Some fonts just don’t like getting teeny. They get angry and become unreadable. When that happens it’s time to call in the big little guns. Specially designed mini fonts are perfect for situations when you need something smaller than 9 px. These cute lil fonts are extremely popular in flash and flash-based applications, however have yet to catch on in other applications. It’s about time to change all of that. Here are 34 free and truly elegant TrueType mini pixel fonts:

04b-03 (16pt)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

04b-08 (16pt)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

04b-21 (21pt)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

04b-24 (16pt)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Pixel Six

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Cubic Five

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Square Dance

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Handy

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Hellovetica

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Accent

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Arma Five Fonts

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Ronda Seven Fonts

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Easta Seven Fonts

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Westa Seven Fonts

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Tempesta Seven Fonts

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Charriot

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Smirnof

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Silky Wonderland

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

YoungDantes

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

piXelize

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Everyday

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

BM harry-A10

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

BM mini-A8

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Semplice Regular (8px)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Bavaria Regular (8px)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Frucade (8px)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Aurora Regular (8px)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Marke Eigenbau (8px)

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Teachers Pet (Sans Serif)

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Sans Serif font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Kharon4a_v01

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Fixed v01

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Kyrou 7 Wide

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Kyrou 9 Regular

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

Silkscreen

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TrueType font, downloads available for MAC & PC.

The force known as jQuery keeps gaining more and more e-steam. To go along with the growth, a bevy of plugins and tutorials are starting to pop up a well. One helpful plugin is known as a content slider.

Content sliders are a great way to show large amount of content on a smaller area of a web page or blog. Dynamic auto sliding content sliders are a opular add-on to numerous websites all over the web. If you are interesting of giving them a whirl, check out this list of our favorite sliders and tutorials  you can get your hands on:

1. jFlow | Official Website | Demo

This is a fairly functional and easy-to-use slider. If you are new to sliding this may be the way to go. Check out the helpful demo as well.

2. Create Featured Content Slider Using jQuery UI | Official Website | Demo

This is essentially a tutorial that helps you “show off the best content of your website or blog in a nice intuitive way” in order to “catch more eyeballs”. Their words. And not far of the mark. This tutorial will help you do just that and more.  For example, One of the techniques to show the featured content is the auto-playing content slider.

3. Create Beautiful jQuery sliders tutorial | Official Website | Demo

This is another tutorial. It explains how to develop and create beautiful jQuery sliders. It features a ton of image descriptions and easy to follow chapters.

4. A Basic Content Slider With jQuery | Official Website | Demo

This is about a simple and basic a slider as you can get. But don’t worry. It’s fully functional. It’s just missing some of the bells and whistles. Perfect for newbies, though.

5. JC Play List | Official Website | Demo

This is a free and simple to use Flash component. It’s created specifically for easy visual implementation of  XML lists such as XMLs, RSS feeds etc. It words in tandem with Picasa and Flickr.

6. Easy Slider | Official Website | Demo

Guess what? This slider is easy to use, as the name indicates. It’s used for content to slide horizontally or vertically with just a humble mouse click.

7.  jqGalScroll | Official Website

jQuery Gallery Scroller (jqGalScroll) takes a list of images and creates an instantaneous photo gallery. The gallery can flow vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. This handy application will also create pagination for easy scrolling.

8. Image Gallery | Official Website

This is nothing complicated. It’s just a simple image slider. But why mess with simple functionality, right? It’s simple, but it sure does work.

9. Making a Content Slider with jQuery UI | Official Website | Demo

This is an extremely well explained and easy to follow tutorial authored by by Dan Wellman for NetTuts.

10. Creating a Slick Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider | Official Website | Demo

This is a tutorial written by Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks.com. The script is based on the infamous Coda slider. As such, it’s extremely innovative and easy to use.

11. slideViewer | Official Website

SlideViewer is a lightweight (1.5Kb) jQuery plugin that will make sure your website isn’t bogged down by heavy program code. It allows you to instantly create an image gallery by writing just few lines of HTML. If HTML is Greek to you, don’t worry. It will walk you through step by step.

12. Start/Stop Slider | Official Website | Demo

This is another easy to use and convenient slider plugin. It lacks functionality, but the stuff it can do it does well. For instance, you can stop and start a moving image gallery with ease.

13. A Minimalist jQuery Plugin | Official Website | Demo

This is a  tutorial from the infamous WebDesignBooth. It shows you how to create a simple content slider using jQuery. Nothing too elaborate. Just trying to get you going.

14. BarackSlideshow | Official Website | Demo

This is a very teeny and light slideshow script for jQuery. It’s inspired by the Barack Obama slideshow featured on his official website during his successful Presidential bid. It uses the considerable power of MorphList to enhance visualization and navigation of the images.

15. Wordpress Theme using JQuery s3Slider | Official Website | Demo

This is a handy Wordpress theme that allows you to create a featured slider using jQuery S3Slider functionality. It’s the real deal, folks.

Flash galleries. Who needs em? You! They are free applications that allow you to create a slideshow on your website quickly and with ease. Just embed it in your website and let the Flash do the rest. The script will automatically form a slideshow from a specified folder or an XML files or from Flickr photostream.

