WordPress is an amazing platform, with its 5 minute install and easy customising. It is perhaps the most widely used open source platform for making clearn and simple corporate websites or blogs. Themes for WordPress are readily available that are free, but if you want high quality then you need to find premium theme designers and providers. We have put here 5 brilliant theme websites for finding themes with that little bit extra of professionalism.

For those of you looking for a great design at a cost effective price, we can now offer theme customization and simple wordpress websites based on any of the themes from the suppliers below.

Theme Forest

Graph Paper Press

Elegant Themes

Woo Themes

Templatic

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• July 5, 2009 -- 5 Amazing Photo Manipulations & Digital Art (deviantArt) (5)
• October 23, 2008 -- Check Your Google Position for a Keyword/Keyword Phrase Tool (7)
• October 27, 2008 -- How to hide desktop items on a Mac – Use Camouflage! (2)
• February 3, 2010 -- How do your organise yourself as a freelance designer? – Part 2 (2)
• October 21, 2008 -- 5 Tutorials and Resources for Image Replacement Techniques (1)
• October 21, 2008 -- Weekly update #4 (1)

As we move more and more into doing things via ‘clouds’ and online web based applications; one of the few things that I have yet to find is a truely comprehensive intermediate web application for search engine optimisation.. I soon came across one that seemed to fit the bill.

Thus, I went off on a journey and in short, I found no web based SEO applications. There are hundreds if not thousands of fairly good individual tools for various tasks associated with SEO. Some of the more popular web based tools include for instance website grader. There is a previous post I made on such tools here: 10 Great Free SEO Tools and Resources

However, after a few tweets (@AcuityDesigns) I came across Sheer SEO.

Sheer SEO

SheerSEO is an SEO software to track and analyze your SEO campaign. Also helps you with link building.

Sheer SEO is a basic to intermediate tool that offers comprehensive link tracking, and automation and an intuitive UI to help speed up tasks such as directory submission to hundreds of free high PR directories. It couldn’t definitely work as a tool to help a freelance web developer offer basic to intermediate SEO campaigns to his clients.

Have any of you had extensive experience with Sheer SEO? Any negatives?

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• December 13, 2010 -- Creative Expansion! Acuity Designs and 2011 … (1)
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• April 12, 2009 -- How to translate a website – considerations (3)
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WorkSnug is a really cool augmented reality iPhone app that enables you to find great places to work nearby, from cafes to coworking spaces, complete with reviews.

Below is a short video showing how this great app works! :

WorkSnug  is available for free download from the iTunes App Store. The app initially covers London, and is absolutely amazing.  Coverage for San Francisco, New York, Berlin and Madrid to come.

Give it a run and let us know if WorkSnug helps you to find a great place to work?

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Whilst going through my RSS reader, I came across this amazing achievement of tech and photography via Photography Blog. An amazing 70 Gigapixel 360° panoramic photograph of Budapest.

The photograph was taken from a 100-year-old observation tower built on the highest point of Budapest, the stitched panorama is over 590,000 pixels wide by nearly 121,000 pixels tall. The young Hungarian photographers used two Sony A900 bodies – each outfitted with a Minolta AF 400mm f/4.5 APO G lens and 1.4x teleconverter – on a sturdy tripod complete with a custom-designed robotic head. The image capturing stage of the project took over three hours to finish. The source images were then stitched with Autopano Giga software  and this process took two full days and resulted in a 200GB file!!

Click the image below to see the panorama on their website ( you will need microsoft Silverlight installed)

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Quote Robot is an app that I came across recently that seemingly streamlined the tedious task of writing proposals for lots of freelance designer’s out there. Intrigued, I signed up and have been giving the free trial a run for its uhh… money.

Essentially Quote Robot exists to:

Well, we’ve always found writing proposals to be a chore.  I (Shawn) spent a lot of time creating a good proposal template in Illustrator, and it really worked, so I gave it away on my blog. I had no idea it would become the most popular article on my blog. I talked to Jon about writing an app to create the proposals, using my template, and we both thought it would help us out, so we did it. The longest part of quoting for me were always, a) coming up with the numbers (what to charge), and b) building the proposal in Illustrator. We decided to focus on trimming the time to accomplish those things. !

