I hope by now you will have noticed the free 2009 calendar with this issue. We’re not quite at the end of the year, and indeed we have another issue out in the UK (with a gigantic tips feature from the best

There was a time was when the simple combination of live action with animation was where motion graphics was at. In the overwhelming welter of technology that has since swamped this field, have we lost sight of the intrinsic beauty of the formerly straightforward approach? Two studios who believe in going back to basics, Spain’s Kotoc and Shadowplay from Los Angeles, share their thoughts with us.

Edvard Scott is a graphic designer and illustrator from Stockholm, currently based in New York. Over the past years Scott’s work has attracted the attention of big-name companies – both domestic and international. Working with art direction, animation, interactive media and printed matter Scott’s clients include Nokia, L’Oréal, Mini Cooper, Shift Japan, Graniph and Start Mobile, and his work has been published in books and magazines such as Grafik, Arkitip, Computer Arts, NeoGeo and Illusive 2.

Our design relationships are very promiscuous. But we don’t work for just anyone. We look for others that really love the creative process. A satisfying collaborative relationship makes us cry happy tears. We work alongside creative agencies, design firms, and directly with clients or individuals.

This article was inspired by two questions I’ve received many times since Dreamweaver added the layers feature. The questions are: “How come I can center my design when I use tables in Dreamweaver, but I can’t center layers?” and “How come when I combine tables and layers, the alignment of elements sometimes looks terrible?”

Here’s a great CSS trick for turning a bulleted list into a navigation bar with a simple rollover effect. Using a bulleted list for navigation bars is a well-accepted convention that meets current accessibility standards. A bulleted list is a logical choice for navigation elements because even if the style is removed, the links still stand out from the rest of the elements on the page.

It’s no longer enough for a photographer to simply have a website. Today, if you want to stand out from the pack, you need a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, multimedia presence to showcase your images and attract new clients. If you’re serious about your brand and your craft, you’ll want to take a closer look at the three photography websites showcased in the following pages.

The following tutorial shows you how to create a Collapsible Panel with Spry, an interactive feature that enables visitors to your site to open and close panels to display more or less information without reloading the page. In Dreamweaver CS3, Adobe added the Spry framework - a new set of tools you can use to create drop-down menus, collapsible panels, and other advanced features. You’ll find these options in a new Insert bar at the top of the work area.

Having just returned from a trip to Russia, I wanted to create a slide show to use in this column. Because I wanted to share my photographs with friends and family, I thought the automated Web Photo Gallery in Photoshop would be a fast, easy way to create a basic site and then I could use Dreamweaver to edit the automatically generated HTML pages to add captions.

No doubt you’ve heard about image slicing, but do you know what it is and how it works? Image slicing is a technique for creating a web page (or a component of a web page, like a header or navigation menu) visually in Photoshop (Fireworks and Illustrator also allow you to slice images, too). But how does it work?