Featured Designer: Portrait Illustrator Oliver Barrett

Today’s featured designer is Oliver Barrett from the buoyant city of Cleveland, Ohio. Using mostly bold colors to create a mix of realistic and surreal portraits, Barrett’s works can only be described as curious.

Celebrity portraits are ever so glamorous, representing them to look even more regal, powerful, and God-like. However, not all portraits are created equal. Oliver shares his view of the superstar and the emotions that come with in his unusual illustrations.

Combining silhouettes, distorting figures, and adding symbolic elements are just some of the techniques Oliver employs in his art. The contrast between the black-and-white sketches and the colorful backgrounds also make many of his works stand out.

Visit Oliver Barrett’s website to see more creativity.

Freebie: Huge Super-Premium Vector Resources Pack worth $42

Today’s freebie comes from Inky Deals, a website that offers premium resources to creative people at insane discounts.

For designers, hunting for excellent and affordable tools and materials are somewhat a challenge. And Inky knows how tough it is to come across a great design deal, which is why they continuously bend over backwards to do all the hard work for you.

This huge premium vector pack is a great gift you shouldn’t miss out on.

The pack is worth $42 of hipster-ish goodies including vector templates, frames, various elements, high-res textures, and illustrations. It also comes with an extended royalty license. That means you can use it endlessly for commercial purposes.

Head over to Inky Deals for more awesome freebies, and don’t forget to grab this pure awesomeness after the jump.

Super-Premium Vector Resources Pack

Exclusive Freebie: 10 Original Fright Packs to Die For!

Today’s daily freebie comes from our good friends over at Freepik. In honor of the haunting festival that’s coming soon, the graphic resource giant has a treat this Halloween.

This exclusive CLD freebie includes everything you need to throw a horror-filled party of the century. From tickets to banners to badges to mailing cards, this superb ghoulish pack will definitely increase scream levels.

Check out all 10 packs below and download them for free after the jump!

Want more of exclusive stuff? Consider signing up for our newsletter!

Scare me.

Freebie: *New* Gorgeous Ipad Pro Mockup (PSD)

Today’s daily freebie comes from Russian designer, Ruslan Latypov. Through his personal design haven, Lstore, Latypov offers a beautiful mockup of Apple’s latest invention.

There are very few devices that can match the smooth and sleek design of the prominent Apple series. Using this brand’s simple but effective approach as basis, Ruslan Latypov created an alluring isometric iPad Pro mockup.

This mockup features an isolated background and a movable pencil set at a high resolution of 4000px by 3000px. It is free for both personal and commercial use.

If you want more awesome freebies, drop by at Lstore. Don’t forget to download the iPad mockup after the jump.

iPad Pro Mockup

Create a cheerful mood with this HB frames vectors!

The main holiday of every person is their birthday. For quick and stylish birthday decor, try out CannyPic frames. They are modern, creative and trendy. We are sure, that you will find what you need.

With our happy birthday frames you can create picture postcards, that describe your admiration and happiness from being a friend of such amazing person. They will be the best background for your good wishes and warm words. You can choose frame, that will pass your friend as well as possible: bright or discreet, with balloons or flowers, vintage or like a child’s drawing.

Using frames will save you a lot of time, that you could spend in searching for suitable background, drawing in graphic program and creating dozens of inappropriate variants. Better prepare a birthday cake!

Funny round frame for your birthday

Excellent photo frame for friends

 

This frame is suitable for your child’s school pictures

Delicate frame for the birthday girl

Birthday muffins and cakes?

What’s a birthday party without balloons?

 

Do you like candy? Excellent sweet birthday frame.

 

7 Mobile App Frameworks for Developers

If it can be done, chances are that there’s already a mobile app somewhere to help you do it. From ordering takeout on a Friday night, booking tickets for a movie show, translating a baby’s cry or flipping a coin (I am not even kidding), there’s a whole wide world of mobile apps to cater to your every whim, no matter how trivial, banal or downright crazy (see: ‘Pocket Girlfriend’ app).

Point is, the time is ripe for mobile app developers to strike. And the development process itself has never been easier to manage. Many app ideas don’t need any previous knowledge in native development; a working proficiency with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are enough to get you started.

What you DO need is a framework, and here are our top 7 choices:

Sencha Touch

This one is particularly popular with Hybrid mobile app developers. The framework is based on HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The latest stable release version 2.4.2 can work across platforms like iOS, Android, Blackberry, Kindle, Windows, and Tizen.