I have decided to split this into four sections: Interface, Making A Proposal, Output and Pricing

The interface
Quote Robot is a very cool, slick web application and it follows all the design trends one would expect from a web 2.0 application. More than just superficially looking the part, things are easy to find and the usability of the site as a whole is intuitive and for the most part simple stupid. These are good things, considering the application’s entire purpose is to streamline and decrease the time writing proposal’s takes. The application guides you through making the proposal fairly quickly and efficiently. There are a few superfluous drag and drop features which don’t seem to really make anything faster, but hey they look nice right.

Making A Proposal
The options it presents are the core of any proposal: client / company information, the scope, budgeting and timescale and quote summary. Each field gets to the core of the information that needs to be handed to a client. Their claim of it being a quick and easy process is definitely true, minimising clicking into new text boxes, formatting titles and all the tiny little tasks that eat up time in InDesign / Illustrator are done away with. I was done filling out the various bits of information for the proposal in less than 10mins.

Output
The template generated is a neat and tidy PDF that looks clean and modern. You can upload your own logo, so it is completely white labelled and looks like a PDF you have made the long and hard way in another desktop program. You can download the PDF so that you can attach it to an email or alternatively send it straight away to the client from the application itself.

Pricing
The easiest way to review the pricing is $24 a month and this gets you ‘unlimited’ everything that Quote Robot offers. Simply analysed, the SMALLEST job of lets say one billable hour – is more than the $24 charge. If you use the application to send one proposal a month, your fee is covered and the time you save can be used to do other projects or just sit back and have a coffee.

At Acuity, it’s something we will definitely be making use of!

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The other day we blogged about the amazing things we liked about Adobe Photoshop CS5. Today it’s Illustrator CS5′s turn. As keen illustrator users ourselves, any new features is a party in our minds!

The Perspective tool is genius! Getting angles of perspective right has always been a somewhat tedious task with endless reference drawings needed etc. Now Illlustrator pulls up a great interactive grid for use. Go Adobe!

The Bristle Brush is a great addition and another step towards removing illustrator and photoshop from intermediary steps in work flows. No more switching the file into photoshop and spending hours creating a huge painted version of a file to import into illustrator as you can now get similar effects in vector format from within Illustrator itself. Great stuff.

Enjoy the video! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXJY0a8NiU)

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With all the talk about the content-aware features in Adobe Photoshop CS5 – I think the following feature has been somewhat over shadowed but for me its ridiculously intuitive. I love it! I am already imagining the hours of time it is going to save me when retouching photographs.

The tool makes use of various different techniques which have been seen before such as not removing edges – but removing colours to define edges – but has condensed them into a simple to use and effective little tool which has an amazing amount of accuracy and control.

I honestly haven’t been this excited about Photoshop since CS2.

Enjoy the video!

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• August 3, 2010 -- Polishing Photos Off With Shadows & Sharpening (Video Photoshop Tutorial) (1)
• July 27, 2010 -- 70 GigaPixel Photo of Budapest (3)
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A while back, I made a post showing a free utility available for mac that was very comprehensive in calibrating a LCD screen. You can view that here. However, it was only available for Mac, QuickGamma is the nearest substitute for the estranged Windows users. I have not personally had a chance to test this one out because I am a mac fanboy but it looks well constructed and has some decent reviews around the blogosphere. View it here.

Read About QuickGamma.

