Webmasters Gallery

One of the most common requests I get from clients is to have some sort of image gallery on their site.  Whether it’s a sliding image gallery on a homepage displaying promotions or a robust gallery full of portfolio images showing off the quality of work, jQuery image galleries are a great way for displaying multiple images on a website.  They are search engine friendly, iPad and iPhone friendly, and lighter weight than a lot of the Flash slideshow galleries on the market.

Jssorr 

This is a touch swipe image slideshow with 360+ JavaScript slideshow effects. It is perfect for mobile-friendly websites. Some of its styling effects include full width slider, simple fade slideshow, banner slider, simple layer animation, carousel slider, ability to create vertical slider, tab slider, list slider and much more. It also has quite a few skins you can take advantage of.

Slides 

Slides is a responsive slideshow plugin with CS33 transitions and touch features. It efficiently slides from one slide to another and can be easily installed and used.

Polaroid Photo Viewer

Polaroid Photo Viewer is an outside-of-the-box kind image gallery concept.  You’re able to move images all over the page, bring them to the front, and rotate them.  This concept might not be the best on a professional site, or one with lots of images, but it certainly is fun and a unique spin on standard image galleries.  Click here if you’d like to download the source code files.  Also, check out the tutorial here.

Sequence JS

Sequence JS is a JavaScript slideshow based on a CSS framework. It has many free pre-built themes to choose from but you can also order your custom-made theme.

Cycle

Cycle takes a rather interesting approach on how to display images.  Rather than the standard slider, or gallery with thumbnails, their transitions give their photo browsing experience and almost human-like interaction.  The shuffle effect is like shuffling through a stack of photos in your hand, while others like zoom or scroll. Reminds me of viewing photos on an iPad or iPhone.

Transition Slider jQuery Plugin

Transition Slider is a very flexible and easy to use Image transition slider plugin for JQuery.

Pretty Photo

 PrettyPhoto is another lightbox style image gallery that will overlay your images on top of the current page.  One of the nice things about PrettyPhoto is that it adds in social links so viewers can easily like or tweet a photo.  As if that wasn’t cool enough, it was also built to handle videos, Flash media, YouTube, iFrames, and Ajax!

Visual Lightbox

VisualLightBox is a free wizard jQuery program that helps you create photo galleries.

S3Slider

S3Slideris a great option for an image slider to help spruce up a homepage.  It has a clean, simple, and sleek look that allows you to easily add a bit of text along with your image.  You can easily manipulate the S3Slider to take on various shapes, transitions, and even have your text displayed in different positions.

FancyMoves

FancyMoves is a jQuery image slider that operates similarly to the Cover Flow song browsing option in iTunes.  The central image is the largest, while the ones entering and leaving the screen shrink in size to give the transition an almost 3D effect.  Modifying the slider width and how much of the next and last image to show is a breeze, you can feature multiple FancyMoves sliders on a page, and the last image loops back to the first image.

About the author: with over ten years in the freelance web design and writing fields, Scott Stanton has had his finger on the beating pulse of the industry’s hottest design trends and bends for the past decade. Scott regularly writes for Wix.com the free website builder. Follow him on Twitter @TheScottStanton.

The post 10 Awesome jQuery Image Galleries and Sliders appeared first on Web Design Dev.

10 Awesome jQuery Image Galleries and Sliders was first posted on May 28, 2012 at 10:48 am.
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Responsive web design is no longer just a trend, it’s mandatory for any new website nowadays. Everything on a website must look perfectly no matter the device it is viewed from.

Menus, posts, image galleries, and every web element must be responsive in order to deliver a perfect user experience for your visitors.

For visually-oriented website designs, image galleries are frequently used to gather multiple images in one place. Making them responsive can be tricky, but fortunately, there are plenty of responsive image galleries you can use.

Let’s keep things simple and check out a few open source responsive image galleries that are available to use on your own projects.

