This is not so much a review, more of a brief overview with the hope you will like what you see and purchase Brand Identity Essentials forthwith.

From the website…

Logos, Identities, Brands…What’s the difference?

Design terms are too often used inconsistently, leading to confusion for designers as well as clients. Contrary to common usage, the words “logo,” “identity,” and “brand” are not interchangeable

Brand Identity Essentials lays a foundation for brand-building, defining the tools and building blocks, and illustrating the construction of strong brands through examples of world-class design.

Brand Identity Essentials is a valuable book that covers just about everything to do with logo, brand and identity design with a lot more besides.

It’s not a hard or text heavy and super detailed book to read, and is cleanly laid out so you can dip in and out quite easily. There are plenty of large size photographs that work well with the text to explain each topic. There is another book, which is far more detailed and text heavy, that I will cover next week called, “Designing Brand Identity: Alina Wheeler“. This is for the more passionate and information hungry types that borders on educational coverage.

100 Principles for Designing Logos & Building Brands

One of the most useful aspects of Brand Identity Essentials is the complete online resources that accompany the book, titled 100 Principles for Designing Logos and Building Brands. A summary of all the topics covered in the book has been made available online for reference, see partial index above.

The few images below are taken from the website version.

All in all a solid and useful book to have around if you are keen to pick knowledge that covers more than just logo design.

If you are already reasonable well versed in logo and brand identity design/marketing/advertising then this may be worth a miss, but the book I mentioned above, Designing Brand Identity, is definitely more hard-core.

Developing your own WordPress plug-ins should be near the top of your list of things to master as a web developer. Not only are they indispensable to clients to bridge gaps that haven’t been filled yet, they are very immensely helpful to the WordPress community. If that doesn’t give you a warm feeling inside you can always charge a fair price and if your plug-in is useful, you’ll make a pretty penny on the side.

As for learning how to create them its should be a walk in the park especially with some php knowledge and theme development experience ; if you don’t have these it should still be easy , there is a lot of info out there and the WP codex is an amazing resource which is why we put it first.

Take your time to read through these and book mark them for later reference – good luck.

 

WordPress Plugins allow easy modification, customization, and enhancement to a WordPress blog. Instead of changing the core programming of WordPress, you can add functionality with WordPress Plugins.

 

This tutorial will describe the implementation of a WordPress plugin starting from scratch. The plugin will connect to an external OSCommerce database and display random products on your WordPress site. It also implements a configuration page for the WordPress admin panel.

 

Create Your First WordPress Plugin in 10 Minutes

 

There will be situations where you will have a main administrative panel, but would like individual users to set their own preferences. In the case of the Devlounge Plugin Series, we added an option for text to be added in at the end of each post. However, what if a logged-in user doesn’t want to see this text? Why not give them the option without affecting all of the other users?

 

Despite an extensive codex, many WordPress users remain unfamiliar with how to create their own custom plugins. In today’s screencast, we’ll start from scratch and build our first usable plugin. For this example, we’ll write a simple “tuts formatting” function that allows a blog editor to more easily format articles.

 

Just read a forum topic Organizing Plugins on the wordpress.org support forums and thought I’d give you all the tips and tricks that I’ve learned and use when developing WordPress plugins.. which can be quite fun! I’m definately not a php or WordPress expert, anyone can create useful WordPress plugins without being a hacker.

 

A lot of plugins nowadays are more reliant on JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets. It is important to separate your JavaScript and CSS into separate files so that the plugin is easier to maintain. This portion of the series will cover how to load JavaScript and CSS files for your plugin.

 

More Tutorials:
WP Tutorial: Your First WordPress Plugin « Mark on WordPress
WordPress Codex – WordPress Coding Standards
WordPress Codex – Creating Tables with Plugins
WordPress Hooks from Flat Earth
How to Write a WordPress Plugin | Devlounge
SEOpher – How to write a WordPress plugin : episode 1 – getting started …
A Love Letter to WordPress Plugin Authors

 

 

Widgets

The Dashboard Widgets API (added in WP 2.7) makes it very simple to add new widgets to the administration dashboard. Doing so requires working knowledge of PHP and the WordPress Plugin API, but to plugin or theme authors familiar with hooking actions and filters it only takes a few minutes and can be a great way to make your plugin even more useful.

 

Before WordPress version 2.0, these extra visual plugins had to be hand coded into the theme template, so a knowledge of PHP is required. In version 2.0 they introduced "Widgets" which wrap around a plugin and allow a non code editing method for incorporating into a theme using sidebars and a drag and drop interface.

 

This tutorial will explain how to create Wordpress widget from scratch. You will also learn how to implement configuration page for your widget.

 

 

Videos
How to Create a Simple WordPress Plugin

 

Building a Plugin – It’s Easier Than You Think Video

This video tutorial, from WordPress TV, demonstrates the basics of constructing a plugin, designing it to make the changes you want, and then using that plugin to alter your WordPress site in a persistent way. Includes some basic discussion on hooks and functions, as well as some sample code.

 

Screencast of presentation made at Wordcamp Montreal 2010

Wordpress’ open nature makes it very easy to create plugins to provide a large variety of capabilities to a site. However, developers don’t always think to follow best practices as they are writing up their code. Will their code break other plugins? Will the resulting site become very slow? Will users be able to understand how to get the most out of the extension? All of these questions will be discussed using concrete examples from four Wordpress plugins developed over the past five years. View Slide Presentation

 

 

Cheat Sheets

WordPress Optimization/Cheat Sheet

 

The WordPress Help Sheet was a good WordPress resource, but it was pretty limited and only had the basics of WordPress. I kept thinking to my self, “What about more advanced WordPress developers? They need something too!”. I felt they were being left out of all the fun. So here’s something for all you WordPress gurus…

 

I know that there are many resources regarding this topic but there are never enough. This post is dedicated to small snippets from WordPress that will make your life easier. Or maybe my life easier and in this case I want to have them in one single post. In a way I’m trying to help you and in another I’m trying to organize this stuff for myself.

 

This cheat sheet is designed to be a quick reference to all of the elements and attributes available in the XHTML 1.1 specification. And because XHTML 1.1 is designed to be modular, it is organized into sections to mirror the XHTML abstract modules and the elements and attributes contained within each.

 

Good looking and well structured html overview.

 

Useful WordPress Plugins
Featured Content Gallery
Ultimate GA
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
WP Super Cache
WP re-CAPTCHA
Easy Adsenser

 

 

About the Author
Ben Rama is a Graphic Designer, CG Artist & Cinematographer from London. He is the founder & director at Digital Empire with many years of experience in Graphic Design, Film & TV within London.

RT: @colegramist: RT: @alsacreations: De belles polices sous licence Open Font

I put together this list of my favorite figure drawing, sketching and anatomy books for fellow artists and student friends. You can download any and all of these books for free.

Have you ever wanted to add that professional touch to your film/movie trailer/movie poster/DVD cover? Below are a few resources for fonts, logos, and box art templates you can use in your project and increase its production value.

Index of /vmware

Here is a list of 50 design resources that can be helpful to any designer or marketer.

bear with me as I self-indulge, if merely to prepare a substantial archived list of resources for the beginning CSS designer

All of our schemes can be downloaded or copied from the website, and are easily usable.

Throughout this site you will find a growing repository of high quality stock photos that are free for professional and personal use.

a rather unconventional filing system, the system proposed and used by Noguchi Yukio

I've really started to like the del.icio.us bookmark server (which I wrote about here). So much so that I wrote up some quick instructions for how you can publish your links on your site. Fun!