Download QuickGamma

The relationship between the input signal and the luminance of a monitor is not linear but exponential with gamma being the exponent. Monitor gamma values usually range between 1.4 and 3.2. Because only a gamma value of 1 resembles a linear relationship, a gamma correction is necessary to achieve maximum reproduction quality. A monitor gamma value of 2.2 has become the de facto standard for Windows, the Internet and the digital photography. Under Windows a gamma correction is already automatically applied. This yields a linear luminance distribution for monitors with a real gamma of 2.2. Because most computer monitors do not have a real gamma of 2.2 an additional correction is required. With QuickGamma you can calibrate your monitor to a gamma value of 2.2 which in conjunction with the automatic gamma correction yields a linear luminance distribution for every monitor. More information and detailed instructions on how to use QuickGamma are available by pushing the Help button in QuickGamma.

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• January 6, 2010 -- A Monitor for Every Budget – What Monitor for Photography and Design? (5)
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Whilst on twitter, I came across this nice little tool to help grade your blog via a tweet by Rutiso It then provides an analysis of your blog and outputs a score out of 100. It functions/looks vry similar to hubspot’s ever popular Website Grader.

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Whilst searching the web for a comprehensive resource to help me to decide what monitor to buy, I came across this great thread on the AnandTech Forums:

Best Monitor for Purpose

The thread is segmented into different purposes you may require monitors for. Here is the section related to Design:

PRINT-TARGET MEDIA PROCESSING (print proofing/Adobe RGB photo editing, Publisher/PageMaker)

o High contrast at medium brightness
o Accurate color/gamma curve
o Good text reproduction
o Wide gamut (92% W-CCFL or >100% LED) preferred for CMYK/print matching

1. 25.5″: NEC MultiSync LCD2690WUXi-BK, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: soft anti-glare H-IPS w/ A-TW-Pol, 92% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-I, DVI-D (HDCP), VGA
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1, Custom
o Input Lag: 40.33 ms, avg (In House)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

2. 30″: NEC MultiSync LCD3090WQXi-BK, 2560×1600 (16:10)
o Panel: hard anti-glare H-IPS, 85% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D DL (HDCP), DVI-I
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1, Custom
o Input Lag: 40.5 ms, avg (prad)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

3. 30″: Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP, 2560×1600 (16:10)
o Panel: hard anti-glare S-IPS, 117% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-D DL (HDCP), VGA, Component, S-Video, Composite, 4-Port USB Hub, 9-in-2 Media Card Reader
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1
o Input Lag: 33 ms, avg (Estimate) (inferred from prad, BeHardware, and HotHardware’s findings)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, VESA Mount

4. 30″: Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC, 2560×1600 (16:10)
o Panel: hard anti-glare S-IPS, 92% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D DL (HDCP), 2-Port USB Hub, 4-in-1 Media Card Reader, CF Slot
o Scaling: None
o Input Lag: 28 ms, avg (Source)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, VESA Mount

5. 24″: HP LP2475w, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: soft anti-glare H-IPS, 102% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DisplayPort (HDCP), HDMI, DVI-I, Component, S-Video, Composite, 6-Port USB Hub
o Input Lag: 33 ms, avg (prad)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1

6. 25.5″: Planar PX2611W, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: anti-glare H-IPS, 92% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D (HDCP), VGA, 4-Port USB Hub
o Input Lag: 16 ms, avg (ToastyX)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, VESA Mount
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1

7. 25.5″: DoubleSight DS-265W, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: anti-glare H-IPS, 92% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D (HDCP), VGA, Component
o Scaling: Full
o Input Lag: 16 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

8. 27″: Dell UltraSharp 2709W, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: anti-glare S-PVA, 110% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DisplayPort, HDMI, 2 x DVI-D DL (HDCP), VGA, Component, Composite, 4-Port USB Hub, 9-in-2 Media Card Reader
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1
o Input Lag: 47 ms, avg (prad)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, VESA Mount

9. 30″: Samsung SyncMaster 305T, 2560×1600 (16:10)
o Panel: hard anti-glare S-PVA, 92% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D DL, 4-Port USB Hub
o Scaling: [Unknown]
o Input Lag: 29.3 ms, avg (DigitalVersus)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, VESA Mount