Elastislide

Elastislide is a responsive jQuery carousel image viewer.  The rotating image carousel will adjust itself automatically to present itself attractively no matter what size of screen or screen resolution the viewer has.  The images will also resize themselves along with the width of the container that the carousel is in to ensure that all of each image is viewable across various screen sizes and resolutions.

Unoslider

Unoslider is a responsive image gallery that allows you to incorporate HTML-rich captions and allows you to have per-slide options.  The gallery is touch-enabled and mobile-optimized, making it a dream for people who are viewing your images from a mobile device.  There are over 40 transitions to choose from and 12 pre-built themes to use, which are easily customizable with CSS.

ResponsiveSlides.js

If you’re looking for a simple responsive slideshow, then ResponsiiveSlides.js is your answer!  Designers have the ability to choose between pagination and navigation controls, transition effects, randomization, HTML captions, and so much more.  It’s extremely lightweight, flyweight in fact, and won’t deliver a knockout punch when you implement it on your website.

jQuery Responsive Thumbnail Gallery Plugin

jQuery Responsive Thumbnail Gallery Plugin is more than just a long name, it’s an amazing solution for a responsive image gallery.  It functions like most simple image galleries with thumbnail navigation, but is responsive and breaks itself down elegantly.

Photo Swipe

Photo Swipe is a free image gallery developed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that is specifically targeted for mobile devices.  This image gallery is compatible with the Apple mobile iOS operating system, Android-powered devices, and Blackberry mobile devices.  It’s easy to install, easier to use, and comes with a gaggle of configuration options so you can fine-tune it just the way you’d like to.

Responsive Image Gallery

Responsive Image Gallery is a phenomenal choice for a responsive image gallery.  Users have the choice of browsing photos with or without the thumbnail carousel, and if they’d prefer to use the thumbnails to navigate through the images or the next and previous buttons on the made slideshow area.

Seamless Responsive Photo Grid

Seamless Responsive Photo Grid is an interesting approach to displaying a lot of images on one page.  Images are displayed more like a collage than a replicated cookie-cutter image and thumbnail gallery all organized into one nice-looking array and labeled as a gallery.  This is a fun option for the occasional project that would allow something like this, works on all major browsers, and is ridiculously easy to incorporate into your own design.

Elastic Image Slideshow

Elastic Image Slideshow is a responsive image gallery with an unobtrusive thumbnail navigation option.  The thumbnails are small blocks of solid color making up the bottom border of the main image in their native state, but slide and fade into position once hovered over.  There is also an autoplay option for viewing the images if you’d like your viewers to enjoy a hands-free viewing experience.

Flexslider

Flexslider is another stunning example of a responsive image slider.  Not only is Flexslider supported in all major browsers, but it’s also programmed with hardware accelerated touch swipe support.  Add custom navigation options and the ability to place any kind of HTML elements your heart desires in the slides and you’ve got yourself a fluid image slider that you can customize to work seamlessly with any design.

Blueberry

Blueberry is a delicious image gallery slider that was written specifically for responsive web design.  It’s an experimental open-source jQuery plugin project that was originally launched in hopes of getting the designers of some of the more popular image sliders to think about making theirs responsive as well.  The fact that this slider is powered by jQuery means that blueberry should not only work on your Blackberry but your Apple as well.

About the author: with over ten years in the freelance web design and writing fields, Scott Stanton has had his finger on the beating pulse of the industry’s hottest design trends and bends for the past decade. Scott regularly writes for Wix.com the free website builder. Follow him on Twitter @TheScottStanton.

The post 10 Amazing Responsive Image Galleries appeared first on Web Design Dev.

With the advent of the Internet it has become easier than ever to steal, copy, or pirate another’s work. Because of this, it is more important than ever to have increased copyright knowledge and protection. And, since designers work almost solely in the world of creating original work, their very livelihood can at times rest upon their ability to defend themselves from copyright infringement.

Quick Disclaimer: The following is not legal advice. Legal advice deals with specific cases of law and legal action. I am not a lawyer and am not qualified to give legal advice. Instead, these are general facts about the law, which is ever evolving. For dealing with any legal matters, or legal advice, please contact an attorney.

