SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

There’s never been a better time to start or upgrade your blog. The tools available are fully-featured, polished solutions that make getting a professional and robust blog up and running ridiculously easy. Like, seriously – some of this stuff would’ve blown the minds of web developers in the ’90s.

But with so many options, which should you choose? This article will focus on the pros and cons of some of the most popular blog solutions: Self-hosted WordPress vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress.com.

We all have our techniques for obtaining a great combination of readability and design. Many designers like to fine-tune the font stacks and sometimes add a nice shadow to bring text to life.

Others like to take typography to a different level and use anti-aliasing tools and such to get a sharp clean result. Whichever method you decide upon, there are some great CSS techniques to enhance web typography without running the whole nine miles.

We’ve featured Photoshop brushes sets a couple of times before on SpyreStudios and this time we’ve collected over 600 ink, paint, watercolor and splatter brushes from various sources.

Most of the sets featured in this post are of high-enough quality that they can be used for both web and print projects. I hope you enjoy the collection.

The Android platform is growing in popularity every day, and for good reasons. Obviously being an open-source project and having Google behind it makes it a great choice for developers. Unfortunately the Android Market can’t really compete against the Apple App Store (in my opinion).

So I’ve chosen 25 Android apps that I think can be very useful to designers, developers and web-workers. You’ll find editors, reference guides, blogging tools, image editing tools and more. If you have your Android device handy you can scan the QR Codes next to each item in the list using the Barcode Scanner application.

There’s probably hundreds of community and networking sites out there but only a few focus on the design and creative community. We went ahead and selected 15 of the best sites for designers and creative types.

Obviously there are some sites we might not be aware of, so make sure you leave a comment if your favorite design community/networking site wasn’t included in this post.

An effective mobile office is essential for productive traveling designers. There are plenty of reasons why you need a mobile office: besides introducing more traveling into your life, you have easier mobility with your design work, increase your focus, get more quality work done, and simplify and enjoy your life more as a result of it all.

But there are no doubt problems that come up while using a mobile office: distractions, finding good places to work, no internet access when you need it, and so forth. How do you avoid these issues? Well, today’s your lucky day, because this article covers how to overcome common mobile office problems.