10. 24″: Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: anti-glare S-PVA, 102% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-D (HDCP), VGA, Component, S-Video, Composite, 4-Port USB Hub, 9-in-2 Media Card Reader
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1
o Input Lag: 33 ms, avg (gorobei)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

PHOTO EDITING/WEB DESIGN (classic sRGB/web-target photo editing, or web design)

o High contrast at medium brightness
o Accurate color/gamma curve
o sRGB (72% NTSC) gamut for better screen matching

1. 24.1″: NEC MultiSync LCD2490WUXi-BK, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: soft anti-glare H-IPS w/ A-TW-Pol, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-I, DVI-D (HDCP), VGA
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1, Custom
o Input Lag: 33 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

2. 21.3″: NEC MultiSync LCD2190UXi-BK, 1600×1200 (4:3)
o Panel: anti-glare S-IPS, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D, DVI-I, VGA
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1, Custom
o Input Lag: 16 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

3. 20.1″: NEC MultiSync LCD2090UXi-BK, 1600×1200 (4:3)
o Panel: anti-glare S-IPS, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D, DVI-I, VGA
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1, Custom
o Input Lag: 16 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

4. 21.3″: NEC MultiSync LCD2190UXp-BK, 1600×1200 (4:3)
o Panel: anti-glare S-PVA, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D, DVI-I, VGA
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1, Custom
o Input Lag: 16 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount

5. 19″: NEC MultiSync LCD1990FXp-BK, 1280×1024 (5:4)
o Panel: anti-glare S-PVA, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D, VGA
o Scaling: [Unknown]
o Input Lag: 16 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount
o Notes: S-PVA panel. Not supported by SpectraView II, and not quite as high caliber as other NEC 90s series monitors, but still a good photo editing candidate. Not the best monitor for fast motion, but perhaps adequate. Info about the similar LCD1990SX is unavailable.

6. 22″: Dell UltraSharp 2209WA, 1680×1050 (16:10)
o Panel: hard anti-glare e-IPS, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: DVI-D (HDCP), VGA, 4-Port USB Hub
o Scaling: Full, Aspect
o Input Lag: 20.6 ms, avg (8 – 20.6 – 30)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Tilt, Swivel, Pivot, VESA Mount

7. 20.1″: HP LP2065, 1600×1200 (4:3)
o Panel: hard anti-glare S-IPS/AMVA, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: 2 x DVI-I, 4-Port USB Hub
o Scaling: [Unknown]
o Input Lag: 33 ms, avg (Estimate)
o Ergonomics: Height Adjustment, Swivel, Tilt, Pivot, VESA Mount
o Info: official specs | prad
o Notes: Panel lottery between S-IPS/AMVA panels. Both panels have their good merits. Aggressive anti-glare coating might be annoying to some.

Use these panels for non-critical work only. If you work for a professional design company, use the ones above this line.

8. 24″: BenQ G2400WD, 1920×1200 (16:10)
o Panel: anti-glare TN, 72% NTSC, 16.7M colors
o Inputs: HDMI, DVI-D (HDCP), VGA
o Scaling: Full, Aspect, 1:1
o Input Lag: 1.9 ms, avg (Inferred from G2400W)
o Ergonomics: Tilt, VESA Mount
o Info: official specs | prad
o Notes: Better quality than Samsung 245BW, cheaper. Less scaling lag than 2493HM and better out-of-the-box colors. 1:1 support. You can use the G2400WD as an alternative to other pricey models for photo editing, but it does have problems with viewing angle stability due to the TN panel and you’ll want to be aware of this. Don’t use it for mission-critical work.

Full credit to those over at the AnandTech Forums who created this list.

Related Posts:

• January 6, 2010 -- A Monitor for Every Budget – What Monitor for Photography and Design? (5)
• November 13, 2009 -- QuickGamma – Calibrate Your Monitor Free (1)
• April 23, 2009 -- How to Calibrate Your Screen/Monitor for free (6)
• August 18, 2010 -- 30 Stunning Black and White Photos (16)
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