free PSD you can add depth and a colorful effect to your plain text. All you need to do is type your text in the smart layer and save the changes.
Use this layer styles pack to make your text more smokey. The pack contains 11 different smoke effects, and you can get this pack as part of your Envato Elements subscription.
Following the original aesthetics of the hugely popular TV show, this free Photoshop text style captures the ambiance and the mood of Stranger Things perfectly.
Make your text glow in the dark with the help of this layer styles pack. The tutorial will walk you through the steps necessary to achieve this effect, and you can download the Photoshop file to follow along.
With this free 3D Photoshop text effect you can add depth, as well as a sandwich texture, to your plain text. Type your text in the smart layer and save the changes.
Use this tutorial to learn how to create casino-style text in Photoshop. As usual, the tutorial includes the Photoshop file so you can easily follow along.
Depending on who you are, building an eCommerce website usually involves different priorities. If you’re a shopkeeper, you will probably think about the big picture stuff. You’ll want your products to look perfect and your content to drive sales.
For web designers, the priorities are more likely to be buried in the details. Sure, our client wants feature x, y, and z – but how do we make it happen? It’s about finding the tools and customizations to get the job done.
Either way, one of the keys to putting a successful eCommerce website together is the payment gateway. Pick the wrong one, and it could be costly or even outright disastrous.
This is among the most important decisions to be made during a project. Yet, it doesn’t always get the level of attention it deserves. Let’s change that!
Here are some tips for helping your clients choose the right eCommerce payment gateway.
Determine Project Requirements First
The payment gateway should not be the first component chosen in an eCommerce project. Even if your client already has a preference, there’s no guarantee it will be compatible with everything on their wish list.
Before seriously considering gateway providers, you’ll want an outline of project requirements. Discuss the features and functionality the website will need to satisfy your client’s goals.
For example, knowing which shopping cart software will be used is vital. The preferred gateway may not simply plug and play with the cart. In those cases, custom code may need to be written or add-on software purchased.
The same goes for recurring subscription payments, like those on membership websites. Some providers are built to handle this out-of-the-box, while others may require more effort.
And it’s not just a matter of basic compatibility. All of the little details need to be figured out ahead of time. Otherwise, you run the risk of having to go back to the drawing board when something doesn’t work as expected.
It’s better to gain an understanding of a project’s needs before committing to a payment gateway.
Consider the Money Management Workflow
Not only do your clients want to make money from their website, but they’ll also want to manage that cash in an efficient way. When it comes to payment gateways, one size does not fit all.
Some of this does have an impact on the website itself. The ability to provide customer refunds is an area that could see a lot of use. Therefore, a gateway that simplifies the process is worth its weight in gold. You may even find one that allows refunds to be created directly within the shopping cart’s back end.
Other aspects are more about interacting directly with the gateway provider. Among the bigger issues here is how funds are transferred to your client’s bank account. There are some gateways that famously require the account holder to make transfers manually. However, others have a more automated approach.
It’s also worth looking into how quickly funds become available. If sales don’t show up within the account for several days, that may not fit your client’s needs.
Dig Deep into Transaction Fees and Future Growth
Every payment gateway has an associated cost. Most take a percentage of each sale and put it in their pocket. This can sometimes be combined with a flat per-sale fee as well.
Shopping around will give your client a good idea of cost-effective providers. However, there’s often more to the story.
In some cases, those per-sale transaction fees can scale. The bigger your revenue, the more money the provider keeps for themselves. Thus, it’s important to look at projections and determine the potential costs if sales take off.
Is your client selling to a global audience? Fees for international transactions and currency conversion could be applicable.
Beyond sales, there are other fees to watch out for. Some providers will charge a fee for “priority” transfers to a bank account. These can become significant if your client is moving a lot of money around.
Monthly or yearly subscription fees might also apply. Providers that offer tiered accounts may require these fees in order to unlock advanced features.
So, while a gateway provider may advertise attractive rates – be careful. The real costs are often spelled out in the fine print.
Help Your Clients Help Themselves
Choosing the right eCommerce payment gateway isn’t easy. It’s much more than just signing on with the biggest name or the shiniest transaction rate. A lot goes into ensuring that it’s the right option for your project.
That said, it’s not necessarily a web designer’s job to make the final decision. That’s up to our clients. All we can do is guide them along and show them what to look for.
On the technical side, we do need to know whether a specific provider will meet the project’s functionality needs. But when it comes to rates and managing cashflow, clients really need to take the lead. They’re the ones who’ll have to live with the choice. Thus, they should know the subject inside and out.
