Typography is one of the true art forms that I find the most appealing when looking through magazines or surfing the web. The amount of detail sometimes implemented is just mind blowing and you can really see that the artist has taken his or her time to put the typography piece together. After floating around on the Internet in search for the most eye catching 3D typography artwork I came up with nothing short of a truly amazing list. I am sure there are many more inspiring pieces of 3D typography artwork out there so if you find any that you think I might have missed please don’t hesitate to mention a location to them in the comment area.

What should be mentioned here is that most of these are done in a 3D client like Maya, 3D Max or Lightwave. Using Photoshop or Illustrator to create these would take infinitely longer than any of these software’s so don’t even try. The way these 3D typography designs come out is pure skills in lighting, texturing and creating all the objects that are present in the design. Designers usually also use Photoshop to sort of “top off” their design by including real elements such as leaves, small items and effects. So a whole bundle of software’s are probably used to create most of these.

Typography Artwork by Tony Ariawan

Artwork by Artek92

Artwork by Hoe Yi

Artwork by KidsWithTools

Artwork by iunewind

Artwork by shydog1978

Artwork by Kyle Bean

Artwork by Serial Cut

Artwork by Serial Cut

Artwork by dkomov

Artwork by Jeff Finley

Artwork by Kim Holtermand

Artwork by luuqas

Artwork by Fanzi

Artwork by Stephanie DeArmond

Artwork by Jeff Osborne

Artwork by Wojciech Pijecki

Artwork by João Marques

Artwork by Tanin-André Hohmann

Artwork by Grafi-Ray

Artwork by Craig Ward

Artwork by Niels van Doorn

Artwork by Eskimo Square

Artwork by Curtis Baigent

Artwork by Chaz Madani

Firefox Extensions add more extensive features to the browser; some add simple toolbars while others can add a wide range of new features.

Main Image.

Here are the designer/developers’ answers to our question:  Which is your favorite Firefox Extension (s) to use when developing a website?

@andysowards

This one is easy. My favorite Firefox tool is Firebug. Hands down. I could not, and will not, live without it. Sample of work I provided is my site, AndySowards.com, which I used firebug on pretty much the whole way through, it definitely helped me build the look and feel of the sites css/javascript/jQuery fairly quickly and without any pain .

The reason that it is so invaluable is because it allows you to fully understand the html/css/javascript that is on a page, very quickly and easily. It has made my css building/manipulation process at least 75% faster if not more. I can just build out the css and have the page styled exactly how I want it in firefox, then just copy and paste the css into the appropriate place. Its that easy! Of course IE, Safari, and Chrome, may need some tweaks. But FireBug allows even the more difficult tasks to be accomplished within minutes! Finding css issues is so easy now. Thank you firebug. You rock.  Check out his website: http://www.AndySowards.com

@obox

I rely heavily on “TidyHTML” and the Firefox Web Developer toolkit to dev sites.

Without those two items I feel lost, Web Developer is perfect for tracking ID’s etc when styling widgets in Wordpress themes. It also helps with spotting div sizes and picking out style values.

TidyHTML is perfect for getting your site w3c compatible. I only use TidyHTML when splicing up designs and converting them to CSS + HTML.

So yeah, without those two tools I would be lost.

Since I use them for every site we develop I will just attach a screenshot of one of our themes because of the way I used the Web Developer toolkit to style the sidebar.

Details of screenshot: Press Theme http://wwwdemo.obox-design.com/press/

@adammccombs

My favorite tool called the 960 Gridder. 960 Gridder is a jquery based tool that overlays any webpage with a 960px grid. It’s great for testing size and spacing to make sure your layouts are pixel perfect. 960 Gridder is cross-browser compliant and works well in Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3 and Chrome. Safari 4 Beta and Opera 9 is also working as expected and it should work in Safari 2.x-3.x also.  960 Gridder is built upon the very famous JavaScript framework jQuery.

960 Gridder will automatically identify if jQuery is present at the website and if it is not, it will include it. However, 960 Gridder isn’t affiliated with the jQuery authors at all.More information about 960 Gridder can be found at: http://gridder.andreehansson.se/.  Check out more of his work http://www.mccombs.me/

@iBlend

My favorite Firefox tool by far is FireBug (http://getfirebug.com).  Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Firebug’s CSS tabs tell you everything you need to know about the styles in your web pages, and if you don’t like what it’s telling you, you can make changes and see them take effect instantly.

Firebug is always just a keystroke away, but it never gets in your way. You can open Firebug in a separate window, or as a bar at the bottom of your browser. Firebug also gives you fine-grained control over which websites you want to enable it for.

I use this tool to tweek styles and html on my local.  Once it looks right, I will edit the real files and upload them to the server.  I recently used this Firefox tool for the release of my new website (http://thewebblend.com). TheWebBlend is a community for designers, developers and tech junkies that keeps you current with a summary of the latest in web related news and trends.  Check out his site: http://thewebblend.com