Here are 20 of the best galleries on the web, that we’ve picked and hand delivered to you. They will help you to learn how to create your own 2D and 3D Flash Galleries and also how to turn it in to a Flash Component.

1. Zen Flash Gallery

This set is heavy on the zen, featuring a natural set of photos and tools to add to your website. Not too heavy on the options, but hey, it’s free and easy to use.

2. 3D Album

This fully featured set of 3D components is based on the  “Building a 3D album with FIVe3D and TweenLite” tutorial . Learn, then see it in action!

3. FlashMo Photo Gallery

This is  another standard multi-picture gallery component for you to try out on your website.

4. Flash Gallery

This is a standard-bearer for gallery installing Flash components. Simply install it and it’s ready to go. Techheads need not apply, although they are welcome too.

5. Art Flash Gallery

Another simple and easy to use component for adding a Flash of art to your webpage. It even features a tutorial.

6. FlashMo 3D Grid

7. Free Flash Gallery

This galley only needs a simple XML configuration to get it to do what you want. Simple and effective.

8. Imagin Flash Photo Gallery

IMAGIN is a flash photo gallery that can organize photos and create cool slideshows for your website. It has a bevy of features, including the ability to upload an infinite number of photos.

9. PhotoDiary

PhotoDiary is another Flash based gallery, but this time with a twist. This handy application allows you to easily  manage the photos on a normal php back end. Not bad!

10. Polaroid Gallery

The Polaroid camera may have fallen out of fashion in the past few decades, however that doesn’t mean you can’t emulate the beloved format in Flash gallery form. Enjoy.

11. Veppa Photo Album

This handy dandy Flash gallery component allows you to upload photos to your website in slideshow format in five simple steps. Nothing special, but useful.

12. Flash Page Flip Photo Gallery template for Picasa

This template is based on the free version of the FlashPageFlip flash engine and works in tandem with Google’s successful Picasa platform. The cool thing about this component is attention to detail. For instance, you can even hear pages flip as you scroll through your photos. Heavy on the “Wow” factor.

13. dfGallery 2.0

This fully featured component set raises the ante with easy to use tutorials and videos detailing how to make your website slideshows as fab as you need.

14. Tony’s Photo Album

This gallery component is open source, which means anything you can dream up can be done with this component. However, you need the coding skills to get there.

15. FlashFlickr Photo Gallery

A gallery component that is based on Flex and Actionscript 3.0. It also uses the famous Flickr API.

16. Invert Media Flash Photo Gallery

This is about as easy as it gets. This Flash gallery component requires no Flash or XML skills in order to use. Simply plug and play.

17. Agile Gallery

The Flash version of Agile Gallery is a free Flash photo gallery that rips through the XML output from Picasa and generates the paging and thumbnails and displays the full sized photos along with any descriptions entered.

18. WS-Slideshow

This handy gallery app lets you change styles and properties via an XML file. It also comes packed in with a configuration program that makes things simple and easy.

19. AutoViewer

Auto viewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewer. The program is designed to display a linear sequence of images and captions.

20. Simple Viewer

This simple and cool gallery is easy to use and features a great and simple user interface. Give it a chance.

Cold Hard Flash is on the case to entertain all of you flashheads out there. This blog aggregates all of the best in news and tips. The kind folks over at the site also showcase hot videos, animations and programs to show you what is possible with everyone’s favorite web development tool.  If you are in the market for Flash-related advice, you could do no better than this handy, dandy website. Check it out here. Tell em we sent ya.

Unfortunately, you cannot avoid the issue of search engine optimization (SEO) when developing an Adobe Flash-based Flex rich Internet application (RIA) or Flash Website.  Fortunately, the Flash SEO Tool is almost here to help ease us into comfort and security.

Peter Gwiazda, the author of this handy app, has this to say about it:

“The Flash SEO Tool lets you add text content for Googlebot to your Flash/Flex site and gives you some SEO optimization capabilities.  The idea is to make it as simple as possible.  No matter what the source of data is (XML, database, etc.), it lets you create text content the same way. You can probably plug the SEO tool to your finished application.”

On his motivation to create the Flash SEO tool, Gwiazda notes, “In my day-to-day work I see that lack of SEO capabilities is the main argument against rich application interfaces.  I had some concepts and experiences with leveraging SEO for Flash platform.  Flash SEO Tool is a proof of concept now.”

Gwiazda’s Flash SEO Tool is currently hosted on Google Code and a download will be available soon.

Mozilla’s new iteration of it’s popular Firefox browser runs up to fifteen percent faster than it’s predecessor, various reports indicate. This, however, still puts the browser behind the speedier Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers. JavaScript three times faster than Opera 10 and more than four times faster than that paragon of pokeyness,  Internet Explorer.

Mozilla Firefox accounts for 25 percent of all browser use, worldwide. Internet Explorer boasts 63 percent of the market share and feisty upstart Google Chrome  captures just 5 percent.