Hopefully, this guide will help you fill them in on the details. Good luck!
There are plenty of JavaScript libraries out there for rendering your otherwise plain and boring numerical data into beautiful, interactive, and informative visualizations. The beauty of using JavaScript for data visualization is that, if created correctly, your data will be highly accessible (usually via HTML tables). A long time ago (2008), I wrote about JavaScript solutions for graphing and charting data and this article revisits the topic with twenty more JavaScript libraries that you can use to bring your data to life, all for no cost.
1. Highcharts
Highcharts is one of the most promising JavaScript charting libraries to hit the scene recently, with its large array of features including seven charting types (line, pie, and bar among them), the ability to zoom in and out of charts, and tooltips for offering more information about data points. The library has many options for customization and they’re well documented on one page for easy referencing.
gRaphaël is a charting library based on Raphaël, a vector graphics drawing JavaScript library. The library is divided into sub-libraries so that you can just download the type of chart that you’re interesting in creating. With the main library, g.raphael.js, at only 12KB and sub-libraries between 4KB to 8KB, this can be a lightweight but fully featured JavaScript charting solution for web developers.
JavaScript InfoVis, a charting library influenced partly by MooTools, is a robust and excellent solution for data visualization. It’s modular (just like MooTools) so that you can include just the parts you need to keep your pages light. It has animation effects capability to captivate and engage your users, plenty of charting types, a helper class for working with JSON data, and much more.
JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit Demo
JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit Download
4. jQuery Visualize Plugin
If you’re already using jQuery, it’d be performance conscious of you to look into plugins for your visualization requirements. jQuery Visualize, a plugin developed by the Filament Group (the core developers of jQuery UI), is a jQuery plugin for generating charts using HTML5’s canvas element. It has 14 options for customizing your charts. Don’t forget to try out their Configurable demo.
For now, moochart only plots bubble diagrams, but there are plans to expand this MooTools 1.2 plugin to feature pie, line, and bar graphs. The plugin has 14 options that you can use for customizing your diagram’s look, and tooltips for providing more information about a bubble when mousing over them. moochart is open source and released under the MIT license.
JS Charts boasts easy usage by emphasizing on the end-user’s ability to use the library with little to no coding, making it ideal for web designers who’d like to chart data without spending too much time learning how to write JavaScript. JS Charts has a web-based GUI and offers hosting for your charts to take some load off your own servers. It supports three chart types: bar, pie, and line.
dygraphs is a JavaScript visualization library for producing interactive charts for time series data. It was designed to plot dense data sets (such as temperature fluctuations). It has user interfacing options such giving the user the ability to specify time intervals on the fly, displaying of values when mousing over parts of the chart, and zooming. It also integrates with the Google Visualization API.
JSXGraph, developed at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, is a standalone JavaScript library for plotting complex geometric shapes and data such as Bezier curves, differential equations, and much more. It has animation features for moving graphs, interactive components such as sliders for experimenting with changing values of variables, and plenty of charting types to choose from.
Protochart is a JavaScript library for use with the Prototype JS framework. It uses HTML5’s canvas for modern browsers, and the ExCanvas library for Internet Explorer support. It has six types of charts including line, pie, bars, points, lines with points, and area graphs. It allows for the display of legends that are highly configurable to help identify items on your charts.
Bluff is a lightweight charting library that ports Ruby’s Gruff gem to JavaScript. Weighing at only 11KB gzip’ed (you also need JS.Class which only weighs 2.6KB gzip’ed), it’s surprising that you’ll be able to get 15 different types of charts out of this library. It features tooltips, a ton of configurable options, legend support, and the .set_theme method for declaring reusable themes.
Style Chart is a free JavaScript-based charting web service/API for creating hosted charts. It’s also available as a downloadable library in case you want to host your own charts (though you need to register in order to download it). It has the things you’d expect from a robust and configurable charting library such as tooltips, legends, and 19 types of charts including 3D pie, 3D bar graphs and Pareto charts.
jqPlot is another jQuery plugin for data visualization developed by Chris Leonello. It’s open source, embodying two sets of licensing: MIT and GPL version 2. It has many options for you to take advantage of in order to truly customize your charts.
jQuery Sparklines is a simple and lightweight jQuery plugin for charting dynamic sparklines (a condensed data graphic). It emphasizes on ease of use and minimal coding; you can create complex sparklines with as little as one line of JavaScript code. When minified and gzip’ed, the plugin only weights 4.7KB so it won’t bog down your page response times much.
jQuery Google Charts (abbreviated as jGCharts), developed by Massimiliano Balestrieri, is a data visualization jQuery plugin for working with the Google Charts API. It has plenty of chart types, including a 3D pie chart that’s dynamically generated. It has a GUI in development (still in alpha release), which will allow you to create charts easily with a graphical front-end.
jQuery Google Charts Demo
jQuery Google Charts Download
15. Canvas Pie Chart with Tooltips
This MooTools class/plugin is for plotting pie charts using the canvas element. It’s based on Canvas pie by Stoyan Stefanov. It’s a simple and straightforward data visualization option for MooTools developers who are only interested in plotting out pie charts.
