Illustration is an incredibly versatile tool that can find many different uses in design. And when it comes to web design we can find an extremely wide variety of implementations.

Today I want to dig into some key ways that this tool has been put to work so we can draw new ideas to inspire and challenge the designs we produce.

Let’s begin someplace I seldom do, with a basic definition: Illustrated: 1) To make clear; 2) To make clear by giving or by serving as an example or instance; 3) To provide with visual features intended to explain or decorate.

It seems that in the real world of web design, illustration tends to perform both functions at one time. It beautifies while it clarifies. And if it is only doing one of these you might need to ask yourself why. Perhaps by putting illustration to work fulfilling both roles is the way to truly leverage the design element for all it is worth.

This is, of...

New WordPress themes are released constantly, some free, some premium. And some better than others.

Free themes, especially, tend to have a greater disparity in quality from one another, with some being just as great as the best premium themes, and others being poorly designed or poorly coded (or both).

Below, we’ve collected more than sixty of the best themes released since late summer. Roughly half are premium themes, ranging in price from...

There are a lot of articles that will try to tell you what you are doing wrong and how to fix things, but the truth is the majority of them aren’t super honest.

They want to get you to sign up for something to sell your work, and that’s supposed to put you on your way.

Not necessarily true. This time around we’re going to explore some of the real issues many of us freelance designers aren’t seriously successful.

You may have tasted a bit of success—for example, you may have a couple paying clients who are pretty good—but you haven’t reached any great individual (or financial)...

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very...

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your...

Your RSS Feed is sometimes the only way your visitors experience what you have to offer on a regular basis.

It serves to inform and entertain, but is also an essential tool for driving traffic back to your website and improving your overall search-engine ranking.

If all your feed does is show a poorly formatted excerpt of your posts, the hundreds of visitors who are not hitting your main site everyday will have no reason to read your content or share it with others.

When optimizing your RSS Feed, you have to consider the kind of content you curate. There are several reasons why you may want to use your feed to generate clicks. You may have...

We’ve talked a lot about responsive design here on Webdesigner Depot, and shared a lot of valuable resources. Today we’re sharing another valuable resource: at the end of this article are details for getting a discount on Chris Converse’s responsive design course on MightyDeals.

CSS3 media queries allow us to dynamically alter the design and layout of a web page in order to deliver an optimal user experience from a single set of HTML and CSS markup.

The techniques...

When you start working with clients you have to understand that the work you produce is not just about how good or bad a design is. It has a lot to do with the way the design fits into the wider spectrum of things.

Does this design fall in line with the overall theme of the company?

Does this design ‘say’ what the company tries to say?

In some instances and with some clients, you don’t even have to make a ‘great’...