It may take some time to get the hang of it, but once you do, you’ll realize why it’s frequently rated as one of the best frameworks available today. Sencha Animator, Ext Designer, and Sencha Designer provide comprehensive HTML5 solution that is unparalleled by anything else in the market.

Ionic

Ionic is an Open Source framework used for developing Native-like mobile apps with CSS, HTML5, and Sass. Released in 2013 and still in beta-stage, this framework comes with a huge support community.

This framework is great for professionals who have dipped their toes in AngularJS. Despite being in beta stage, it is one of the best Hybrid frameworks out there.

Mobile Angular UI

This is an HTML5 framework that’s used to create interactive mobile apps using Bootstrap 3 and AngularJS. It includes Bootstrap 3 mobile components (switches, overlays, sidebars) and AngularJS modules (angular-route, angular-touch, angular-animate).

Since the responsive media queries are isolated from Bootstrap as separate files, you only have to add what you need. It doesn’t have any jQuery dependencies either, so a few AngularJS directives are all you need to create great user experiences on mobile.

Appium

Appium is an Open Source test automation framework for both Native and Hybrid apps for iOS and Android. It uses a flexible, two-layer approach; popular test-engines first and its single API after.

It uses Apple’s UI Automation test engine for iOS, and Google UI Automator or Google Instrumentation TestRunner for Android apps. The Selenium WebDriver API uses an architecture that’s commonly available to most programming languages and contains plugins and tools for basically any IDEs anyone could ever use.

Sculpt

Sculpt is lightweight, mobile-first, and responsive framework based on HTML, CSS, and Sass. It’s specially written to cater to devices with relatively small dimensions. Additional media queries can be added as the device dimension increases. It has three active built-in grid sizes (732, 960, and 1140 px).

Since Sculpt uses Sass (.scss) stylesheets and variables, the apps built on this framework will not leave users of IE8 or those without JavaScript support behind. A mobile version of the website will always be there for IE8 users, ensuring greater usability.

Junior

A jQuery based HTML5 framework for developing mobile apps which look and act like Native. It is based on Zepto.js and is integrated with Backbone. UI components are used from Ratchet CSS, which in itself is used to prototype iOS apps with simple HTML, CSS, and JS components.

It’s small, lightweight, and easy to use effectively since it’s based on jQuery. It has Modernizer and MVC support with Backbone. It works hard at combining the best of existing frameworks.

Spine.js

This one is another Open Source framework for developing HTML5 and CSS3 apps. It’s short, lightweight, and easy to master. Most of the things you will need to kickoff a front-end app is provided with here. It ships with Ajax and LocalStorage adaptors which, again, are easy to use and even recreate.

It also has an active support community on Google and github. So even if you get stuck, there are always others who will be able to lend you a hand.

Keep the goals in your mind that your app needs to accomplish; your audience, their preferred device/platform/browser, and your own specifications. There’s no one-size-fits-all adage that can be applied to mobile app frameworks. You may want to choose a framework and create an app with huge JavaScript and CSS stylesheets. Sure it would make for a great mobile user experience, but it would go to waste if a majority of your audience has no JavaScript support.

Don’t give your audience what you want. Give them what they need.

Happy Developing!

Author Bio: Lucy Barret is a WordPress developer and a Blogger. She is associated with HireWPGeeks Ltd., a PSD to WordPress Company. She handles all the major projects of WordPress customization and has a team of experienced WordPress Developer. You can follow her company on social media networks like Facebook and Google+

Featured Designer: Oliver the Magnificent Icon Maker

Today’s featured designer is Oliver from Bucharest, Romania whose main goal is to solve problems through well-crafted and eye catching designs.

When you hear the word “icons,” you think simple illustrations like social media logos, mail, Facebook thumbs, and elements like arrows and gears.

For Oliver, icons are more than just that—they are tiny, precious gems that can either make or break your designs. With that in mind, Oliver and his creative cohorts have racked their brains and sweat buckets to create gorgeous icon sets that you can use in practically any design project, especially for web and mobile applications.

Among Oliver’s featured creations is the Smashicons set. Composed of a whopping 14,000 icons, which are continuously being tweaked and added, Smashicons features elements under a wide range of categories. This includes medical, movies, file types, holidays, business, religion, and many others, all of which are available in four design styles: color, webby, outline, and solid.

Ready to see a new world of icons? Hop over to Oliver’s Dribble profile.