TufteGraph is a jQuery plugin that emphasizes on ease of use and minimalism. It offers you only a few options for styling and instead relies on CSS for customizing the look and feel of your graphs, which ultimately means that your web pages will render faster because JS has to work less. Check out this introduction video to TufteGraph.
Timeline is a JavaScript widget for creating interactive timelines. You can scroll through items featured in chronological order by using your mousewheel or by holding down your mouse button on the timeline and dragging left or right. Clicking on a dot, which represents an item in the time line, will reveal more information. Timeline is open source, released under the BSD license.
Protovis is a data visualization library for charting data. Protovis was created by the Stanford Visualization Group. It uses JavaScript and SVG to dynamically plot out your data. Protovis is open source released under the BSD license. You can download the source on their home page.
milkchart is a JavaScript charting/graphing library that requires MooTools. milkchart renders HTML data tables into one of its five types of charts: column, bar, line, scatter, and pie (with future expansions planned for area graphs) using HTML5’s Canvas element. milkchart is open source under the Apache License.
Timeplot allows you to dynamically generate time series graphs. Hovering over data points reveals their value. Timeplot was developed as part of the SIMILE Project at MIT. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to utilize Timeplot. Timeplot is open source and available the BSD license. The Timeplot demo and download links are on this page.
Timeplot Demos and Download Info
Summary
Bringing data to life is an important part of web design. Javascript is great for any site with lots of data on it, such as a financial advisor or realtor’s website. It allows the data tables to stand out and not be so bland, so I highly recommend taking advantage of it.
365psd consistently publishes high-quality PSD files for you to download. Whether you’re looking for specific user-interface components like web buttons or entire UI kits, you’ll find it on this community-driven site.
Brusheezy is a premier resource and community site for artists seeking to find user-contributed free PSD resources. Though they’re most known for their Photoshop brush libraries, they have also have a huge collection of over 300 free PSDs.
Web designer Orman Clark is the creator of Premium Pixels, a top online destination for those in search of cream-of-the-crop, free design resources. You’ll find a big range of free PSDS on this site, like the Dark UI Kit (PSD) and even this 13-inch Apple MacBook Air PSD.
You probably know of Dribbble already, an exclusive site for designers where we can share screenshots of our work. But did you know that you can find a lot of PSDs on Dribbble? A simple search using terms like “psd” and “free psds” will lead you to a ton of high-quality PSDS.
Freepik, a search engine that helps graphic and web designers locate high-quality graphics, has a special section that indexes all the free PSD files they have on the site. Having served over 91 million downloads and having indexed over 1.4 million design resources — there’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for at the site.
6. Best PSD Freebies
Best PSD Freebies is a website where you can discover free PSD design resources. It’s by Canadian web designer Michael Reimer, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with through our partner site, Six Revisions.
7. PixelBin
What PixelBin lacks in the quantity of PSD freebies they’re offering (relative to the other sites on this list) the site more than makes up for in terms of quality. Though they only have around 30 free resources, they’ve already served 88,000+ downloads — a testament to the goodness of their PSDs.
8. Designmoo
Though Designmoo doesn’t strictly dish out free PSD files, it’s hard to write an article like this without mentioning this design resource site for two reasons. First is that Designmoo offers superior-quality design resources. Secondly, among the different types of user-contributed design resources they make available for free, many of them are PSDs.
This site collects and features hundreds of free Photoshop files that the sites owners have found on the Internet. Right now, they’ve steadily amassed a collection of over 200 free Photoshop files.
This site has a wonderful hoard of free PSD files — templates, icon sets, UI sets, graphics, you name it, they have it. What I like about this site is that the PSD previews are nice and large, making it easy to spot the freebies I’m looking for.
Also: I just wanted to mention that Design Instruct occasionally releases free PSD downloads as well — feel free to download them!
What’s your favorite site for finding PSDs, and why is it your favorite site? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks!
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