What Copyright Is

The first thing every designer needs to know about the copyright law is just what copyright is. Copyright is the law protecting the exclusive rights of a creator’s original work. It sounds straightforward, but at times it can be rather confusing.

Essentially, copyright law in today’s realm is meant to protect original creative work from unauthorized copying, adapting, or publishing. It protects the sole right of the creator to copy, distribute, publish, and display, and sell the work as they choose.

The Difference Between Copyright and Trademark

Trademarks are used by companies for recognition. They are typically a word, phrase, symbol, device, or name used for recognition purposes. In effect, trademarks are a symbol used for quick recognition by a corporation or entity.

Copyright, on the other hand, deals with any original work, not just a company’s symbol.

What Can’t Be Copyrighted

Purely mechanical, clerical, or factual information.

Work that is not sufficiently original. General lyrics or poems like “Want you so bad baby” don’t pass the test.

Ideas, systems, operations, or procedures.

Works that have already had their copyright expire

Lastly, copyrighted items that are used in fair use conditions

Fair use

Fair use is an exception to copyright laws. Fair use was made to allow copyrighted material be used without the owner’s permission, in so called fair use circumstances. In the United States, these are mostly limited to education uses, new reportage, and satire/parody.

Exclusive Rights

The exclusive rights granted by copyright are temporary. However, that is a matter of decades rather than days or months. Copyrighted work will eventually move into the realm of public use, but typically the author/creator maintains their exclusive rights for an extended period of time, often as long as they are alive.

Owner of Copyright Work

As a designer, it is important to know when the work you create should fall under the protection of copyright, and whether you own the rights to the original work.

Typically speaking, it is always the creator of the original work who owns the copyright, even if allowing the work to be used commercially. However, if the designer is employed by a company and specifically designs something for the employer, the company typically owns the copyright.

Whether the designer keeps the copyrights while self-employed is largely the designer’s decision. The designer has to legally assign the copyright over to the client in order for the client to legally get full control of the copyrighted material. However, most clients typically expect the copyright as part of a package deal with their payment.

The Need to Register

In the United States original work doesn’t need to be registered to enjoy the protection of copyright. However, there are some very serious benefits to registering any valuable, unique, or original work with the US copyright office.

Although all original works are protected under copyright law, whether or not they were registered, it is the registration that makes copyright infringement easy to prove. To this end, the US government will cover the legal fees for a copyright infringement case if the original work is registered with them.

So, the creator of original work could press a copyright infringement suit against someone violating their copyright protections. However, an unregistered creator would have to pay the legal fees themselves, and wouldn’t be awarded any money as just compensation. The registered owner would have their fees paid by the US government, and would more than likely receive statutory damages in the form of money, which isn’t something an unregistered owner can expect.

So, in effect, no one ever needs to register their intellectual property. In practice however, it makes real fiscal sense, along with granting peace of mind.

Again, I’m not a lawyer. If you have any legal questions I would urge you to seek legal counsel.

Hopefully this will help educate designers about the generalities of copyright law. In this day and age there is a very real need for designer to be well informed and prepared against copyright infringement. What experiences have you had as a designer with copyright infringement? Is there anything you would recommend to designers out there concerning copyrights?

The post What Every Designer Should Know About Copyright appeared first on Visual Swirl Design Resources.

Before spring fades to summer let’s get those desktops cleared with some virtual spring cleaning. Welcome to another collection of fabulous desktop wallpaper calendars for the month of May. These wallpapers have been hand-picked from some amazingly talented artists and designers to give you a variety of options for making your desktop look nice. Feel free to share your favorites and check back next month for some great new desktop calendars. As always, if you’d like to include your own design in future roundups, drop me a line.

6 Springtime Desktop Wallpaper Calendars for May 2012

Wallpaper by Ibrandstudio

Wallpaper by Paper Leaf

Wallpaper by MonkeyMan504

Wallpaper by Webgranth

Wallpaper by Studio of Mae

Wallpaper by Kriegs

The post Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: May 2012 appeared first on Visual Swirl Design Resources.