The king is dead! Long live the king! As 2009 fades into nostalgic glory, and 2010 begins it’s slow crawl towards infamy, web designers can’t help but wonder what the year will hold for their favorite profession/hobby/whatever. Here is a list of five web design trends to look out for in 2010. None of this stuff is going to reinvent the wheel. Mostly’ it’s an analysis of several things that people caught on to during 2009 that look to be making a giant leap towards the e-mainstream.

1. Oversized logos and headers

It’s easy to see why this trend is going to blow up big in 2010. It’s eye-catching. It catches people’s interests. Heck, it could potentially prevent someone from clicking away for a few seconds. Isn’t that the point? Plus that de-emphasize clicking and place a strong emphasis on scrolling down. This simple transition helps ease anxieties of users used to years of poor and malfunctioning links.

2. Sketched and hand-drawn design

Hand-drawn and sketched design is by no means new, but it hasn’t exactly caught on in a big way yet. Why is that? Most web-designers are afraid to dip their toes into the genre for fear they can’t draw. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. Even poorly drawn letters can imbue any site with a personalized sense of charm. That’s what 2010 is going to be all about, putting your personal stamp on your website. This will be one such tool for doing just that.

3. Slab typefaces

Slab typefaces are relatively new in the Internet world. However, they’ve been around for hundreds of years in the “real world.” Think, the typeface used on wild west wanted posters. Why are they catching on now? The aforementioned trend towards larger logos and typefaces lends itself nicely for the mighty slab to take it’s place among the web-elite. Like a double bacon burger with extra cheese, slab typeface doesn’t do anything daintily.

4. One page layouts

As opposed to the mighty slab, one page layouts challenge you to edit away what’s unnecessary. In 2010, this trend will move away from quirky navigation and become more minimal in its approach. These websites are more like clickable business cards. They will be more of a one-stop-shop for how to locate you and your work on various other sites– your blog and your social media hangouts. They could also eventually overtake the conventional resume.

5. Change of perspective

The desktop perspective has been around so long now that it’s time for a chance. Put a cork in it. It’s done. Ok, well not done. But there will be more choices in 2010 for sure. One such choice is a change in perspective. This could be side-shot aerial, foregrounds and backgrounds mixed(shown above) and any other number of experimental perspectives. We’ll see what designers think of as the year plays out

That is it for now. What do you think? Have any of your own ideas where web design is going in 2010? Let us know.

2010 is upon us. Get ready for another round of changes of both the monumental and incremental variety. Our friends as Last Exit have compiled a list of digital marketing trends for the new year. Some will seem obvious, others not so much.  Read on to discover how the new year will play out:

1. Facebook continues it ’s eventual replacement of personal e-mail – This is already happening, thanks to the massive pre-existing userbase of Facebook and a few key conveniences that sites like Gmail and Yahoo can’t offer. For one, you don’t have to remember any e-mail addresses. Just ring up your friends name and it’s message time. It even has a chat functionality built in. But don’t worry, Facebook still hasn’t made a dent into business e-mail. Maybe in 2011.

2.The Cloud Helps Open-Source Software Make Proper Money – Open-source software projects that were typically a tiny niche market are  now available to the masses. In this example, Beanstalk, a fully hosted, version-controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open-source project has created a subscription based service that – for a small fee – removes the hassle of setting up Subversions and maintaining those pesky servers.Cloud computing infrastructures is the only way to make this kind of business model profitable.  Companies like Beanstalk don’t have to upfront capital outlay for servers. With the right skills any open-source project can be commercialized this way. Bring it on.

3.Mobile commerce finally comes into it’s own -  Mobile commerce was something of a joke until the iPhone app store took the world by storm in the past year or so. This trend will continue as the new Google Nexus phone enters the fray and other companies finally play catch-up with Apple’s business models. Expect your all-in-one smart phones to be able to do all sorts of new things, for a fee, by this time next year.

4. Fewer registrations, less annoyances - How tired are we of remembering password after password after password? We are lazy, dammit! Well, companies are listening. This has already begun to happen. Notice once you sign into your Gmail account, you can pretty much do anything within the Google network. More companies will partner up to make this a reality amongst different websites. You should probably change your password from “hello” already, though. It’s 2010.

5. DIY culture comes into it’s own – Call it DIY culture, Web 2.1, or whatever you want. It’s here to stay. Sites like Cafe Press, Etsy, and even old stalwarts like eBay allow people to run their own businesses from the comforts of their own home. Etsy in particular has turned into a huge success story, allowing people to produce and sell their own art for whatever price they choose. And, of course, Etsy gets a cut. Not a bad deal for them.

6.Crowd Sourcing – Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of various outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special-interest groups to not only carry a message but also to lead and take part in activities on their behalf. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, expect to see huge growth in crowdsourcing models provoked and led, in large part, by digital social media strategies.

7.Flash overtakes the universe – Every year likes to predict the death of flash, simpler is better after all. That’s a load of podunk, though. Flash is not only here to stay, but it will be wrapping it’s sinewy tentacles into every aspect of the Internet experience this year.  Thanks in part to Adobe’s rich media tool. Also, several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash-built websites no longer serve up single, impenetrable pages. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. Which is good for all of us.

Well that’s it for now. Let’s meet back here at the end of year and see how wrong we were. Isn’t that part of the fun?